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

by Donald Kladstrup

  As more stretchers arrived, the same astonishing scene repeated itself. Soldiers stripped their tanks and trucks of everything that was not essential, tossing out clothes, tools, even extra ammunition, to make room for the new cargo. Some of the men emptied their canteens and refilled them with such legendary greats as Latour ’29, Mouton ’34 and Lafite ’37.

  It was quite a party. As the French flag was raised over Eagle’s Nest, Bernard opened his first bottle of Salon ’28 and lifted it in a toast. The soldiers called it le repos du guerrier, or the warrior’s break between battles.

  One last skirmish lay ahead. Their American “cousins” had just arrived in Berchtesgaden and they were less than pleased to see that the French had beaten them there. The Americans had always assumed they would get to Berchtesgaden first. To be outmaneuvered, outfoxed by a bunch of guys who were officially under their command galled them.

  Bernard and his men were not terribly concerned. By then, most were well into their celebration and they were not about to let some sore losers spoil the party, especially since there was more than enough booze to go around. It did not take the Americans long to realize that. There were wine cellars everywhere. Nearly every villa had its own well-stocked cave. The new arrivals found one that belonged to Field Marshal Göring. It was bursting with more than 10,000 bottles. Soon, about the only sound that could be heard was the popping of corks.

  One American, however, was in no mood to celebrate. General Wade Haislip, commander of the 21st Army Corps, had just arrived in Berchtesgaden and the first thing he saw was the French Tricolore flying above Eagle’s Nest. He was angry and embarrassed.

  “You were under our orders and you still are,” he barked at General Philippe Leclerc. “Get that flag down and put the Stars and Stripes up!”

  Leclerc did as he was ordered, then shrugged. What did it matter? He knew who had won the race.

  Not long afterward, he ran into one of his group commanders, General Paul de Langlade.

  “Well, it’s done,” said Leclerc. “It’s been a long and hard road but it’s ended well, wouldn’t you say?”

  Langlade nodded and smiled. “God loves the French.”

  * * *

  TEN

  The Collaborator

  IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE TO IGNORE LOUIS Eschenauer.

  “He was a big man with a big cigar and an even bigger personality,” Jean Miailhe said. “Everyone knew Uncle Louis.”

  Uncle Louis was Bordeaux’s most prominent wine merchant, an indefatigable négociant who bought wine in bulk, bottled it and then sold it to customers throughout the world. He was fluent in English, French, German and Russian, and wrote his own business letters in those languages. He knew as much about the wine business as anyone in Bordeaux. A typical day would find him visiting several châteaux, tasting their wines and negotiating what he felt was a “fair” price, as well as dealing with piles of correspondence and orders and overseeing bottling, packing and shipping. Uncle Louis was so successful and made so much money that he rarely had to borrow from a bank. He would buy up a grower’s entire crop and pay cash on the barrelhead.

  “Eschenauer was very talented, a real expert,” said Heinz Bömers, Jr., who, like his father the Bordeaux weinführer, knew and worked with Louis. “He could detect the slightest nuances and flaws in wines. During the war, he and my father would go out and taste dozens of wines together. They trusted each other’s judgment and were very good friends.”

  It was that friendship and his close ties with the German leadership that enabled Eschenauer to greatly increase his fortune during the war by selling wine to the Third Reich.

  It also got him into trouble. After the war, he was arrested and put on trial for economic collaboration.

  Although the trial took place in 1945, many in France still feel it is too sensitive or embarrassing to talk about. It is a chapter of history they prefer to forget, a period when more than 160,000 people were brought to trial or investigated for collaborating with the enemy. Even President Charles de Gaulle worried about that period and, for the sake of national unity, sought to portray France as “a nation of resisters.”

  The Eschenauer case, however, raises uncomfortable questions about that portrait, questions which are still being debated. Was he a collaborator? Did he use his connections with the Germans to enrich himself illegally? Or was he merely one of many people in France who simply did what they had to in order to survive?

  Those who knew and admired Uncle Louis argue that it is inappropriate and distasteful to be digging up a man’s past when he is no longer able to defend himself. Let him rest in peace, they say, and let the rest of us live in peace.

  That attitude is shared by the French legal system. Documents relating to Eschenauer’s trial, part of which was held behind closed doors, have been sealed by a law that protects a person’s privacy by restricting access to personal papers until sixty years after the person’s death.

  Eschenauer died in 1958.

  He was born in 1870. His family, which lived in Strasbourg, ran a successful wine business there until the Franco-Prussian War broke out. With Alsace about to be annexed by Germany, the family fled to Bordeaux, where they hoped it would be safer, and where Louis was born that same year.

  It was a propitious move. Bordeaux’s port and other commercial facilities provided the perfect setting for the family to resume business. Within a year, Maison Eschenauer had become one of the best-known names in the region.

  On the personal front, however, it was a much different story. Louis’s father was a womanizer, something Louis’s mother made sure her son realized. One of Louis’s earliest memories was seeing his mother in tears because his father was with another woman. Often, she would drag him out of the house and down to the port as she searched the bars and dives for her husband. “I want you to see what your father is doing; I want to show you the horror of debauchery,” Louis remembered his mother telling him. For a little boy, it was a traumatic experience, he later told friends, one that would stay with him and affect his relationships with women for as long as he lived. He would one day take a mistress but never marry her or legally acknowledge the child he fathered. He couldn’t, he said, because his mother would not approve.

  In 1900, when his father died, the twenty-nine-year-old Louis took over Maison Eschenauer and turned it into one of the leading négociant firms in Bordeaux by specializing in fine wines, the grands crus. He was shrewd and exacting, and ran his firm with flair and ingenuity. During Prohibition in the 1920s, he managed to get wine to his customers in the United States by bottling it in perfume bottles. The best wines, such as Château Ausone and Château Suduiraut, were shipped in genuine crystal. Dry white wines were labeled “water from the Roman baths.”

  In social circles, Uncle Louis, as he was popularly known, was considered a warm and generous host. Women adored him and friends practically begged for reservations at Le Chapon Fin, the restaurant Eschenauer owned. “You couldn’t get in unless you had a zest of British humor, a rosette of the Legion of Honor or a personal invitation from Uncle Louis,” one Bordelais recalled. The restaurant featured the greatest wines of France and a clientele to match. King Alfonso XIII of Spain and England’s Prince of Wales were just two of his regular customers. Alfonso was particularly partial to the truffles served in silver cups alongside delicately prepared meat dishes. The Prince of Wales gravitated between écrevisses à la nage (fresh water crayfish floating in its sauce) and lièvre à la royale (hare cooked in the royal style). Because Eschenauer was called the “king of Bordeaux,” visiting royalty felt right at home.

  As the region’s most prominent wine merchant, Eschenauer presided over a society which, in many ways, was secretive and closed. The Chartrons, whose name was derived from the Quai des Chartrons, the strip along the port where they lived and worked, were négociants of English and German descent, Protestants whose ancestors had settled and begun trading in the port city two hundred years earlier. They had names like Lawton,
Johnston, Kressman and Schÿler. They intermarried, played tennis and golf, spoke English and German as well as French, and they worked assiduously to maintain contact with their countries of origin, making annual pilgrimages to their ancestral homes to place flowers on family graves. Behind the closed and nondescript doors of the Quai des Chartrons, they lived in grand apartments of restrained elegance, surrounded by antique mahogany and family silver.

  Although Eschenauer considered himself “one of them,” that was not his style. He lived away from the Quai in a mansion decorated with modern paintings. Instead of golf and tennis, he preferred horse racing; he owned several prize-winning horses, which, he said, helped make up for a family life that he did not have.

  Cars were another passion. He owned one of the first in Bordeaux and had several custom-built for him. The flashy cars attracted a great deal of attention, especially as he cruised down the coast to the resort of Biarritz, where he had installed his mistress.

  “Louis had a real love of luxury,” said Florence Mothe, a Bordeaux winemaker and writer. “With his sumptuous limousines and winters spent in Egypt, he seemed like a character out of F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

  Eschenauer was equally flamboyant in his business life, flaunting his famous German clients and worldwide contacts. One of his closest associates was Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Third Reich’s Foreign Minister, whom Eschenauer had hired before the war to sell some of his wines in Germany. When France declared war on Germany in 1939, Eschenauer, who did more than half his business with that country, found himself in an uncomfortable position: some of his best friends and customers were now “the enemy.” With exports to Germany cut off, Eschenauer was suddenly stuck with a huge stock of wine he could no longer sell.

  The crisis was short-lived. In June 1940, after German forces overran France, an old friend and client came knocking on Eschenauer’s door. It was Heinz Bömers, head of Reidemeister & Ulrichs, Germany’s largest wine company. Bömers told Louis he had just taken on a new job: buying wine for the Third Reich. “It can be profitable for both of us because I am here not just for the Third Reich; I have permission to buy wine for my own company as well,” he said, “so we can continue our regular business as usual, plus you can sell straight to the German government.” Bömers explained that before he accepted the job of weinführer, he had insisted on total independence with no restrictions on how much money he could exchange to buy for his personal business. He added that France, now an occupied country, would only be permitted to sell its wine to Germany; all of the other usual export markets such as Britain, Russia and the United States were being cut off.

  Louis needed no convincing. He realized that the arrangement Bömers was proposing was not only practical but potentially lucrative—for both of them. A deal was quickly worked out as other wine merchants looked on with envy.

  The new political and economic realities governing France seemed to agree with Eschenauer, despite the traumas of occupation. Like most other Chartrons, he was politically conservative and leery of anything that might impede business. What scared him most was the specter of communism, social upheaval and labor unrest.

  It was almost with a sigh of relief that he greeted the return of Marshal Philippe Pétain in 1940 to head the country. Pétain’s hatred of communism and decision to collaborate with Germany, Louis felt, offered the best assurance that France would avoid the kind of economic stagnation that had crippled the country in the years before the war.

  Collaboration, at that time, had few sinister overtones. It signified the working relationships Pétain wished to establish with Berlin which would help France rebuild itself. In that spirit, Eschenauer joined Groupe Collaboration, an organization that supported Pétain’s program and took its name from the Marshal’s speeches advocating Franco-German collaboration. Its membership—as Louis would come to regret—also contained hundreds of people whose political sympathies were distinctly fascist and pro-Nazi. Uncle Louis donated 10,000 French francs to the Groupe.

  By 1942, the meaning of collaboration had changed dramatically. It meant hunting down and deporting immigrant Jews, arresting communists and other perceived enemies of the state—doing whatever Berlin wanted in hopes that France would be guaranteed a favorable position in a new Europe dominated by Germany.

  Did Eschenauer realize what was happening? If he did, would it have made any difference?

  “Business was his first priority,” explained Florence Mothe, who knew Eschenauer and whose stepfather worked for Uncle Louis. “But he was not an anti-Semite. I never heard him say one word against Jews.” Indeed, he was a friend of Baron Philippe de Rothschild, who was later to defend him.

  When the Germans tried to requisition the wine of Châteaux Lafite-Rothschild and Mouton-Rothschild, Eschenauer urged Bömers step in and prevent it from happening. The weinführer agreed. He had already assured the Bordelais he would do all in his power to protect their best wines. The Rothschilds’ wine remained untouched. Baron Philippe, who knew and worked with both Eschenauer and Bömers, later confirmed the story to Florence Mothe and referred to Uncle Louis in his book as “a great friend of mine.”

  And yet, with the Germans seizing other Jewish wine estates, which they then sold to non-Jews, Eschenauer was quick to take advantage. He formed a company, the Société des Grands Vins Français, which allowed him to discreetly buy up such properties.

  “He was an opportunist, absolutely,” Mothe said, “but he was not pro-Nazi; he was just pro-Louis. For Louis, business always came first.”

  But many in the Bordeaux business community considered Eschenauer’s behavior provocative. They resented the way he flaunted his German friendships. Frequently he invited Nazi officials such as Heinz Bömers to join him for an afternoon at the racetrack. Louis’s distant cousin Ernst Kühnemann, the German officer who commanded the city’s port and submarine base there, was an even more frequent guest. The two were very close because Kühnemann was also in the wine business and head of the Berlin wine company Julius Ewest. Often, they could be seen strolling arm in arm beside the track, a sight many French spectators found infuriating and disgusting.

  “They may have been cousins,” recalled one Bordeaux wine merchant, “but it created a scandal in Bordeaux to see this ‘emperor of the Chartrons’ on intimate terms with the commander of the naval base.”

  Off the track, the cousins could be seen at Uncle Louis’s restaurant, where other German officials, many of them sent by Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, were being entertained as well. To accommodate its German clientele, Le Chapon Fin was granted a number of exemptions. The restaurant was allowed to serve wine around the clock; it was not restricted to certain hours as other restaurants were because of rationing; nor did it have to post four different fixed-price menus daily with meals for 18, 50, 70 and 100 francs. It could charge what it wished. Although meat and fish were almost impossible to come by elsewhere, one could still dine very well at Le Chapon Fin.

  Such privileges left a bitter taste in the mouths of other Bordelais. While they struggled to survive, Uncle Louis continued living the high life.

  By the summer of 1944, nearly everyone realized that Germany was about to collapse. Even Heinz Bömers, who was visiting his family in Bavaria, knew the end was in sight and had refused to return to Bordeaux.

  After D-Day, as one town after another was liberated, swastikas began appearing over doors of suspected collaborators. The handwriting was literally on the wall; but Louis Eschenauer did not seem to see it.

  Despite warnings from Charles de Gaulle that those who collaborated with the enemy would be punished, Louis’s glamorous lifestyle continued unchanged. There were trips to Biarritz in his custom-built cars (unlike others, he still seemed to be able to get fuel), afternoons at the racetrack with his German friends and lunch nearly every day with Captain Ernst Kühnemann.

  It was probably during one of those lunches that Kühnemann informed Eschenauer that with the Allies sweeping into France, it would not be long b
efore German forces occupying Bordeaux would be pulling out. That may have been when Uncle Louis first realized the tide truly had turned and that he could be in serious trouble.

  He watched with growing anxiety as German troops, caught on the run, lashed out with atrocities and mass executions, and he saw how the Resistance struck back, chasing down suspected collaborators as well as Germans.

  That August, Eschenauer learned that the Germans planned to blow up the port of Bordeaux just before they evacuated the city. When a local politician with connections to the Resistance pleaded with him to use his influence to try to save the facility, Louis jumped at the chance. It was a way to make sure he was on the winning side and it might even save his neck. Besides, it was definitely the best way to protect business. He needed that port to ship his wine.

  Eschenauer immediately contacted Kühnemann to set up an emergency meeting with other German officers. There, he argued that destroying the port would be a big mistake, that it served no military purpose and that many innocent people could be hurt or killed. What neither Eschenauer nor the Resistance realized was that the Germans probably would not have been able to destroy the port anyway because most of their detonators had been sabotaged just a few days earlier by a German soldier who opposed the plan. But that was a secret the Germans were keeping to themselves. In a bluff, they promised not to blow up the port if their troops were allowed to leave Bordeaux peacefully without being fired at. The Resistance agreed.