Madame Marie Hugel, however, had more immediate concerns. Three weeks after the annexation, she was told to report to German headquarters. No one was sure why, although it was no secret that authorities were upset about Monsieur Hugel’s refusal to join the Nazi Party. Letters and notices had been sent urging residents of Riquewihr to join, but Monsieur Hugel had steadfastly ignored them. Now there were rumors that their business might be closed and that the family could be deported.
“My mother was frightened,” André said. “She did not know what to expect.”
When she arrived at headquarters, an officer informed her that her loyalty to Germany was in question. “We are aware that you always speak French to your children,” the German said. “Why do you hate Germans?”
Madame Hugel, momentarily taken aback, quickly recovered. “What do you mean?” she asked. “How can you say I hate Germans? My own brother is German, and I also have two sons who are about to fight for your Führer!”
Her response caught the officer by surprise, but he seemed satisfied. A few minutes later, he excused her. As she turned to go, the German stopped her and added a gentle warning. “Madame, we are the Wehrmacht; we are not the bad ones and you shall have no further trouble from us, but once the yellows come, it will be awful.”
He was referring to the Gestapo.
No one, in those first few weeks, personified the pain of defeat more than Gaston Huet. When German troops arrived at his bunker, he and his men surrendered immediately. At gunpoint, they were ordered to stand up and start walking, “but a very courteous officer told us not to worry, that we would be released soon,” Huet said.
He and his men were marched from Calais into Belgium. With each passing mile, more and more prisoners joined the column. At Bastogne, they were herded into railway cars used for hauling cattle to slaughter.
“We were completely exhausted,” Huet said. “We had walked more than two hundred miles and had become just machines, no longer able to think.” There had been little food, just a bit of bread, and the water was tainted. Dead animals, killed in battles that had raged there, lay everywhere. “We knew they would pollute the water in ditches, which was the only water we had to drink,” Huet said. Once in a while, he and his men found rhubarb along the road and mixed it in to make the water taste better, but “there was always the smell of the stable.” Everyone became ill.
As they neared the German border, the size of their column had mushroomed. It now numbered in the thousands. “I was stunned,” Huet said. “The sheer number of French soldiers taken prisoner was amazing; it was something I never imagined.”
Although Huet still held out a flicker of hope Allied forces might rescue them, those hopes vanished when they crossed into Germany. On June 17, three weeks after their capture, they entered Oflag IV D, a prisoner-of-war camp for officers in Silesia, where they would spend the next five years.
“The moment I saw that place,” said Huet, “I knew right away the war was over for me.”
* * *
THREE
The Weinführers
WHILE THE WAR WAS OVER FOR HUET AND OTHER POWs, it was only beginning on another front—the wine front.
Wine was the one commodity the German leadership was intimately connected with—personally, professionally and socially.
Men like Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and former Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen, now ambassador to Austria, had come to Nazi posts directly from the wine trade. So had military leaders including Captain Ernst Kühnemann, commander of the port of Bordeaux and a wine merchant who had spent a great deal of time in the region before the war. General Moritz von Faber du Faur, the senior officer in Bordeaux, was a leading economist who also had a special interest in wine.
Others in the Nazi top brass such as Field Marshal Göring and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels prided themselves on their knowledge of wine and possessed vast collections. Whereas Goebbels’s tastes ran to fine Burgundy, Göring preferred great Bordeaux, especially Château Lafite-Rothschild. According to Albert Speer, an architect who served as the Third Reich’s Minister for Armaments and Munitions, few things gave Göring more pleasure than sitting down late at night and uncorking a great bottle of Lafite-Rothschild. Speer said the only time he ever got close to Göring as a person was when the field marshal shared a special bottle of Lafite with him.
Foreign Minister Ribbentrop was a great lover of champagne, a taste he acquired when he represented the champagne houses of Mumm and Pommery in Germany. He had made a fortune in the wine trade after wooing, then marrying Anneliese Henkel, daughter of Otto Henkel, “the king of German champagne.” (Henkel was Germany’s largest sparkling wine producer, although the “wine” he made reportedly was nothing more than apple juice “juiced up” by a team of engineers in Hamburg.) With the fortune he made—and married—Ribbentrop had no trouble financing his political ambitions. To add a whiff of aristocracy to his lineage, he styled himself Joachim von Ribbentrop. His veneer of charm and elegance soon caught the attention of Hitler, who took him to meet President Paul von Hindenburg. Hindenburg, a real von, was not impressed. “Spare me your little champagne peddler,” he told Hitler. But Hitler was impressed. He considered Ribbentrop “greater than Bismarck,” and believed he was the ideal person to oversee the Armistice Commission, the body responsible for establishing Germany’s economic policy for France.
About the only one in the top leadership who was not interested in wine was the Führer himself. After one taste of a great French wine, Hitler is reported to have pushed it away, calling it “nothing but vulgar vinegar.”
Historians, however, are divided over the extent of Hitler’s asceticism. While some say he did not drink at all, others claim he frequently drank beer and diluted wine. “His asceticism,” according to Hitler biographer Robert Payne, “was a fiction invented by Goebbels to emphasize his total dedication, his self-control, the distance that separated him from other men.”
This did not make for very enjoyable evenings when Hitler got his entourage together in front of the jade-green fireplace at the Führer’s house at Berchtesgaden. As Speer wrote, “To animate these rather barren evenings, sparkling wine was handed around and, after the occupation of France, confiscated champagne of a cheap brand; Göring and his air marshals had appropriated the best brands. From one o’clock on, some members of the company, in spite of all their efforts to control themselves, could no longer repress their yawns. But the social occasion dragged on in monotonous, wearying emptiness for another hour or more, until at last Eva Braun had a few words with Hitler and was permitted to go upstairs. Hitler would stand up about a quarter of an hour later, to bid his company goodnight. Those who remained, liberated, often followed those numbing hours with a gay party over champagne and cognac.”
Ascetic or not, when Hitler looked at the men surrounding him, he quickly understood how prestigious and profitable wine could be. He decided that Germany should obtain the very best of France’s wines, and Göring quickly seconded the motion, telling occupation commissioners that France was “fattened with such good food that it is shameful.” He admonished the Reich’s soldiers in France to “transform yourselves into a pack of hunting dogs, and always be on the lookout for what will be useful to the people of Germany.”
To get the best wine, however, the Nazi leadership did not want a pack; it wanted pointers, men who knew not only wine but also the people who made and sold it. So the Reich’s economic planners turned directly to the German wine trade, creating a corps of what some called “wine merchants in uniform.”
The French had another name for them: the weinführers.
Their job as Beauftragter für den Weinimport Frankreich (agents for importing wines from France) was to buy as much good French wine as possible and send it back to Germany, where it would be resold internationally for a huge profit to help pay for the Third Reich’s war.
To do the selecting and buying, the Third Reich decided to send Otto Klaebisch of Matt
eüs-Müller, a sparkling wine producer and Germany’s agent for several champagne houses, to Champagne. Adolph Segnitz, head of A. Segnitz and Company and Germany’s agent for the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, went to Burgundy. The most important of them all, Heinz Bömers, who headed Germany’s largest wine importing firm, Reidemeister & Ulrichs, was assigned to Bordeaux.
German authorities, however, had made a mistake. The weinführers were, indeed, wine merchants and wine experts, but they were much more than that. They also were friends of many French wine producers and merchants. Their connection through generations of doing business together had long since transcended commercial matters; they had trained in each other’s firms and spoke each other’s language fluently. They were even godfathers to each other’s children.
The weinführers also were keenly aware of something Maurice Drouhin stressed to his son at the beginning of the war: “One day, whether in five months or in five years, this war will be over, and France will still be next to Germany. We will still have to live together.”
Heinz Bömers was late, and his children could hardly believe it. Their father was never, ever late, nor would he permit them to be, especially for family events like the regular Sunday afternoon game of croquet.
When Bömers finally emerged from the house, he apologized, explaining that he had been listening to the news on the radio. It was September 3, 1939, and he had just heard that Britain and France had declared war on Germany. Ushering his older son, Heinz Jr., away from the other children, Bömers said, “I expect to be called into the army soon, and then I don’t know if I will be able to speak to you again privately, so I will tell you today that we have lost this war. Don’t speak about this with anybody, not with your brothers and sisters, and especially not with your friends at school. It would be dangerous for the whole family.” Before Heinz Jr. could reply, his father added, “It is important to me that you understand how I feel. I want you to be prepared for what is ahead.”
Although Heinz Jr. was only thirteen years old then, he never forgot that moment. “I have always had in my heart these words and his conviction that Germany would lose. My father told me the United States surely would come in to help the British. He felt that Germany, even though it was very powerful at that moment, could never defeat a country as big as the United States.”
At the time, the family was at its summer house near Bremen. Bömers looked around wistfully as they closed up the house that weekend to return home. “I don’t know if we will have the opportunity to come back here next year,” he said to his family. His concerns were well founded; they would not return for seven years.
When the Bömerses arrived home, an unexpected visitor was there to greet them. It was the headmaster of young Heinz’s school. “Please help me, Herr Bömers,” he pleaded. “Your son is the only student in our school who does not belong to a Nazi organization. If you do not let him join one, there will be many problems for the school.” Bömers had consistently refused to sign papers enrolling his son in the Hitler Youth, so he asked what other Nazi groups were part of the school. The headmaster gave him a list, and Bömers noted the school orchestra among them. “How often does the orchestra rehearse?” he asked. When he was told that it met three times a week, he said, “All right. Heinz plays the flute, so he will join the orchestra.”
After the headmaster had left with the signed papers, Bömers told his son that he should go to practice only once a week. “If anyone gives you trouble and says you must go more often, you tell them you are obeying your father and they must talk to me.” No one ever did.
The Bömers family already had a reputation for disagreeing with the Nazis, and especially with Hermann Göring. In 1930, Göring had been prime minister of the German state of Middle Saxony when Bömers’s father was a senator from Bremen. Senator Bömers had made no effort to conceal his contempt for Göring and his politics, and when the prime minister came to Bremen, Bömers refused to see him. Göring was incensed and did not forget the slight.
Four years later, after Senator Bömers’s death, Heinz Bömers was told he would lose the family business unless he became a member of the Nazi Party. Reluctantly, Bömers joined. “He had to think of his family, to protect them,” Heinz Jr. said. “He had to make compromises and I know he suffered from that. But he was always convinced the Nazi time was a temporary time, so you had to do all you could to survive.”
That is why when Bömers, forty-seven, who had been excused from active military duty for health reasons, received a cable in May 1940 from the German Ministry of the Economy offering him the job of Beauftragter in Bordeaux, he agreed to go. “It was a job he could have refused, I think,” Heinz Jr. said, “but I think he felt that this was someplace where he could help, could make things easier for everybody. He had many, many friends in Bordeaux.”
Bömers accepted the job on several conditions: that he not be paid by the Nazis and would pay his own way; that he be free to change as many marks into francs as he wished; that he not be required to wear a uniform; and that he have the authority to “step in” if he felt the actions of German troops were inappropriate. “He was afraid that some of these Nazis, like Göring, would like to have some very nice old Mouton-Rothschilds, and he could imagine that some of the soldiers would think they should just pick them up for him,” Heinz Jr. said.
Bömers arrived in Bordeaux just after the armistice was signed. In a way, it was like a homecoming. Prior to World War I, his family had owned Château Smith-Haut-Lafitte and made wine there until the French government confiscated it along with other German-owned property. In the years that followed, Bömers, working from his offices in Bremen, imported French wines and developed a close relationship with key producers.
So for many Bordelais, his arrival in 1940 posed a cruel dilemma: their old friend and business colleague now represented the enemy. To allay fears, one of Bömers’s first acts as weinführer was to call wine people together and reassure them he was still their friend. “Let us try to continue our business as normally as possible,” he said, “but when I leave one day, I hope you will have better stocks of wine than you have now.” It was his way of telling them that he had their interests at heart and that when the war was over, he hoped to continue doing business with them.
“He came around and said hello to all of us,” said May-Eliane Miailhe de Lencquesaing. “Of course, we all knew him from before the war, when he would come here, so we said to him, ‘As long as you are not wearing a uniform, you may come over in the evening and have dinner with us as usual.’ ”
Nevertheless, many Bordelais were apprehensive. “Bömers was a very powerful man,” said Jean-Henri Schÿler of Château Kirwan. “If you did not want to sell him your wine, he could order you to do so.”
Even Daniel Lawton, who had trained in the Bömers firm in Bremen and who ran one of Bordeaux’s oldest brokerage houses, got a taste of Bömers’s temper. When he heard Bömers’s demands for wine and the prices the Germans would pay, Lawton had no hesitation about standing up to Bömers and refusing.
Bömers was incensed. Glaring at Lawton, he warned, “If you don’t agree to sell us wine on our terms, there will be sentries with bayonets in front of all Bordeaux cellars tomorrow!”
“Go right ahead, do it,” Lawton replied.
It didn’t happen. Bordeaux wine merchants, however, had little or no alternative but to deal with Bömers. “We could no longer sell our wines to Great Britain or the United States,” said Schÿler. “It was all closed up. We had a choice: we could sell our wines to the Germans or we could throw them into the Gironde River.”
Hugues Lawton, whose father had defied Bömers, agreed. “You had to deal with a situation you did not want. Once you are defeated, you have to do what you are told.”
Although many Bordelais considered Bömers tough, even autocratic, they respected him. They had been worried he would go after Bordeaux’s finest wines, treasures that one producer said constituted an “inestimable museum of wine.�
� Another worried aloud, “Will this integral part of French civilization be confiscated, pillaged, sent with the Renoirs, the Matisses, the Georges de La Tours to the other side of the Rhine?”
Bömers vowed that would not happen, even though his overlords in Germany were putting heavy pressure on him.
Instead, he did the Bordelais a favor: he relieved them of massive stocks of poor-quality wine that had accumulated after the harvests of the 1930s. One of his purchases alone amounted to the equivalent of a million bottles.
Bömers did most of his business with négociants, wine merchants who bought wine in bulk from growers, bottled it and then resold it. One of them was Louis Eschenauer, whose firm had specialized in exporting to Germany long before the war. “Uncle Louis,” as he was called, was almost as famous for his close friendships with German leaders such as Ribbentrop as he was for his outstanding knowledge of wine. Eschenauer, who was seventy when Bordeaux was occupied, had done extensive business with all of the German leaders as well as Heinz Bömers during the prewar years and his business now, as a result, was flourishing. “Eschenauer was one of my father’s best friends,” Heinz Jr. said, “and I know he worked with him a lot, tasting wines together and choosing wines to buy.”
Wine and War: The French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France's Greatest Treasure Page 7
