Wine and War: The French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France's Greatest Treasure

by Donald Kladstrup

  Klaebisch ran into problems almost from the moment he moved in. The 1940 harvest was disastrous. The yield was 80 percent below average. Aware that Berlin expected him to supply a certain amount of champagne every month, Klaebisch visited the houses he had done business with before the war and asked them to make up the difference from their reserves.

  De Vogüé thought that was a bad idea. He feared that other houses would be angry and jealous. With international markets cut off and sales to French civilians prohibited, those firms might easily go out of business.

  Even the houses Klaebisch wanted to do business with were unhappy. Yes, their market was “guaranteed” but they also had to accept what the Germans were willing to pay, and it was not much. Producers feared that the huge quantities of champagne Klaebisch was demanding would soon deplete their stocks, leaving them stuck in the same economic morass they had been in during the 1930s.

  Those years, more than anything, defined the almost militant mood that still prevailed in Champagne when Klaebisch arrived. In 1932, champagne houses had managed to sell only four and a half million bottles of the 150 million that were in their cellars. The mood among growers who sold their grapes to the houses was sour too. In 1933 and 1934, they were paid no more than one franc a kilo for their grapes. In 1931, they had been paid eleven francs, a loss of income that severely jeopardized their businesses. The picture improved in 1937 and 1938, but quickly turned bleak again when war was declared in 1939. In desperation, producers began walling up their champagne and shipping other stocks to the United States and Great Britain for safekeeping.

  Now they faced massive requisitioning. Pol Roger, the house that made Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s favorite champagne, was ordered to send huge quantities of its 1928 vintage to Berlin each month. “It was such a great vintage,” said Christian de Billy, president of Pol Roger, who was born in that year. “We never had a lot and tried to hide what we could, but it was so wonderful and so well known that it was impossible to keep it out of German hands. Klaebisch knew it was there.”

  As German demands for champagne escalated—at times Klaebisch was demanding half a million bottles a week—de Vogüé feared, more than ever, that houses like Pol Roger would not survive. On April 13, 1941, he called together producers and growers to set up an organization that would represent the interests of everyone in the champagne industry. “We are all in this together,” de Vogüé told them. “We will either suffer or survive but we will do so equally.”

  The organization they created was called the Comité Interprofessionel du Vin de Champagne, or CIVC, which still represents the champagne industry today. At the time, the goal of the CIVC was to enable producers to present a united front and speak with a single voice. De Vogüé, it was decided, would be the point man. “He had the courage and enough audacity to represent the interests of Champagne and to be the one and only delegate to the Germans,” said Claude Fourmon, who was de Vogüé’s assistant. “He never doubted the Allies would win the war, so his goal was to keep everything at an acceptable level. He wanted to make sure that everyone had something to start over with when the war ended.”

  Klaebisch was unhappy about the CIVC and did not want to deal with it; he preferred to stick with his prewar contacts. He knew that was how Bömers operated and he wanted to emulate the Bordeaux weinführer by taking complete control of the champagne business. Klaebisch summoned de Vogüé to his office in Reims.

  There, he got right to the point. “Here are the ground rules. You can sell to the Third Reich and its military, and also to German-controlled restaurants, hotels and nightclubs, and a few of our friends like the Italian ambassador to France and Marshal Pétain at Vichy. The Marshal, by the way, likes to have a good quantity for his own personal use.”

  De Vogüé listened without interrupting as the weinführer outlined the conditions. “Nobody gets any free samples, there are no discounts no matter how large the order, and no full bottles of champagne may be sold unless empty bottles are first turned in.” Then Klaebisch told de Vogüé how much champagne he wanted each month and what he was willing to pay for it. “You can spread the order out any way you wish among the major champagne houses just as long as I get my champagne,” he said.

  De Vogüé was taken aback. “There is no way we can meet those demands,” he said. “Two million bottles a month? How do you expect us to do it?”

  “Work Sundays!” Klaebisch shot back.

  De Vogüé refused. To their credit, each man seemed to have an innate sense of how far they could push the other. After more heated exchanges, de Vogüé said champagne producers would work longer days to meet their quotas but only if the weinführer extended the number of hours they could have electricity. Klaebisch agreed.

  De Vogüé, however, was not the only thorn in Klaebisch’s side. In Berlin, Field Marshal Göring was demanding ever greater amounts of champagne for his Luftwaffe. The navy was also making huge demands. Buffeted from all sides, the weinführer went back to de Vogüé. This time, he was more conciliatory. “We’ve had our disagreements,” he said, “but I’ve got a problem with Berlin and I hope you will see fit to help me.” Klaebisch described how Göring was pressuring him to supply more champagne. He then proposed that if the CIVC would keep the champagne coming, he would make sure producers had all the supplies they needed such as sugar for their dosages, fertilizer for their vineyards, even hay for their horses.

  De Vogüé said it was a deal.

  It was an especially good deal for Pol Roger. Not long afterward, a spokesman from Pol Roger contacted the weinführer’s office to say they were doing some repair work in their cellars and needed cement. Klaebisch arranged for its immediate delivery. Pol Roger used the cement to wall up and hide some of its best champagne from the Germans.

  “The champagne houses did their best to perform a little sleight of hand,” admitted Claude Taittinger, head of Taittinger Champagne. “Most tried to preserve their best wines and palm off the inferior blends on the enemy.” They knew, for instance, that bottles whose labels were stamped “Reserved for the Wehrmacht” and often had a red bar running across it were unlikely to fall into hands of their regular customers. As a result, most of the houses did not hesitate to use them for their worst cuvées. “What they forgot,” said Taittinger, “was that Klaebisch was a connoisseur and capable of cracking the whip now and then to show he was not always fooled by our tricks.”

  One day at lunchtime, Klaebisch called up Roger Hodez, secretary of the Syndicat des Grandes Marques de Champagne, an association representing the major champagne houses, and invited him for an aperitif. “We’ve never had a drink together,” the weinführer said. “Why don’t you drop by my office and we’ll have one.” Hodez felt he could not refuse.

  When he arrived, Klaebisch invited him to sit down and poured him a glass of champagne. Then he poured one for himself. The weinführer seemed to be in a good mood and Hodez began to relax. Then, suddenly, Hodez’s nose wrinkled as a ghastly odor rose from his glass. Bravely, he took a sip. The taste was only slightly better than the smell. There was no sign Klaebisch had noticed Hodez’s discomfort. “What do you think?” he asked affably. Before Hodez could reply, the weinführer suddenly leaned across his desk and put his face inches away from Hodez’s. “Let me tell you what I think,” he snarled, his voice rising in crescendo. “It smells like shit! And this is what you want me to give the Wehrmacht to drink? I want the house that made this crap struck from the list of firms supplying champagne to Germany. I wouldn’t dare send their stuff to Berlin!”

  Hodez shrank back in his chair, fumbling for words as he tried to pacify Klaebisch. “I’m sure it was only an accident,” he stammered, “a case of dirty bottles perhaps, or maybe . . .” Before Hodez could say anything else, however, he was ordered out of Klaebisch’s office.

  The shaken trade representative went straight to de Vogüé and told him what happened. De Vogüé immediately contacted the champagne house and warned officials of what Kla
ebisch had said. The head of the firm shrugged, saying he did not care. “We’re not making much money from the Germans anyway. We’ll be better off selling a little of our champagne on the black market and holding the rest until after the war.”

  De Vogüé shook his head. “That’s not the point,” he said. “We’re all in this together and you have to provide your fair share.” He instructed the firm to send its portion of champagne to several other houses, which agreed to bottle it under their own labels.

  Klaebisch, however, was more suspicious than ever that champagne producers were trying to trick him. He began conducting spot checks of champagne bound for Germany, pulling out bottles, popping their corks, sniffing their contents and then tasting them. That is how François Taittinger ended up in jail.

  François was twenty years old when he was brought in to help run the family firm after his uncle had become totally deaf. Like others, he underestimated Klaebisch’s knowledge of champagne and thought he could outfox the weinführer by sending him champagne that was distinctly inferior in quality. When Klaebisch discovered it, he ordered François to his office.

  “How dare you send us fizzy ditch water!” he yelled.

  François, known for his quick temper, shot back, “Who cares? It’s not as if it’s going to be drunk by people who know anything about champagne!”

  Klaebisch threw François into jail. In the same cell were a number of other champagne producers who had also tried to pass off bad wine.

  A few days later, the eldest of the Taittinger brothers went to Klaebisch’s office to plead François’s case. Guy Taittinger was a former cavalry officer and a born diplomat. He regaled the weinführer with stories about his days in the French army. He described how he once had to “drink a bottle of champagne that had been decapitated with a saber and poured into a backplate of armor.” Klaebisch was amused, so much so that finally he shook his head, put up his hand and said, “Okay, you win. Your brother can go.”

  Most people in Champagne saw Klaebisch not as a Nazi diehard but more as an arbitrator between the French wine community and Berlin. Never was that more evident than when Vichy launched a forced labor program, Service du Travail Obligatoire, or STO, to supply Germany with workers for its factories and industries. In one week alone, Pol Roger had ten of its workers hauled off to Germany; the next week, seventeen more.

  “There’s no way we can continue like this,” de Vogüé warned Klaebisch. “We don’t have enough people for our regular work, let alone for the harvest. If you do not get some of our workers back, you will have no champagne next year.” The CIVC itself tried to keep the houses functioning by rotating experienced workers from one champagne maker to another. Still, the companies were falling far short of their imposed quotas.

  The weinführer, who prided himself on his efficiency, quickly contacted authorities in Berlin. Faced with a choice between less champagne or less labor in their factories, the Germans chose the latter and allowed some of the more experienced and older workers to return to their cellars.

  Each concession from Klaebisch, however, seemed to generate another edict. From now on, he said, a German officer must accompany every worker going into the caves. Producers thought it was ridiculous and completely impractical. When the weinführer backed off, there was a huge sigh of relief, for the chalk cellars, the crayères of Champagne, were being used by the Resistance, both as a place of refuge and as a place to stockpile arms and supplies.

  In fact, the Resistance was doing a great deal more. It had picked up on the fact that champagne shipments were providing significant military intelligence. Through them, they could tell where the Germans were preparing a major military offensive. They first became aware of this when the Germans, in 1940, ordered tens of thousands of bottles to be sent to Romania, where, officially, there was only a small German mission. Within a few days, Romania was invaded by the German army. Afterward, bottles of bubbly were distributed to all the troops, a way of saying to the soldiers that “the Führer thinks of his men first.”

  From that time on, the Resistance, with help from the major champagne houses, kept meticulous track of where large shipments of champagne were going. Alarm bells went off toward the end of 1941 when the Germans placed a huge order and asked that the bottles be specially corked and packed so that they could be sent to “a very hot country.” That country turned out to be Egypt, where Rommel was about to begin his North African campaign. The information was relayed to British intelligence in London.

  As the war continued, relations between Klaebisch and de Vogüé deteriorated. Klaebisch felt more and more as though he were being taken advantage of and being “sandbagged” by de Vogüé. He was annoyed that de Vogüé always referred to him as Klaebisch, never Herr Klaebisch or Monsieur Klaebisch or even Captain Klaebisch, just Klaebisch.

  But that was a mere irritation. Far more serious was that Klaebisch and other German authorities were becoming more and more convinced that de Vogüé and his colleagues at Moët & Chandon were actively helping the Resistance. Their suspicions were correct.

  In the early days of the occupation, Moët & Chandon had been pillaged more than any other champagne house. The Chandon château on the grounds of Dom Pérignon’s abbey had been burned down and many other buildings belonging to Moët were taken over to house German troops. To add insult to injury, the company had also been ordered to supply the Third Reich with 50,000 bottles of champagne a week, or about one-tenth of all the champagne the Germans were requisitioning.

  “Under those conditions, I and others at Moët, the entire top echelon, couldn’t help but resist,” said Moët’s commercial director, Claude Fourmon.

  De Vogüé himself headed the political wing of the Resistance in the eastern region of France. In the early stages of the war, he had argued against an armed resistance that could endanger innocent lives. As the war ground on, however, his feelings began to change and he welcomed the Resistance into Moët’s twenty-four kilometers of cellars. “At the very least,” said his son Ghislain, “my father turned a blind eye to sabotage and subterfuge, and to tampering with champagne and its shipment.”

  On November 24, 1943, Robert-Jean de Vogüé asked his cousin René Sabbe to serve as translator for a meeting he and Claude Fourmon were scheduled to have with Klaebisch. Because the recently completed harvest had been so small—and so good—they were hoping to persuade Klaebisch to reduce the amount of champagne he was planning to requisition.

  Shortly after they arrived, the telephone rang in an office next to Klaebisch’s. A young officer interrupted the meeting to tell the weinführer that the call was for him. Klaebisch excused himself. Within minutes he was back and sat down at his desk, crossing his arms over his potbelly.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “that was the Gestapo. You are all under arrest.” On cue, several officers with pistols drawn burst through the door and took the three men into custody.

  “We were completely stupefied,” Fourmon later recalled. “De Vogüé had just persuaded Klaebisch to let houses sell more champagne to French civilians. I don’t know exactly what triggered the call but I think the Gestapo wanted to take de Vogüé out of the line of command.”

  De Vogüé’s first reaction was “Let Fourmon go; he knows nothing.” He also pleaded for the release of Sabbe, saying he was there only to translate. De Vogüé’s appeals were to no avail.

  All three were charged with obstructing the trade demands of the Germans and imprisoned. Sabbe was released a few days later because of his age, but Fourmon was sent to Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in Germany.

  De Vogüé was sentenced to death.

  The sentence sent shock waves through Champagne. For the first time in history, the entire industry—growers and producers, labor and management—went on strike. Klaebisch was stunned and, at first, did not know what to do. He branded the strike an “act of terrorism” and warned that force would be used unless it ended immediately. The Champenois ignored him and stepped up their protes
t.

  In the face of such unprecedented action, Klaebisch seemed paralyzed. Calling out troops, he feared, could result in even greater unrest and force the Germans to take over the production of champagne, something he knew they were ill prepared to do.

  There was something else Klaebisch feared as well: the spotlight. The last thing he wanted to do was to call attention to himself, especially now when everything seemed to be falling apart. To make matters worse, his brother-in-law and mentor, Joachim von Ribbentrop, had fallen out of favor, and Klaebisch could all too easily picture himself suddenly freezing with other German soldiers on the Russian front.

  After more fruitless appeals to the Champenois to end their protest, Klaebisch and the Germans gave in. They agreed to “suspend” de Vogüé’s sentence but said they were only doing so because he had five children. Instead, he was put in prison.

  Despite his clashes with de Vogüé, this was not what Klaebisch had expected or wanted. “I can well imagine Klaebisch was uncomfortable with my father’s arrest,” Ghislain de Vogüé said. “I suspect he was just obeying orders he had been given.”

  But punishment of the champagne industry had only begun. Champagne houses which had supported the strike were hauled before a military tribunal and given a choice. They could pay a heavy fine, 600,000 francs (about one and a half million francs in today’s currency), or the head of each house could spend forty days in prison. Nearly all paid the fine.