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

by Donald Kladstrup

  Huet took one last look around the camp. He stared at the barracks where he had lived, then at the guardhouses; the machine guns were still in place. So was the barbed wire which ringed the camp. Huet also looked at the Tombe d’Adolph, the mock grave of Hitler which the prisoners had built. Life in Oflag IV D had been a nightmare, the paralyzing cold of winter, the awful heat of summer and especially the lack of food. He shivered when he recalled the bitter January days when prisoners tried to catch rats for dinner. Yet some incredible friendships had been forged during those years.

  He thought about those friendships as he proceeded down Hitlerstrasse, the name given to the dirt path which cut through the middle of the camp and led to the front gate.

  Huet passed through the gate and started walking west, toward France and home.

  He was not alone. The roads were full of frail sick men, all looking far older than their years. At times, the men tried to help and encourage each other as the mud sucked at their worn-out shoes and boots. They were so weak after their years of captivity that each step was painful. All that kept them going were thoughts of home. What would they say to their families? Would their friends recognize them? What had happened in the five years they had been gone?

  For more than a hundred kilometers, Huet kept going, stumbling over roads that had been torn up by tanks and pockmarked by repeated bombing. The war was not quite over; Germany had not yet surrendered. At times, Huet and the other POWs had to throw themselves onto the wet and cold ground for protection as fighter planes and bombers flew overhead.

  As they approached the Franco-German border, they met Allied troops coming toward them. The troops rushed to help them. “This way, this way,” the troops said, escorting the POWs to trains bound for France.

  It was late February when Huet finally arrived back in Vouvray. He returned to a welcome that needed no words. “We just fell into each other’s arms, my wife and I,” he remembered. “We were laughing and crying at the same time. So many emotions.”

  And then he saw his daughter. The baby he had last seen on her first birthday was now a little girl, nearly seven years old, and shy behind her mother’s skirts. She peeked out at the man she knew only from his letters and her mother’s stories and asked if he wanted to play. The question made him weep. “She was so beautiful, I could hardly believe it,” Huet said.

  It would be some time before he was ready to play, however. Huet had lost more than one-third of his body weight. Before being captured, he weighed nearly 160 pounds. When he was freed, he weighed less than 100.

  Before he fell asleep that first night at home, he had one last question. “And the vines? How are the vines?”

  A few days later, Huet discovered the answer for himself and nearly wept again. Five years of war and neglect had taken their toll. No pruning had been done and the vines were gangly, their branches hanging down every which way. Gone were the tidy rows that once had been so carefully staked and tied neatly to the lines of wire. And weeds were everywhere, even though it was only March. Plowing had been impossible because the Germans had requisitioned the horses. Huet could clearly see what the lack of fertilizer and copper sulfate had meant as he looked at the number of sick and aged vines that needed replacing.

  It was a plight facing nearly every winegrower, and the problems extended to their cellars as well. Wines that had lain in wooden casks for five years desperately needed bottling, but that was impossible because there was a bottle shortage. For many wines, it was already too late. They had dried out, lost their fruit and were undrinkable. The casks in which they had been aging were ruined as well. Some had become moldy from overuse, while others were damaged when overzealous Vichy inspectors poured oil into them to prevent vignerons from withholding their industrial alcohol quota.

  Just when it seemed as if the picture could not be worse, Mother Nature conspired against winegrowers. On May 1, the early warm spring vanished as France was gripped by a deep freeze. Temperatures dropped below zero. Vines with young shoots already sprouting were frozen solid. One old winemaker in Bordeaux said he had never seen such a hard frost so late in the spring. Many growers lost their entire crop.

  It was not much different in other wine regions. In Burgundy, however, the worst was yet to come. Maurice Drouhin had been heartened when, after the frost, temperatures soared again and his vines showed new signs of life and began to flower.

  Now, as he stared at the sky with his son Robert, dark clouds advanced ominously from the northeast. It was 5 P.M., June 21. On what should have been the longest day of the year, the whole of Burgundy was suddenly plunged into darkness, almost as if night had fallen. The wind rose and the house began to shake. Then it began to hail. Balls of ice shredded vineyards throughout the Côte de Beaune. Ten of the main villages, from Puligny to Corton, were ravaged. Maurice could only shake his head. Like everyone else, he wondered if there would be enough grapes to make any wine at all.

  The following morning, he and Robert went out to survey the damage. Leaves of his vines looked like they had been sliced with a knife. Flowers looked as if they had been trampled into the ground by a stampede. Maurice stopped to talk to other vignerons, but there was little to say. It was the same everywhere. Everyone realized they would be lucky if they could salvage even 5 percent of their crop.

  Maurice decided it was time to do something he had been putting off until the German surrender had been signed and he was positive the war was over. “Grab a broom,” he told Robert. “We’re going to get rid of a few cobwebs.”

  Together, they went down to the cave and began brushing away the webs and grime that had accumulated on the wall Maurice had built five years earlier. “Those little spiders of yours did a good job,” he said to Robert. Then they began knocking down the wall. The wines that had been hidden behind appeared to be in perfect shape, including a complete stock from the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti from 1929 to 1938.

  Maurice took one of the bottles up for dinner that night and told Pauline it was a celebration. With these wines, he said, we’ll be able to pay our bills and get business going again.

  It was a strategy many others were adopting as they recovered wines they had hidden from the Germans. Gaston Huet retrieved his wines from a cave along the Loire River. The weeds and brush he had planted now completely concealed the opening, but he had no trouble finding it.

  His brother-in-law André Foreau, another Vouvray winemaker, dug up his garden to unearth the bottles he had buried. So did a neighbor, Prince Philippe Poniatowski. But Poniatowski was worried about what the time underground may have done to his wine, so he called in some wine experts to join him in a tasting. The verdict was unanimous: all the wines were in outstanding condition, even the 1875.

  In Champagne, Marie-Louise de Nonancourt took her son Bernard with her when she broke down her wall at Laurent-Perrier. There was one casualty. Her statue of the Virgin Mary, which she had cemented into the wall to guard the hidden stock, shattered as sledgehammers hit the bricks. Marie-Louise, however, saw it as a sign of good luck, saying the Virgin had done her job and now it was up to the de Nonancourts.

  In June 1945, the Marquis d’Angerville of Volnay in Burgundy was surprised to receive a letter from one J. R. Swan of New York City. The letter read, “I am writing you to ask if you are still in possession of 10 cases of Volnay Champans ’34 and 10 cases of Meursault Santenots ’34 purchased from you for me and left in your care. It would be a great deal to expect that they had not been taken by the Germans but there is always the chance that I have been fortunate.”

  The wine Swan had ordered represented just a few of the many bottles that had spent the war hidden and untouched behind a wall in d’Angerville’s cellar. In a letter to Swan, the marquis informed him that the wine was still there and would be shipped to him immediately.

  But it was a task the marquis approached with regret. His 1934 Volnay Champans was one of the best wines he had ever made and he hated parting with it. 1934 had been an outstanding v
intage, certainly the best of the decade, and it had produced wines that were rich, velvety and harmonious. His ’34 Volnay Champans was no exception. It was the wine he and his family drank to celebrate the end of the war, and if there had been any way he could have held on to some of it, he would have done so.

  D’Angerville realized, however, there was no alternative. Unless he let it go, there would be no way to start business again. So he packed it up.

  30,000,000 BOTTLES OF CHAMPAGNE THAT GERMANS MISSED ARE AWAITING EXPORT Paris, Sept. 13 (UP) — More than 30,000,000 bottles of champagne are in French cellars waiting to be exported to the United States, because the Germans were afraid to go into the underground caverns to remove them. Léon Douarche, former director of the International Wine Office, said today that the Germans carried away only a small percentage of this year’s production of wine and champagne, which he estimated at 3,700,000,000 liters, compared to the yearly average figure of 5,500,000,00.

  —The New York Times, Sept. 14, 1944

  In July 1944, Otto Klaebisch, the weinführer of Champagne, placed a large order for champagne for the German military with the CIVC. Three weeks later he abruptly canceled it and fled back to Germany.

  With Patton’s Third Army rapidly advancing toward Champagne, the Germans had to leave quickly, so quickly, in fact, that they did not even have time to set off all the explosives they had planted under bridges. Nor did they destroy Champagne’s vast cellars as Himmler had threatened to do.

  Nevertheless, the German occupation had left companies and personal lives in tatters. There were millions of francs’ worth of unpaid bills for champagne the Nazis had shipped to Germany. Champagne houses, notably Moët & Chandon, were in disarray after their executives had been imprisoned and the houses themselves had been placed under direct German control.

  The Champenois, therefore, were relieved when they heard that Robert-Jean de Vogüé, who had headed both Moët and the CIVC, was still alive after a year and a half in a slave-labor camp. They were horrified, however, when they saw his condition.

  De Vogüé was not supposed to have survived. The Nazis had put the letters NN against his name—Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog)—which meant work him to death and dump him into an unmarked grave. Just after he arrived at the camp, a sadistic guard told him, “You know what they say about Ziegenhain, don’t you? Those who come to Ziegenhain come here to die.”

  De Vogüé almost did.

  One morning he awoke to discover that an infection in the little finger of his right hand had become much worse. As he examined it more closely, he realized that gangrene had set in. When he asked for a doctor, the authorities ignored him. De Vogüé knew he would die unless he did what was necessary himself. He found a piece of glass and sharpened it as best he could. Then he began to cut. With no anesthetic, the pain was unbearable but de Vogüé continued to cut until he had removed his entire finger. Using the rags of his concentration camp clothes, he finally stopped the bleeding. The crude operation saved his life, but it was almost for naught.

  When his camp was liberated, de Vogüé began walking. He had gone only a few kilometers before he collapsed. As he lay unconscious along the road, a British officer passed by and stopped. He was a man whom de Vogüé had once worked with in Champagne. The Englishman jumped out of his jeep and picked up de Vogüé; then he notified de Vogüé’s family that he was bringing him home.

  For de Vogüé’s five children, it was an exciting moment. They had no idea of their father’s condition and had decorated the living room with signs of “Welcome Home, Papa.”

  When de Vogüé arrived, all the joy vanished. No one recognized the frail, sticklike figure who could no longer stand on his own. He bore no resemblance to the elegant, dynamic man who had run the Moët & Chandon champagne house and who had faced down Otto Klaebisch.

  Now he hung between the shoulders of the British officer and his brother-in-law. His greeting was so faint the children were not even sure he had spoken. Their mother began to cry as she ushered the men into the bedroom to help put her husband to bed. For days, there was doubt he would recover.

  De Vogüé’s assistant, Claude Fourmon, who was arrested with him in Klaebisch’s office, arrived back in Champagne in as bad a condition. Fourmon had been sent to Bergen-Belsen, where each day was a test of survival. He would fix a date to live and then, when that date passed, he would pick another one. “If I can just make it until January 13,” he would tell himself, “then I can make it.” When January 13 arrived, he picked another date.

  Those dates stretched on through the winter of 1943–44. The cold was unbearable. “I sang,” Fourmon said. “I sang against the cold. I sang hymns, children’s songs, anything. Songs seemed to be the only thing that helped.”

  When he finally returned home, Fourmon, like de Vogüé, was barely alive. He had been tortured and was no longer the ebullient young man whom the Gestapo had arrested in Reims two years earlier. “I came back not young anymore,” Fourmon said.

  He was thirty years old.

  May-Eliane Miailhe de Lencquesaing was crying. She and her family had just returned to Château Pichon-Longueville-Comtesse de Lalande. The Germans had left it only the day before, and the Miailhes, for the first time in four years, were getting a look inside.

  “The Germans were brutes,” she said. “They had dried their uniforms in front of the fires and sparks had flown everywhere. The beautiful boiseries were ruined and every pane of glass was broken. Even the marble fireplaces and doors were in pieces. Windows had been left open and rain poured in, ruining the parquet floors. Straw pallets on the floors where the soldiers slept were like mud.

  “And the smell! It took us years to get the smell of the grease they used on their jackboots out of the château.”

  It was the same throughout Bordeaux as winemakers and winegrowers tried to erase the scars left by the occupation: swastikas carved into stonework, graffiti scribbled on walls, bullet holes.

  Château Mouton-Rothschild had been occupied and damaged but not confiscated by the Third Reich. Like Château Lafite-Rothschild, the Vichy government had sequestrated Mouton to keep the Germans from declaring it a Jewish asset and making it German property.

  When Baron Philippe de Rothschild came back to Mouton, however, he was already bearing a burden of sorrow. He had fled France to join de Gaulle’s Free French Forces in 1942, leaving behind a wife and tiny daughter. For most of the war, the two managed to survive, living first in the south of France and then in Paris. The baron’s wife, the Comtesse Elizabeth de Chambure, was not Jewish, so she was confident the Germans would leave them alone.

  But she was wrong. Just before Paris was liberated, the Gestapo arrived at her apartment. In front of the terrified eyes of her daughter Philippine, the comtesse was dragged out of her home and put on one of the last trains bound for the German death camps. She was killed in the gas chambers of Ravensbrück only a few days before the concentration camp was liberated.

  Upon seeing his beloved Mouton, the baron became even more saddened. Although his wines were untouched, the château and grounds had been severely damaged by the Nazis, who had transformed Mouton into a communications command center. There were even bullet holes in the walls of some of the rooms where the Germans had used paintings for target practice.

  Baron Philippe was determined to eradicate all signs of the Nazi presence. He discovered that some of the soldiers who had occupied his property were being held as prisoners in a nearby camp. “Who better to redo the château where there was devastation, everything to be cleaned, repaired, repainted,” he later recalled in a memoir. When Baron Philippe asked authorities for permission to put the Germans to work, officials agreed.

  For days, the POWs labored to repair the damage they had done, ripping down miles of communications cables they had strung around the château and demolishing antiaircraft gun emplacements on the grounds. They also filled in the bullet holes.

  But their work was far from finished. For years
Baron Philippe had dreamed of creating a park around Mouton, along with a road that would link it directly with Mouton d’Armailhac, a neighboring wine estate he had acquired. The baron equipped the Germans with rakes, shovels and other tools and told them to get to work. Under a blazing sun, the prisoners began planting trees, flowers and shrubs, clearing land for a park and digging out a path for the road.

  The project took months to complete but when it was finished, the baron pronounced himself well satisfied.

  “I can never look at the road,” he said, “without thinking of it as the ‘Route of Revenge.’ ”

  French winegrowers were overwhelmed by the amount of work that lay before them and the amount of money it would cost. Money for repairs, money for new high-axle tractors and other equipment, money for fertilizer and copper sulfate, money for replacing vines. Where were they going to get it?