But Eschenauer was only one of many négociants who were competing for Bömers’s attention and trying to grab as much of his business as they could. According to Bömers’s secretary, Gertrude Kircher, the behavior of the Bordeaux wine establishment ranged from “absolute commercial cynicism to absolute toadyism. It was embarrassing how they bowed and scraped to him.” They threw big parties, one after another, and did everything they could to get the weinführer to attend. “They would call up and tell me the names of all the other important people who had been invited,” Kircher said. “They told me what they planned to serve, what was on the menu; they pretended they wanted to talk to my boss about German music and literature. Herr Bömers found it all ridiculous.”
Bömers had his own shopping list and list of suppliers. He preferred working with the old connections he and his family had established over the years, people like the Miailhes, who owned several châteaux and vineyards around Bordeaux.
“He was a very honest man,” May-Eliane Miailhe de Lencquesaing said. “My parents used to tell me, ‘Thanks to Mr. Bömers, we still have our wine.’ He tried his best to keep a good balance, not to make the Germans angry and to take care of his French friends.”
But it was sometimes a dangerous job. According to Jean-Henri Schÿler, “Bömers had to walk a tightrope. It was a bit of a double game he had to play.”
Helping him play it was a merchant named Roger Descas, Vichy’s representative to the German Economic Service Headquarters in Paris. Like Louis Eschenauer, Descas was an old friend of Bömers. He was also the man with whom Bömers negotiated wine prices and quotas. Descas, however, was at a disadvantage. If he set prices too high, he risked sparking inflation or even worse, retaliation from the German authorities. On the other hand, if prices were too low, French wine producers would be in an uproar.
Bömers understood, and sympathized. “I have an idea,” the weinführer said in a phone call to Descas. “Why don’t you meet me for dinner. I’ll explain everything when I see you.”
The two met that evening at La Crémaillère, one of Paris’s top restaurants. There, as they dined on filet de boeuf en croûte and turbot en sauce champagne, Bömers outlined what he had in mind. “It requires a bit of acting,” he said. “You and I will meet here the evening before we are scheduled to appear at the economic offices; we’ll work out all the details and decide then how much wine I can buy and what you should be paid for it. The next morning, however, when we present our cases, we’ll pretend to get into an argument, one which hopefully will dispel any notion that we are in collusion.”
Descas did not have to think about it for long. “Let’s do it,” he said to Bömers.
When the two men arrived at the Hôtel Majestic, where the German economic offices were located, they went through the usual formalities. Each gave a short speech stating what he thought was fair. Then the real show started. Bömers accused Descas of trying to squeeze him and demanded that he lower his prices. Descas argued that the prices were fair and said it was the weinführer who was doing the squeezing. Bömers pretended to fly into a rage and the argument became more heated. Finally, by the end of the morning, the two reached an agreement on a set of figures. They were the very figures they had worked out the night before.
“This worked very well,” Heinz Jr. said. “My father said the government representatives usually accepted his figures the first time and were satisfied he was getting the best deal.”
But not always. On several occasions, Bömers was called to Paris to answer complaints that he was being too friendly with the French wine merchants.
Those meetings, however, were nothing compared with those he faced when he was summoned, on three occasions, to Göring’s office in Berlin. There, Bömers got the full brunt of the field marshal’s fury.
“It was frightening,” Bömers later recalled. “He said I was being too cozy with the French wine trade and practically accused me of treason. I told him, ‘If you are not satisfied with my work, I will finish and go home.’ But he knew I was an expert on Bordeaux wine and the best man for the job, so finally he did not do anything. But I cannot tell you how very disagreeable and even terrifying those meetings were.”
Twice a year, Bömers was given leave to return to Germany and spend time with his family. When he went back for Christmas in 1941, there had been a dramatic change: Britain’s Royal Air Force was making nightly bombing raids over Germany and the United States had just entered the war. Even worse, Hitler had launched a “war of annihilation” against the Soviet Union, an offensive he predicted would be over in six weeks. It had now been six months, and no end was in sight. The Russian winter had set in and German troops, stretched thin to begin with, were dying in the paralyzing cold.
These events convinced Bömers more than ever that Germany would lose the war, and he moved his family to Bavaria, where he hoped it would be safer. “Every day you would hear that this young boy or that one, someone you knew very well, was killed,” Heinz Jr. said. “It was terrible. Every night we heard the bombers going to Munich, where my two sisters were attending the university. Terrible, terrible. Even now when I try to explain this, well, it is something you just can’t explain, but we had to live with it.”
The following summer, on his next visit home, Bömers was told that his brother-in-law, a Lutheran pastor, had been arrested after the SS discovered he was saying a prayer for Jews at the end of each service. “My mother was distraught; she was very close to her brother, so she asked my father to try to help,” Heinz said.
Bömers went to the SS headquarters in Berlin to plead for him. The officer in charge told him to “speak his piece.” When Bömers had finished, the officer said, “Okay, are you done now? Because I want to tell you something. We know your brother-in-law is a good German; we know about all the medals he won in World War I. But he is not a good Nazi. He deserves the death penalty.”
Bömers returned from the meeting so badly shaken that he could not even remember what he had said to the SS officer. The officer, however, eventually agreed to release the brother-in-law, sending him to work in the post office and forbidding him to continue in his pastoral duties. “You are lucky,” the officer told Bömers. “I should have sent him to a concentration camp.”
“My father hated the Nazis,” Heinz Jr. said. “He was absolutely anti-Hitler and considered him a criminal.”
But Bömers reserved a special loathing for Göring. He regarded him as a pretentious thug whose evil was matched only by his greed. It was Göring he was thinking of when he told the Bordelais that if any Germans, regardless of their rank or position, ever approached them and demanded their wine, they should call him immediately and he would come and put a stop to it. “That happened, absolutely that happened,” Heinz Jr. said. “He took his car and went out—I am not sure where this was—and ordered the troops to leave immediately. And they did.”
But Bömers could not be everywhere, and there were always those who conspired to get around the system. Working with French merchants who illegally cut their prices, some German officers, with no papers or official authorization, would drive their military trucks directly up to the vineyards and haul away massive amounts of wine.
Bömers suspected Göring was behind many of these incidents. He was sure the field marshal wanted to get his hands on as many bottles of great wine as possible. On one occasion, Bömers received an order from Göring for several cases of wine from Château Mouton-Rothschild. “Mouton is too good for the likes of him,” Bömers thought, so he asked workers at the château, one of the few which did its own bottling, to help with a bit of deception. The weinführer sent them bottles of vin ordinaire and instructed them to glue on Mouton labels. The workers were only too happy to comply. The bottles of wine were then shipped to Göring’s office in Berlin. Bömers never heard a word of complaint from the field marshal.
There was, however, a limit to how far the weinführer would go. When a group of négociants suggested the German leadershi
p would never know the difference if he bought cheap wine from the Midi rather than their grands crus to fill orders, Bömers was furious. A few bottles to deceive his nemesis was one thing; a wholesale scam which could compromise his professional reputation was quite another. Most of the Bordelais seemed to respect that.
Hardly any of them considered him a Nazi. Bömers confessed to one producer that he was thrilled to be able to “throw away his uniform” and do business in his usual way. “He did as little as possible to harm the wine trade,” one merchant said. Even British wine authority Harry Waugh, who dealt extensively with wine producers in Bordeaux both before and after the occupation, described Bömers as “sympathetic.”
Others went much further. “He saved our wine,” May-Eliane Miailhe de Lencquesaing said. “He made sure no one had to sell too much wine, and he made sure it was always paid for. After he came, no more wine was stolen.”
In late October 1940, shortly after arriving in Beaune, Adolph Segnitz, the newly appointed weinführer of Burgundy, received an unsigned note. “Please be advised,” it said, “that some here are trying to cheat you. They are hiding their best wines and selling you wines that are not so good.”
A few days later, Segnitz summoned winegrowers to a meeting. Holding up the note, he informed them, “I have something here that I would like to read to you.” When he had finished, there was an awkward silence. Some in the audience squirmed nervously in their seats. After several seconds, Segnitz continued, “Now I wish to tell you something. For me, this note means nothing. As far as I am concerned, it does not exist.” With that, he tore it up. The relief was almost tangible.
“He hated turncoats,” said Mademoiselle Yvonne Tridon, secretary for the Syndicat des Négociants en Vins Fins de Bourgogne. “He didn’t approve of French turning in French.”
Growers who had been listening to Segnitz considered him a man of honor with whom they could do business. “He never threatened us or accused anyone of trying to cheat,” said Beaune négociant and winemaker Louis Latour. “He was the only German we could talk to because he was from our world.”
Segnitz’s family ran a wine firm in Bremen which had been importing fine French wines since its founding in 1859. A few years before World War II, Adolph Segnitz took over A. Segnitz and Company and began specializing in Burgundy. He was fascinated by the land, its history and culture, and he especially loved the wines that were produced there.
“He was a real Francophile,” recalled Mademoiselle Tridon. “We never thought of him as a stranger or foreigner because he was always coming by. He worked well with people here and no one was afraid of him.”
Segnitz was in his sixties when Nazi officials offered him the job of Beauftragter in Burgundy. Like his friend Heinz Bömers in Bordeaux, he despised the Nazis and did not relish working for them. He agreed to do so, however, on condition that he be given a free hand to do his job and that Berlin would not interfere. “My father was very clear about that,” his son Hermann said. “He was determined to be completely independent.”
From the beginning, Segnitz tried to assure the Burgundy wine community that he understood their problems and sympathized with the hardships caused by the occupation. “But let us work together and try to make the best of things so that we have something when this war is finished,” he said. Segnitz promised there would be no strong-arm tactics and that winegrowers could decide for themselves if they wished to do business with him. “I am here to buy wine,” he said. “If you wish to sell your wine to me, fine, but I shall not force you to sell.”
One of those who chose not to was Maison Louis Latour. “My grandfather absolutely refused to deal with any German wine merchant after World War I,” said his grandson Louis. “Germany had been a major market for us before the war but my grandfather was so upset that he vowed he would never do business with anyone from Germany again.” Grandfather Latour died shortly after Segnitz arrived but his son had the same attitude. “My father liked Segnitz personally but he was just like my grandfather and refused to sell him any wine,” Louis said. Segnitz accepted it and did not try to force him.
Although Segnitz came to Burgundy “with a lot of money in his pocket,” there was not much wine for him to buy. Harvests between 1939 and 1941 had been minuscule. The weather had been awful, with the early summers too dry, followed by days of heavy rain and sometimes hail. In 1939, which was mediocre at best, there were so few grapes to pick that the harvest took ten days instead of the usual two or three weeks. Even if the growing season had been perfect, the situation would have been difficult because most of the young men who picked the grapes had been mobilized into the army.
In 1940 conditions were even worse. This time, the harvest took only three days. Because grapes had not fully ripened, winemakers wanted to chaptalize, or add sugar to their wine to boost its alcoholic strength, but that was impossible because of a sugar shortage. It was also difficult for winemakers to clarify their wine—that is, to remove the particulate matter that often makes red wine cloudy. Normally clarifying, or fining, was done by adding egg white, which clings to the tiny particles and drags them to the bottom. Eggs, however, were even more scarce than sugar. As a result, many winemakers had to resort to what their fathers and grandfathers did. They used charcoal to fine their wines.
According to the Marquis d’Angerville, one of Burgundy’s leading winemakers, “Our wine was so bad in 1940 that we did not bother vinifying; we just poured it into the ground.”
The following year was not much better. Most able-bodied men who would have been working the vineyards were now in German prisoner-of-war camps. In addition, according to the government’s Revue de Viticulture, chemical fertilizers were “practically nonexistent” and rations of insecticides were “inadequate.”
Consequently, what little wine Segnitz did manage to buy was mediocre at best. Some of the best, however, came from Maurice Drouhin. He and Segnitz had done business before the war and were good friends. In Drouhin’s opinion, Segnitz not only understood wine but also was sensitive to people’s feelings. He sympathized with their despair at being an occupied country and understood how they chafed under the shortages, curfews and other restrictions.
Yet the occupation of Beaune, initially at least, was “not terrible,” according to Mademoiselle Tridon. “Unpleasant yes, but we did what was necessary to survive.” Because mail was censored, Tridon, as secretary for the wine producers’ syndicate, resorted to another delivery system: she stuck letters that she did not want the Germans to see behind the door of the women’s toilet. “The Germans were too dainty to go snooping there,” she said.
Because of the curfew, usually at 8 P.M., although the Germans could change the time on a whim, business and most other activity ended early. Bicycle lights were painted blue and residents were required to hang blackout curtains over their windows. “It was so dark that even I, who have been here all my life, could get lost,” Tridon said.
More upsetting were the military patrols which moved constantly through the cobblestoned streets, checking people’s identity papers and sometimes frisking them for hidden weapons. “They would ask us questions but it was so ridiculous because none of them could speak much French,” Tridon said. “Everyone laughed because whenever the Germans asked a question, we would reply with something entirely vulgar.”
Segnitz, who did speak French, was acutely aware of how despised the Germans were and did his best to fit in. Before World War I, his family owned two wine properties in Bordeaux, Château Chasse-Spleen and Château Malescot-Saint-Exupéry. When World War I broke out, the cellars of Chasse-Spleen were pillaged by local residents, who turned on the grape pickers, accusing them of working for the enemy. Both châteaux were then confiscated as enemy property by the French government.
Given that background, Segnitz was unfailingly polite and never wore his military uniform in public. Unfortunately, he still stuck out like a sore thumb. “Segnitz would walk around town in a green loden coat, and he looked
just like the German actor Erich von Stroheim,” said Louis Latour. “He must have been a little bit frustrated, because he would always say, ‘How do people know I am German? I speak perfect French but everybody always says, “Oh you must be that German.” ’ ”
Although public opinion was intensely anti-German, most in Burgundy, as in other parts of France, were still pro-Pétain and supported the Marshal’s program of close collaboration with Germany. Such was the reverence for him that the Burgundy wine merchants’ syndicate decided to send the Marshal sixty-six cases of wine, some of which were bottled in 1856, the year he was born. Mademoiselle Tridon was dispatched to Vichy to make the formal presentation. Reading a letter from the syndicate, she said, “We present this gift as a sign of our respect and as proof of our fidelity to your commands and to national unity.” Tridon later recalled that Pétain “was very nice, but what I remember most about that day was how incredibly old he looked and how a doctor stood constantly by his shoulder.”
Shortly after their tribute to Pétain, wine merchants and producers were shocked to learn that Maurice Drouhin had been arrested. He was walking to a meeting in August 1941 at the Hospices de Beaune, the city’s charity hospital, when a German patrol picked him up.
Wine and War: The French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France's Greatest Treasure Page 8
