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

by Donald Kladstrup

  It was much the same for the more than 4,000 prisoners, packed into twenty cement-block buildings, two rows of ten each divided by a narrow strip of dirt the prisoners called Hitlerstrasse, or Hitler Street. The entire complex was surrounded by fortified guard towers and rows of barbed wire.

  Running through the center of each of the buildings was a line of cement sinks. On each side was row after row of bunk beds, three high. The mattresses were stuffed with wood shavings, and aside from one blanket per bed, there were no other covers. The windows were bare, as was the cement floor. On the day before Huet arrived at the camp, the Germans had distributed one roll of toilet paper to each barracks. With 180 men in each, that came to one square per person.

  Oflag IV D was what its name said it was, an Offizier-Lager, or camp for officers. Under the Geneva Convention, officers who were taken prisoner were to be housed and fed “no worse” than the troops who captured them. They could practice any religion, were exempt from hard labor and could correspond with their families and friends. If they were caught trying to escape, they were to be subjected to nothing more than a month of solitary confinement.

  Grim as officer camps were, they were far better than regular POW camps and nothing like concentration camps where Jews, Slavs, Gypsies—those the Nazis called untermenshen, or subhumans—were thrown. Once clear of interrogation, an officer POW had nothing to do but wait for the war to end. Mind-numbing boredom was the worst enemy, but hunger was a close second. Food was an incessant preoccupation.

  Gaston Huet awoke one morning with breakfast on his mind. He could barely stomach the thought: “panzermilch again,” a diluted soy milk he and the other prisoners were given every single morning for breakfast along with a bit of bread. Lunch would be no better: broth, perhaps with some boiled potato ground into it. Dinner would feature a dab of pâté, ground meat of an unknown origin held together with a great deal of lard.

  The monotony of the day was interrupted when a German guard entered Huet’s barracks just before noon and announced that mail had arrived for some of the prisoners. Although the rules of war stipulated that officers could correspond with their families, the rules were often conveniently overlooked. It had been weeks since any mail, always censored, had been allowed into Oflag IV D. This time it included several packages, all of which had been torn open and inspected by the German authorities.

  Huet beamed when his name was called. There was a letter and a parcel from his wife. He put the letter in his pocket, holding the best for last, and opened the box. Inside were three eggs, packed in flour so they would not break, provisions the POWs cherished most since they could be used in so many ways to stretch their meager food supplies. Huet sifted through the flour with his fingers, not wanting to miss anything else that might have been packed, such as a bar of soap or a bouillon cube. The latter especially was something German censors kept a watchful eye out for after they discovered that secret messages had been scribbled to several prisoners on the inside of the wrappings of the tiny cubes.

  Satisfied there was nothing more in the flour, Huet placed his box of food in a locked storage area and retreated to his bunk to read his letter. “My dearest husband . . . ,” the letter began, and Gaston was transported to another world, a world of home, family and friends. He savored every word and lingered over the description of his growing daughter, trying to picture what she must look like. He had last seen her on her first birthday. He had missed her first steps, her first words. She would be nearly four now and he was about to miss yet another birthday.

  News of the family vineyard added to his melancholy. Just before being recalled to active duty in 1938, Huet had taken full charge of running Le Haut Lieu when his father’s health, already fragile as a result of World War I, deteriorated further. “It’s a bit of a struggle but the vines are okay,” Huet’s wife wrote. In between phrases that had been blacked out by the censor, Huet learned there had been rain in Vouvray. The term mauvaises herbes, or weeds, also stood out. Even with the censored passages eliminating some of his wife’s words, Huet could easily picture what the vineyard looked like. Because it was early summer, he knew the grapes would still be green and tiny, but if it did not rain too much, there was a chance the vintage would turn out to be a decent one. He longed to be home for the harvest but that, he knew, was impossible.

  Tucking the letter back in his pocket, Huet went looking for his friend Daniel Senard. He found him stretched out on his bunk. Any news from home? Huet asked. Senard, the winemaker from Aloxe-Corton in Burgundy, shook his head. Unlike Huet, Senard had not received a letter. From earlier ones, however, he knew that German soldiers had occupied his home, pillaged his wine cellar and even burned some of the family’s antique furniture to keep warm. Huet filled Senard in about the news he had received. Their conversation soon turned to the problems winegrowers throughout France were facing. Before long, other vignerons in the camp had joined them.

  Of the million and a half French soldiers languishing in German POW camps, most came from rural areas, which meant that many, including hundreds in Oflag IV D, were directly or indirectly connected to the business of wine. To get through the long, boring days, those in the camp had formed groups to share news about their vineyards and compare notes about viticultural practices.

  It was during one of the group meetings that Huet came up with an idea that startled everyone. “Let’s have a wine banquet,” he said. At first, no one said anything, and then there was a torrent of chatter. Finally, someone asked the obvious: how do we have a wine banquet without any wine? Huet confessed he did not have an immediate answer. “But I have an idea. Let me think about it.”

  Afterward, he explained what he had in mind to Senard and another winemaker friend, André Cazes, owner of Château Lynch-Bages in Bordeaux. “I can sum it up in one word,” Gaston said. “Blackmail.”

  He had learned from a prison work crew that a nearby camp for criminals had wine and liquor circulating in it, which was against regulations. “Let’s threaten to blow the whistle,” Huet said. “You know as well as I do that our camp commander is scared to death of the Gestapo. Maybe he’ll let us bring in some wine for ourselves if we promise to keep quiet.” Senard and Cazes agreed it was worth a try.

  A few days later, the three prisoners confronted the commander. He reacted nervously. “Where did you get that information? For God’s sake, don’t tell anyone!” Huet replied that their silence could be had for a price, then he outlined what he and his friends had in mind.

  The commander was reluctant at first, but the last thing he wanted to do was stir up trouble or call attention to himself.

  “You can have the wine,” he said, “but I am not going any further than that. You will have to use your tickets colis to get it.”

  Those were the labels French prisoners of war were issued to obtain food and other provisions from home. They were like shipping permits, and each POW was given one label a month to send home. No package sent back could weigh more than five kilos, and it had to have the label attached. However, there was never any guarantee the Germans would deliver them, and when they did, the packages were always opened and inspected.

  Huet and his friends were ecstatic, scooting from the commander’s office like little boys who had been given a treat, congratulating each other and exclaiming, “We did it, we’re going to get our wine!” They rushed back to their barracks to report the good news and begin planning.

  News of their victory spread through the camp faster than rumors of liberation. “Is it true?” other POWs asked. Many were skeptical and thought it was a joke. But by the end of the day, the question nearly everyone was asking was “Can we help?”

  Huet named a committee composed of representatives from each of the country’s wine regions. It was decided that 700 bottles of wine would be needed. That way, every prisoner would get one glass. Their goal was to have everything ready by the fall of 1942, timing their party so that it coincided with the grape harvest back home.

&n
bsp; The work became all-consuming. After months of unrelenting boredom, now they had a party to plan. Huet and the other committee members worked every day, putting out word that each prisoner with a wine connection should beg three bottles of wine from home. After careful calculations, they were sure that three bottles per package would come in under the five-kilogram weight limit the Germans had imposed on packages.

  When the first packages of wine began arriving late that summer, there was euphoria. “This is really going to happen,” the POWs thought. That was when things started to go wrong.

  The first headache came after too much champagne. Most champagne at that time was bottled in 80-centiliter bottles, five centiliters larger than the other wines, which meant that all the champagne packages being delivered to the POWs slightly exceeded the five-kilogram limit. The German commander had promised that none of the packages would be opened as long as they met specifications. Those from Champagne did not, and overzealous guards pounced on them.

  It was left to Huet to break the news. “We’ve lost most of our champagne,” he told the POWs. “The Germans who seized the parcels probably drank everything inside.” Huet said that without the champagne they would not have enough wine in time for the party, so they would have to postpone it for a couple of months.

  The announcement came as a crushing blow. There was momentary silence as the other POWs absorbed the impact of his words. All those labels wasted. Would they ever get enough wine? But it was much more than that.

  “The party meant everything to us,” Huet recalled years later, “and suddenly it seemed like it was all being taken away.”

  That sense of loss was exacerbated by news from home: German forces that November crossed the Demarcation Line and placed the entire country under occupation. Mail from home, which was irregular at best, became even more erratic. As morale plummeted, anger began rising. Prisoners raised their arms and mockingly shouted “Heil Hitler” at every guard who passed by. They also built a Tombe d’Adolph, Adolf’s Tomb, and conducted a sham funeral service there. Fearing the problem could escalate, authorities threw hundreds of POWs into the bloc des isolés, or isolation block, accusing them of harboring “anti-German” sentiments.

  Huet was worried as well. Calling his wine fête committee together, he declared, “For everyone’s sake, we’ve got to go ahead with the party. Even if we don’t have as much wine as we wanted, we’ve got to do it. Let’s fix a date and stick to it.” The date they picked was January 24, 1943, the feast day of St. Vincent, the patron saint of French winemakers.

  It was an inspired choice, for the German winter had set in with a vengeance. Snow fell heavily and temperatures dropped below zero, but hardly anyone noticed. The POWs were obsessed with planning for the grand event, and everyone wanted to be involved. Artists volunteered to make posters and maps of different wine regions. A theater group offered to stage skits about wine and even make costumes. A priest who directed a camp chorale group said they would put down their hymnals and start practicing drinking songs.

  One day while Huet was working on the program, he was approached by a representative of the carpenters’ group. “What about a winepress? We can build you a model of one,” he said. Huet thought it was a great idea but wondered if it might be too complicated. After all, where would they get the wood? The carpenter replied it was not a problem and that Huet would be doing them a big favor by letting them build a press. “Them,” as Huet discovered, were five POWs who were intent on escaping. An underground tunnel was being dug and wooden bed slats were being used to prop it up. The winepress, the carpenter said, would help explain to any suspicious German why all the bed slats were disappearing. In addition, noise from construction of the press would help cover up sounds from the tunneling.

  Huet was amused but not surprised. There had been numerous attempts at escape from Oflag IV D, several of them successful. As the prisoners’ logbook noted, “So many tunnels are being dug that it’s like living on an anthill.” The most memorable attempt occurred when 150 officers tunneled from beneath the latrines to the woods beyond the camp, but not before getting the cooperation of the other POWs to refrain from using one part of the facilities until after they had made their break.

  Escape was something Huet never considered. Like many POWs, he was afraid of what the Germans might do to his family. Those who tried to escape were usually unmarried men without families to worry about.

  The carpenters’ offer, however, intrigued him. He shrugged his shoulders. “Why not? Go ahead and build the press,” he said.

  By now, Huet’s one-night wine tasting had evolved into a two-week extravaganza of exhibits and seminars celebrating the glories of the wines of France. A leaflet distributed by vignerons of the camp proclaimed,

  We want to sing about the sun and the breezes blowing through the vineyards. We want to sing about what the eye cannot see from behind the barbed wire and walls of this camp, and about what one cannot imagine growing here on this hard, infertile ground of the Silesian plain. We want to sing about wine to stomachs washed out and swollen by three years of nothing but water. We want our celebration to be like the grape which has grown, ripened and been harvested in beauty and generosity.

  A few days before the grand fête, the more than 4,000 POWs of Oflag IV D had been asked to list, in order of preference, the wine they would most like to drink. Burgundy? Bordeaux? A sweet wine from the Loire? Choices ran the gamut, and pretty soon the POWs were exchanging stories about wines they had drunk, arguing at times about which vintages were better and which region of France produced the greatest wine. All had been asked to indicate three choices in case their first choice was unavailable.

  Meanwhile, Huet and his organizing committee went to the locked storeroom and began counting the bottles of wine. When they had finished, they were crestfallen. There were only 600 bottles, 100 fewer than what they had hoped for. “This means one bottle is going to have to serve seven men,” Huet told the others. “It’s going to be a very small glass of wine.”

  By January 24, everything was ready to kick off the Quinzaine des Vins de France, the two-week wine celebration. As vignerons demonstrated how the newly constructed winepress worked, colorful posters depicting the glories of wine were hung on the walls of the barracks. A troupe of actors dressed in paper costumes went through a final rehearsal of the skit they had prepared. The camp choir warmed up with a few scales and measures from a drinking song they had learned, “Farewell, baskets, the harvest is over . . .”

  Beneath all this activity, five POWs were getting ready to say their farewells. A splurge of unusually warm weather in January had enabled them to finish their tunnel earlier than expected. As colleagues stood watch by the window, the five men shoved one of the beds aside and slipped through a hole in the floor. Each clutched a small disguise kit as they crawled through the tunnel toward the woods, about 125 yards away. There, hidden by the trees, they donned their disguises, homemade German uniforms which had been fashioned from the cardboard the wine had been packed in. Back in the barracks, other POWs checked one last time from the windows to make sure no Germans were around, then slid the bed back into place.

  As evening fell, all attention shifted to the moment everyone had been anticipating. A jubilant Gaston Huet, overcome with relief and emotion, called members of his committee together to give them one last message. “It’s time,” he said simply.

  The wine fête was held in the so-called Hall d’Information, the name given the barracks where plans for the soirée were first conceived. Because space was limited—the building could hold only 235 people at a time—it was decided that the celebration would be staged seventeen times over the course of several days in order to accommodate all of the POWs.

  As that first evening got under way, the atmosphere was surreal. Many of the POWs could hardly believe it was happening. As each man took his place, he found a small piece of paper with a typewritten message attached to his chair:

  This evening wil
l give us time to recall and glory in one of France’s purest treasures, our wine, and to alleviate the misery with which we have had to live for so long. A party to celebrate wine? No, it is not just that. It is also a celebration of us and how we have survived. With this little glass of wine that we are going to drink together tonight, we will savor not only a rare fruit but also the joy of a satisfied heart.

  The “rare fruit” would come later, however. First, one of the speakers said he would like to correct a few misunderstandings. “Some of you labor under the assumption that there is no more beautiful sound in this world than the pop of a champagne cork,” he said. “You are wrong. Champagne must be opened not with a pop or bang but with a whisper.” To open it otherwise, he warned, allows the carbon dioxide to escape prematurely and the result, “though spectacular, is usually a mess.”

  Unveiling a fake bottle of champagne that had been prepared for the demonstration, the speaker announced he would now show them how a bottle of champagne should be opened. As the bemused audience looked on, he meticulously peeled off the foil capsule, undid the wire holding the cork in place and gently set about easing the cork from the bottle. “Remember,’’ he reminded his listeners, “always with a whisper.”