Moët & Chandon suffered the worst. “They decapitated Moët,” Claude Fourmon later said. Nearly all of the top management was sent to prison or concentration camps.
Hoping to discourage further disobedience and justify their crackdown against Moët, Klaebisch and other German authorities produced a propaganda film. It showed faked cases of Moët & Chandon champagne being seized and opened, all of them filled with rifles and other weapons. The film was distributed to movie theaters throughout France and Germany. The Germans also forced French newspapers to run an article saying de Vogüé had been helping “terrorists.”
Within a few months, the German Occupation Authority had completely taken over the running of Moët. The man they put in charge was Otto Klaebisch.
In many ways, the weinführers accomplished exactly what the Third Reich wanted. They helped stop the pillaging, restored order and supplied Germany with an extremely lucrative product. More than two and a half million hectoliters of wine, the equivalent of 320 million bottles, were shipped to Germany each year.
More important, the weinführers mitigated a situation that could have resulted in far worse consequences for France. They served as a buffer for a battle that raged within the German leadership over how to deal with France, between Nazis like Göring who wanted to “smash and grab” and treat France like a conquered country and those who favored a less ruthless approach, incorporating France into a German-dominated new Europe and “providing it with a little fodder” so it could be milked for all it was worth.
Above all, the weinführers recognized the economic and symbolic importance of France’s wine industry and did all in their power to make sure it survived. It was for their benefit too, for they realized that when the war ended and they returned home to their businesses, it was essential to have someone—namely, the French—to do business with again.
While the war continued, however, and especially as it began turning against Germany, most people in France became convinced that the best guarantee of survival was to rely on themselves, not on the weinführers and certainly not on Pétain’s Vichy government, which was becoming more fascist by the day. That meant finding unconventional methods and having the courage to bend or break established rules.
As Janet Flanner predicted when the war first began, “Owing to the Germans’ mania for systematic looting—for collecting and carting away French bed linen, machinery, Gobelin tapestries, surgical instruments, milk, mutton, sweet champagne—the French will have to become a race of liars and cheats in order to survive physically.”
* * *
FOUR
Hiding, Fibbing and Fobbing Off
STATIONMASTER HENRI GAILLARD WAS sweating.
For nearly a year he had put up with the German occupation, and it had caused him one headache after another. His salary was late; money for his staff never got to the station of St. Thibault on time; one package after another was getting lost. He dutifully filled out the forms the Occupation Authority in Dijon sent him, and answered their never-ending questions about what his train station was doing.
But now he faced a lot more than a bureaucratic headache: his job was on the line—and maybe more than that.
This morning, when he came into work at his station in Burgundy, he heard the bad news. A train had derailed in his section because a switch had been thrown the wrong way, and now the entire contents of that train were missing. And not just any contents. The train had been filled with the best wines of Burgundy, all of it destined for Germany and for people Henri shuddered to think about—Göring, Himmler, maybe the Führer himself. What was he going to do?
Only days before, Henri had confidently asked his German boss in the Occupation Authority, the commandant of the 3rd Arrondissement of Dijon, for a pass to cross the Demarcation Line to visit his daughter in Lyon, who was about to have a baby. He had hoped to get permission so he would be there right after the baby’s birth. It was his first grandchild, after all, and he had reminded the commandant that he still had one week of vacation remaining. He also pointed out that he was a World War I veteran who had been decorated (perhaps not the best thing to say to someone who was on the losing side of that conflict).
What would the Germans do now? Henri wondered. Would he get to Lyon? Lose his job? End up in prison?
Dipping his pen in the official brown ink, Henri Gaillard nervously began his report:
STATIONMASTER’S LOGBOOK, ST. THIBAULT STATION, CÔTE D’OR, BURGUNDY: I have the honor to inform you that there has been an accident on the St. Thibault railroad line. This is the first time anything like this has ever happened since I was placed in charge several years ago. I have absolutely no idea what could have happened to the contents of the cars. I apologize most humbly for the inconvenience and sincerely hope this will not reflect badly on my character or career. Your most respectful servant, Henri Gaillard.
If Gaillard did not know what had happened to the wine, he was probably the only one who did not. All along the railroad lines of France, farmers, winegrowers, and especially railroad workers, or cheminots, were systematically stripping railway cars full of goods bound for Germany.
“It was almost a sport,” said Jean-Michel Chevreau, a Loire Valley winemaker. “Our favorite amusement was cheating the Germans.”
Chevreau’s “cheating” began in July 1940 after a troop of German soldiers, passing through his village, insisted on spending the night in his wine cellar. The next morning, after they were gone, Chevreau discovered that more than a hundred bottles were missing. He decided to get even.
A few nights later, he and some friends armed with jerry cans and rubber hoses slipped out after curfew and made their way to the railway station in nearby Amboise where the Germans were loading barrels of wine destined for Germany. When the guards were looking the other way, they quickly and quietly siphoned all the wine from the barrels, an exercise they repeated over the course of several weeks until authorities in Berlin began complaining that the barrels arriving there were empty. Officials in Amboise promptly posted more guards around the loading area of the train station. They also put floats in the barrels so they could tell if they were full.
But that did not stop Chevreau and his friends. “We continued siphoning, then filled the barrels with water,” he said, laughing.
STATIONMASTER’S LOGBOOK, ST. THIBAULT STATION: Please let me know what you would like me to do with the large container of wine barrels that has arrived here. The barrels are all empty. I remain your most respectful servant, Henri Gaillard, stationmaster.
Chevreau and others throughout the country were engaged in a special kind of resistance—not the Resistance but one that Janet Flanner called “hiding, fibbing and fobbing off.” Not only were enormous quantities of wine hidden from the Germans, but the French, according to Flanner, also “patriotically lied about the quality of the stuff they delivered to the enemy who ordered vintage Burgundies and ignorantly accepted piquette (thin, tart wine unfit for sale).” They also “fobbed off” watered-down wines and brandy to their conquerors, selling them diluted grands crus, watery champagne and “60-proof eau-de-vie in place of the 80-proof cognac they had paid for.”
In Champagne, producers bottled their worst wines and marked them “Special Cuvée for the Wehrmacht.” They then added insult to injury by using poor-quality corks that normally would have been thrown away. When the Germans arrived to investigate a firm they thought was cheating them, the management, according to writer Patrick Forbes, “would be terribly, terribly sorry, but a pipe had burst or the river Marne had risen, and not wishing to mess up their beautiful shiny jackboots in a flooded cellar, the Germans—with luck—would go away. Not that they ever displayed much enthusiasm for visiting the enormous chalk and limestone caves where champagne houses stored their wine: they were afraid of meeting the fate of Fortunato, the hero of Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado,’ who was walled up alive in the eerie catacombs of the Montresors.”
Much of the “hiding, fibbing and fobbin
g off” was the result of lessons learned from earlier wars. After the battle of Waterloo, Prussian troops pillaged cellars throughout Champagne. Before they left, some scratched their names and a few dankeshön as well as some less polite graffiti on the walls.
In World War I, it happened again, but this time the Germans were not the only culprits. French troops en route to the front also helped themselves to numerous cases of champagne. Among them was a young soldier who would later become one of France’s most famous performers. When Maurice Chevalier later recalled that moment, he laughed about it. “It was almost a patriotic act,” he said. “We felt, ‘That’s a few less for the Prussians!’ ”
Often, the Germans made it easy for the French to cheat. “They were incredibly sloppy when they placed orders for wine,” chuckled Alsace’s Johnny Hugel. “We’d get a piece of paper saying send ten thousand bottles to such and such a place, but they never designated precisely which wine they wanted, so we would always send our worst, like the 1939, which was absolute rubbish. If the Germans hadn’t arrived, we would still have that vintage unsold in our cellars.”
Some winegrowers and producers deliberately misread and misdirected orders so that the Wehrmacht’s wine, for instance, ended up in Homburg instead of Hamburg.
STATIONMASTER’S LOGBOOK, ST. THIBAULT STATION: I have the honor to inform you that I have received several large wine containers with unreadable labels. Although the destination appears to be St. Thibault, it does not specify which St. Thibault. No merchant in the area recognizes the name of the sender. Waiting for a useful response from you, I am your servant, Henri Gaillard, stationmaster.
One of the most unusual examples of how winegrowers tried to protect their wines from the Germans during World War I took place in Bordeaux. The owner of a château, upon learning that the Kaiser’s troops were heading in his direction, elected to hide his precious bottles in a pond on his property. All went smoothly until the following morning, when one of the officers billeted at the château decided to go for a stroll around the pond. Peering across the ornamental water, he suddenly stopped, his eyes widening in amazement. There, on the surface of the water, was a sea of floating labels.
By World War II, French winegrowers had come up with a few new twists. André Foreau, a winemaker from Vouvray, buried his best bottles under the beans, tomatoes and cabbages of his vegetable garden. Foreau’s brother-in-law Gaston Huet used the natural caves of the Loire Valley to hide his stocks of wine. Then he planted weeds and bushes in front of the caves to conceal their entrances.
Nevertheless, the winemakers of Vouvray were worried when they learned a contingent of German troops was headed their way and planning to spend the night. But Mayor Charles Vavasseur, himself a winegrower, had an idea. He went to an artist friend and asked him to try his hand at forgery. Together, they produced some very official-looking papers, saying all the wine of Vouvray had been “reserved for the Wehrmacht.” When a representative of the Occupation Authority arrived to make the arrangements for the German soldiers, Vavasseur showed him the “official” documents and explained that the only places large enough to hold all the troops were the wine caves. “Of course you can put them there,” Vavasseur said, “but, well, I cannot guarantee that the soldiers will not touch the Wehrmacht’s wine. I can only hope they will emerge sober in the morning.” The German official decided it was best to find another place for the men to sleep.
Such foresight did not prevail in Aloxe-Corton, where another contingent of soldiers stayed overnight. “They helped themselves to a lot of bottles from my cellar,” recalled Daniel Senard, a Burgundy winegrower, whose house had been requisitioned by the Germans. Senard had hidden most of his better wines but purposely left a few in plain sight. “We couldn’t hide everything,” he said. “If we did, the Germans would have become suspicious. As it was, they probably would have taken more of my wine if they hadn’t discovered something else.” That “something else” was a cache of stoneware bottles filled with a clear liquid, which the soldiers thought was gin, bottled in the traditional Dutch manner.
“They began consuming it with great enthusiasm,” Senard recalled with a chuckle, for it was not gin the Germans were drinking, but purgative water, eau-de-Santenay, a powerful laxative. “It was the sort of thing everyone’s grandmother kept on hand ‘to clear the system.’ ” That night, the courtyard was unusually full of soldiers coming and going, exchanging the goose step for the green-apple quick step.
According to an American writer who was in France at the time, the Germans “had the feeling that they were constantly being tricked and laughed at.”
In Alsace, for instance, when the Germans heard that the Hugels owned a pig named Adolf, they dispatched several soldiers to the family’s house. When the soldiers arrived, they found the gardener at work and the pig dozing nearby. The officer in charge approached. “You,” he said menacingly, “what were you thinking about when you named this pig Adolf?” The old gardener, however, was not intimidated and did not miss a beat. “Why do you ask?” he replied. “What are you thinking?” The officer, embarrassed, was at a loss for words. He turned and led his men away.
Even in Paris, when the Germans went out to dinner in the poshest restaurants, they often felt something was being put over on them. Were they getting what they ordered? Was that vintage bottle of wine the real thing? Although the Germans were suspicious, they had no way of knowing that a number of restaurants had indeed hatched a deal to disguise their wine. It was done with the help of a very special carpet company.
Chevalier’s was a chic carpet firm that had been in business for generations. It bought and sold only the finest carpets, such as antique Aubussons and high-quality Persians. When a valuable carpet needed cleaning, even one from a museum, it usually went to Chevalier’s. Although no one seems to remember who came up with the idea, someone decided the dust was too good to throw away. Some of it came from carpets that were centuries old and had never been cleaned. Before long Chevalier’s was bundling up sacks of ancient dust and distributing it to some of Paris’s best restaurants. There, it would be sprinkled on bottles of cheap young wine to make them look old and rare. The bottles would then be presented to German clients who thought they were getting something extraordinary.
Like restaurant owners in Paris, Madame Gombaud of Château Loudenne in Bordeaux was determined that the Germans would not get what they wanted. When she learned that the Germans were planning to use part of the château for a brothel, she was furious. She rushed outside to the farm buildings and began gathering rat droppings, which she then distributed liberally throughout the château, particularly in the bedrooms.
A few days later, a German inspection team arrived to make a final assessment. It did not take long for them to decide that the brothel idea was not a good one, and it was soon dropped.
“We knew certain things were going on,” one German officer later recalled. “We knew, for instance, that winemakers were building walls and hiding their wine behind them. We absolutely knew they were being built, but we didn’t have time to check everyone’s cellar.”
Clearly, they did not have time to knock down the cobwebs that disguised the new wall in Maurice Drouhin’s wine cellar. Nor did they have time to dismantle the woodpile that concealed the freshly built wall at the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. And it certainly would have been impossible for them to pore over all the papers and documents that obfuscated the true ownership of certain wine properties.
No one did a better job of clouding the picture than the Bartons, an Anglo-Irish family with interests in Bordeaux since the 18th century and which owned Châteaux Langoa- and Léoville-Barton. When World War II broke out, Ronald Barton, who ran the two estates but had never taken out French citizenship, realized he was living on borrowed time. Nonetheless, he was determined to look after his interests as long as possible. Every night when he sat down for dinner, Barton made it a practice to drink one good bottle of Langoa or Léoville, his own private toast echoin
g that of Maurice Chevalier. “Here’s one less for the Germans if they win, one less for my heirs if we do.”
When Marshal Pétain signed an armistice with the Germans that June, Barton, who was British, knew he had to flee and barely managed to catch the last ship out of Bordeaux. It was an emotional departure, with Barton wondering aloud to friends “whether he would ever see his beloved Langoa again.”
His fears were well founded. Soon after Barton arrived in England and joined the British army, the Germans announced they were seizing his châteaux and vineyards as enemy property. But then something unusual happened. Barton’s business partner, Daniel Guestier, went to the Germans in Bordeaux and argued that the seizure was illegal because Barton was Irish. He reminded the Germans that Ireland was neutral in the war and that, therefore, the Germans had no right to confiscate the property. Barton’s sister in Dublin, who was, in fact, a true citizen of the Republic of Ireland, launched a letter-writing campaign. Friends, business associates, even total strangers bombarded German authorities with mail, all bearing Irish stamps and postmarks and stressing Ronald’s Irish background. Even the Irish ambassador to Berlin joined the conspiracy, underscoring Ireland’s neutrality and claiming that Ronald Barton was indeed Irish.
Wine and War: The French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France's Greatest Treasure Page 11
