The ploy worked. Although the Germans did use Châteaux Langoa- and Léoville-Barton to billet their troops, they did not confiscate the two properties as they had intended.
The Bartons were not the only ones to thwart the Germans in this respect. France’s Vichy government surprisingly played a role as well.
It was no secret that Field Marshal Göring was a lover of the great wines of Château Lafite-Rothschild and had long coveted the famous estate. Hitler reportedly planned to grab Lafite as “spoils of war” and present it as a gift to his chosen successor. To prevent that from happening, Vichy, which had no desire to see choice French property fall into German hands, employed a piece of legal cunning and sequestrated the château and its vineyards. With Lafite now officially the property of the French State, the Germans were unable to confiscate it as a Jewish asset.
But, as with Langoa-Barton, the Germans did set up a headquarters in the château and housed some of their troops there. That made Lafite’s bookkeeper, a woman named Gaby Faux, very nervous. Madame Gaby, as she was called, lived at Lafite and had agreed to do her best to watch over the property after the Rothschilds fled France. She had even accepted the most sacred objects of Paris’s Great Synagogue from Robert de Rothschild, who was head of the Consistory of the synagogue, and hid them under her bed and in her bathroom to protect them. She was sure the Germans would never enter the private quarters of a single lady. But she was not so sure about Lafite’s wine cellar.
Just before the troops arrived, Madame Gaby enlisted the help of several other people who worked at Lafite and began moving some of the more precious bottles, including the classic 1797s, to the cellars of neighboring châteaux who agreed to hide it among their own wine. As an added precaution, she did something even more extraordinary: she began “cooking the books.” Night after night, she sat in her little apartment on the Lafite premises, carefully transferring ownership of Lafite’s wine away from the older generation of Rothschilds, which had escaped from France, to the brothers Alain and Elie. The two Rothschilds, who were in the French army, had been taken prisoner when the Germans overran France. She knew that because they were prisoners of war, their property was protected under the Hague and Geneva Conventions and could not be touched by the Germans.
STATIONMASTER’S LOGBOOK, ST. THIBAULT STATION: You contend that there was cattle missing from my last shipment. Were they bulls or cows? Your servant, Henri Gaillard.
The Germans sensed the stalling and subterfuge but could do little about it except to step up their security and surveillance. Even Henri Gaillard felt the pressure. As wine, food and cattle continued to mysteriously disappear from trains passing through his station, Gaillard was bombarded with posters from German authorities reminding him that he was being watched closely. “The Country Has Its Eyes on You, Cheminot,” warned one. Gaillard was ordered to hang the poster in his office and keep it there for one month.
But subterfuge and obfuscation were not what worried the Germans most. It was the increasing sabotage, especially along railway lines. In retaliation, the Germans began forcing the French themselves to help improve security. What they failed to realize was that many of the people they enlisted to help them were the very ones causing the problems, people like Jean-Michel Chevreau, who had been siphoning their wine.
“It was a time of high drama relieved by moments of high jinks,” Chevreau said.
Some of those high jinks occurred during nightly patrols that Chevreau and others were forced to conduct. “We had to go out every night between our village and Amboise and report any incidents,” he said. “The Germans also gave us wooden sticks which we were supposed to poke at suspicious objects.”
In an effort to make sure Chevreau and others did their work, authorities in Chevreau’s village of Chançay would stamp their papers, noting the time they began; the papers would be stamped again in Amboise to note when they had finished. “But we never did any work,” Chevreau said. “All we did was calculate the time it would take to walk along the tracks between our village and Amboise; then we would get on our bikes and go to Amboise and hang around for a while before getting our papers stamped there. Then we rode home.”
STATIONMASTER’S LOGBOOK, ST. THIBAULT STATION: I am responding to your query as to the whereabouts of a missing wine shipment. There has been no wine shipped by my station this month. Your respectful servant, Henri Gaillard.
Gaillard was not surprised to receive another poster, this one admonishing him to remember the slogan of Marshal Pétain’s National Revolution: “Work, Family, Fatherland.” It was a slogan Gaillard and many French were becoming increasingly cynical about. Work? That was for the benefit of Germany, people scoffed. Family? With one and a half million Frenchmen now prisoners of war in Germany, many families were without fathers, husbands and sons. Fatherland? Nothing more than a milk cow for the Germans.
Despite Pétain’s promises, most French realized that a peace treaty with the Germans was not about to be signed, that prisoners of war were not coming home and that the occupation was not going to end anytime soon.
With each day that passed, the occupation, with its rationing, roadblocks and curfews, seemed to infect another aspect of French life. Authorities routinely opened private mail to check on public opinion. Cinemas were required to show German-made newsreels. American films were banned and listening to American jazz was prohibited. But as rules and restrictions increased, so did genuine resistance.
It manifested itself in subtle ways at first with what historian H. R. Kedward called “minor gestures of defiance, made to look accidental or unthinking: knocking over a German’s drink, misdirecting a German tourist, pretending not to hear or understand orders given in the street, or wearing combinations of clothes which made up the forbidden tricolor of blue, white and red.”
The wife of one winemaker remembers walking down the street of her town on July 14, Bastille Day, arm in arm with her mother and sister-in-law. All celebrations of France’s national holiday had been forbidden by Vichy, but the women had their own way of celebrating right under the noses of the authorities. She wore a blue dress, her mother was in white, and her sister-in-law wore red.
In Champagne, a young manicurist also found a way to protest the German presence. Seeing an officer who came regularly for a manicure enter the shop where she worked, she got up, put on her coat and walked out. “I couldn’t bring myself to touch his hands,” she said.
Such “gestures of defiance” followed a speech almost no one heard. On June 18, 1940, just a day after France agreed to surrender, a forty-nine-year-old French army general went on the radio from London to urge his countrymen to fight on. His name was Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle said France had not lost the war, only a battle. “I call upon French men and women everywhere to resist and continue the struggle.” Very few, at first, answered his call.
Within a few weeks, however, an underground pamphlet entitled Advice to the Occupied urged people to obey the curfew as this would enable them to be at home in time to listen to the BBC. Everyone, it said, should “display a fine indifference but keep alive the flame of your anger; it will become useful.”
Many heeded the advice and listened to the BBC, not to receive secret messages or commands but to obtain accurate news to counter the official German and Vichy propaganda. “There was a special aura about it and whispering all the news,” said May-Eliane Miailhe de Lencquesaing. “When the broadcasts were finished, everyone re-set their radios to a French station or Radio Vichy. It was something all of us did automatically just in case the Germans came snooping.”
On November 11, 1940, there was a special bulletin: students in Paris had clashed with German police at the Arc de Triomphe while trying to commemorate France’s victory over Germany in World War I. According to the broadcast, shots were fired and students fell bleeding to the pavement. When their comrades rushed to pick them up, police with riot batons charged.
The clash sparked a “palpable change” in the atmosphere
. “Only a short time ago, public opinion was weak and soft, prepared to agree to anything,” wrote one French diarist. “Vichy and Berlin have now contrived to make the entire country aware of this servitude.”
And awareness gave way to biting cynicism.
“If we had been ‘occupied,’ to use the polite term, by the Swedes,” commented one Parisian, “we would at least have been left with a dance step, a taste for blue and yellow ribbons; if it had been the Hottentots, or the Italians, or the Hungarians, we would have had a song, a smile, a certain way of shaking the head . . . But as for them, everyone knows only too well that they’ll leave us nothing. Not a melody, not a grimace. Even street kids wouldn’t dream of imitating the goose step.”
Despite his fears of repercussions, stationmaster Henri Gaillard was also becoming annoyed, and his messages to German authorities in Dijon reflected it. They had become clipped and more cynical. Most telling, he was no longer using the formal, stylized endings—the so-called patisseries, or pastries, beloved by the French—to close his communications with the Germans. Gaillard was now merely signing his name.
STATIONMASTER’S LOGBOOK, ST. THIBAULT STATION: You would do well to remember that wine shipments cannot arrive as quickly as your demands do. You will not get your shipment until you send me the correct papers. I’ve told you this before. There is one additional matter as well. My toilet is broken. It would be nice to have it fixed before winter, especially since it is now leaking into my wine cellar! Henri Gaillard, stationmaster.
By 1941, Gaillard’s disillusionment was shared by nearly everyone in the country. Clandestine newspapers calling on the French to defy the Germans had appeared. So had active Resistance groups in both the occupied and unoccupied zones.
One of the first groups was Combat, started by a group of French military officers and reservists. Jean Monmousseaux, a winegrower and négociant from the Touraine, was one of its members. Monmousseaux had served in de Gaulle’s tank regiment and was one of the few who had heard his broadcast from London. He was extremely moved. “My father found it very hard to accept France’s defeat,” his son Armand said.
Monmousseaux met frequently with his former army buddies, saying “We ought to be doing something, but what?” One day, the answer appeared at his door in the person of one of his old comrades. “Come along Jean, we are going to need you,” he said.
Because Monmousseaux lived close to the Demarcation Line, he had become a familiar sight to the Germans as he crossed from one zone to another with his barrels of wine. Those barrels, his friends pointed out, were big enough to hold a man. Jean understood immediately, and enthusiastically agreed to help.
Putting a person in a barrel, however, is not easy. Wine barrels are made to be watertight. Both ends of the barrels are firmly sealed and fixed beneath the curved ends of the staves, and each of the staves is made to fit perfectly to its neighbors. Putting someone in a barrel requires first removing the metal rings around the barrel and then taking it completely apart, stave by stave, and finally putting it back together again in the same way, around the person. “That is the only way,” Armand said. “You can’t just pour him through that little hole.”
Jean and his cooper, the barrelmaker, tried a few dry runs. The best time they could make on each end of the run was two hours, two hours to take the barrel apart, get a man into it, and then put it back together again around him. Then there was the trip itself and the wait at the Demarcation Line, which could take hours more. It was a long time for a man to be confined in such a tiny, nearly airless place, but it was possible.
“It’s worth the risk,” Monmousseaux reported to his colleagues. “Let’s do it.”
So, over the next two years, Monmousseaux conducted a traffic in human beings, ferrying Resistance leaders in and out of the Occupied Zone in his wine barrels. As each mission was completed, he would put his barrels back together, fill them with wine and return home. The Germans never discovered what he was doing.
By now, incidents along railway lines had become an almost daily occurrence. Cars were derailed, shipments of wine, food and other goods bound for Germany disappeared or were being destroyed.
Nearly every week, stationmaster Gaillard had to notify his German bosses in Dijon that another shipment of goods was missing. One week, he reported that a crate of wine arriving in his station weighed substantially less than it did when it was first loaded onto the train. The following week, Gaillard’s report was even worse. “I am returning to you a case of wrapped but totally empty food packages,” he wrote. “They were supposed to contain 37 kilos of foodstuffs, but they do not. Also missing is one 50-kilo sack of salt.”
Incidents of stealing and outwitting the Germans had become so frequent that those involved sometimes found themselves tripping over each other. In Bordeaux, for example, a local Resistance group spotted a train loaded with wine for Berlin and decided to liberate its contents. “They pillaged it neatly,” one Bordelais remembered.
Once home, all were thrilled to discover that the bottles they had swiped came from some of the best vintage years and greatest châteaux. Immediately, they began uncorking a few of the bottles to celebrate their success. Then, one by one, their faces fell. The wine was ghastly. Bordeaux négociants had beaten the Resistance to the punch, gluing high-class labels on bottles that were filled with nothing but plonk.
STATIONMASTER’S LOGBOOK, ST. THIBAULT STATION: A large container of wine bottles has just arrived at my station. Please tell me what you would like me to do with them. They are all empty. Waiting for a useful response. Henri Gaillard.
Defying the Germans was a dangerous game. In Bordeaux, a man was shot and killed when he raised a clenched fist as German soldiers were staging a parade. Another was executed for cutting telephone wires.
Even the Hugels of Alsace, who “fobbed off” poor-quality wine on the Germans whenever possible, realized they had to be careful. “If we got an order from the Platterhof, the guest house of Hitler, we always sent our best wine,” Georges Hugel said. “We usually received two orders a year from the Platterhof and most of the time those orders were very precise. There were a lot of people there, not Hitler, though, who appreciated good wine. We didn’t dare cross them.”
Others, especially those who were young like seventeen-year-old Gerald Boevers, were more daring. Boevers, who lived in the champagne-producing village of Louvois, was bored. It was July 14, Bastille Day, but Vichy authorities had banned all traditional celebrations, fearing they might lead to anti-German demonstrations. Boevers and three friends decided to celebrate anyway. They found several metal containers and filled them with gun powder from hunting ammunition they had hidden from the Germans. Someone then struck a match while the others ran for cover.
“It was a pretty big explosion,” said Boevers, “big enough to bring the police and a bunch of soldiers down on us.” Boevers and the others were taken immediately to Gestapo headquarters where, for the rest of that day and night, they were interrogated and severely beaten. “At one point,” said Boevers, “a man from the Gestapo told me, ‘If you were eighteen, we would have shot you.’ It was the only time I was glad I was too young to join the French army.”
Another young Frenchman, Marcel de Gallaix, also decided to take some chances. Marcel was a lawyer who specialized in property rights. Despite his wife’s fears, he agreed to represent winegrowers in Burgundy who wanted to challenge German requisitions and confiscations. To reach his clients, he often had to cross the Demarcation Line, an exercise that was both nerve-wracking and time-consuming. Trains could be held up for hours while passengers and cars were searched. By the time Marcel finally reached his destination, he discovered another problem: no one had any money. “That’s okay,” he said. “You can pay me with wine.”
So on each trip, he went home with a satchel full of good Burgundies—all in unmarked bottles. “That way he could tell the Germans it was merely some table wine he had picked up,” his wife Gertrude said. “Maybe weeks or da
ys later, we would get a packet of labels, sometimes in the mail, sometimes someone would bring them to the apartment. Goodness, did that wine ever do marvelous things for those awful wartime meals!”
By the winter of 1941, which was one of the coldest ever, conditions of life in both zones of France “had declined from austerity to severe want,” according to historian Robert Paxton. With imports cut off, oil and coal supplies dwindled. According to Jean-Bernard Delmas of Château Haut-Brion, “You got so cold you couldn’t think of anything else.” Jean-Bernard was in grade school at the time. “I will never forget how cold it was in our classroom. We wore our coats all day. The teacher would have us run around the classroom every few minutes just to warm up.”
STATIONMASTER’S LOGBOOK, ST. THIBAULT STATION: I would like to remind you that it is now December and my toilet is still not fixed. I am also attaching my list of missing freight for this week: seven packages of groceries, weight 210 kilos. Please follow up on this as quickly as possible. Henri Gaillard, stationmaster.
Wine and War: The French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France's Greatest Treasure Page 12
