Hitler's Vineyards: How the French Winemakers Collaborated with the Nazis

By Christophe Lucand

“Fascinating. Detailed, well-written, and controversial, Lucand’s history of France and its wine during the Nazi Occupation is an unexpected treat.” —The Wine Economist

During the Second World War, French wine was hardly a trivial product. Indeed, following the Fall of France, it proved to be one of the most valuable French commodities in the eyes of the Nazi leaders. In 1940, “Weinführer” (official delegates and wine experts appointed by Berlin), were sent to all the wine regions of France to coordinate the most intense looting that the country had ever seen.

Alongside the very ambiguous relationship of the Vichy Regime and the collaboration of many French professionals with the occupiers, this immense program of wine collection was a drama that many would prefer to forget. Now, more than seventy years after the end of the conflict, the time has come to tell the story of what really happened.

Following a meticulous investigation and relying exclusively on previously unpublished sources, Christophe Lucand reveals the history of the world of French wine that was subjected to the tests of war, occupation and of all the compromises this entails.

“The author has walked the line with sensitivity and provided a balanced review of this very painful time for French winemakers.” —Firetrench

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781526750723

Book preview

Introduction

On 13 May 1940, Wehrmacht soldiers broke through the frail French lines around Sedan. In a few days, the enemy had crossed the Meuse and the best part of the Allied armies had been taken prisoner. For France, the rout was total and the disaster unprecedented. Nine months earlier, almost day after day, the French Minister Paul Reynaud had declared: ‘We will win, because we are the strongest.’ With this strange defeat began one of the darkest pages of French history: the setting up of an authoritarian, repressive political regime, and the organisation of one of the biggest plundering ventures ever.

This systematic control of the whole of the French economy for more than four years did not spare wine production and trade, on the contrary. During the months preceding the attack on France, the Berlin authorities had officially designated wine as a highly strategic product, thought to be indispensable for the German civilian population, essential for maintaining the soldiers’ fighting spirit, and indispensable for supplying the Reich’s social rounds. After July 1940, France’s economic overthrow at last created the opportunity for Germany to engage in systematically getting hold of wine from all of the wine regions that now came within its sphere of influence. In the years to come, the Nazis discovered the other incentives wine had to offer, placing it at the heart of the parallel circuits of wartime international trade or transforming it to produce priority fuel substitutes towards the end of the world conflict.

In order to satisfy the huge and continually increasing quantity of wines the Nazi authorities demanded, an immense appropriation system was set up as early as the summer of 1940 throughout the whole country, with the ambiguous involvement of the Vichy State and the participation of tens of thousands of French professionals involved directly in collaborating very actively with the Occupier. To coordinate and supervise these enormous programmed levies, import agents for French wines – all of them German professionals and wine experts – were sent into the country’s great wine producing regions. At the time, the men the French called the Weinführers had considerable authority and, above all, almost unlimited purchasing power to satisfy Berlin’s demands as quickly as possible. The success of their task depended mainly on their very good knowledge of the local wine producing sectors, often backed by ageold commercial contacts with French professionals. By the end of the conflict, tens of millions of bottles, and millions of hectolitres of wine, had been handed over to the enemy without a hitch, in accordance with the agreements. All this greatly helped the German war effort and permitted a host of local wine merchants, vintners and various other intermediaries to make a fortune, directly to the detriment of France’s interests.

The subject of this short book has, however, never been the object of a study on a national scale. No historical, scientific enquiry has ever seen the light of day, although reference works on some of the emblematic vineyards do exist. It is a fact that wine hasn’t had the attention of historians; they have not picked up on the importance it has in a country that is indeed the world’s foremost producer, exporter, importer and consumer. Despite the fact that it is present everywhere in France, where in 1940 winemaking activities occupied directly or indirectly almost 7 million inhabitants, despite Nazi Germany subjugating the country and planning to reduce it to a mere supplier of raw materials for agriculture, the contribution of wine on an industrial scale has never led to a historical investigation.

There are several explanations for this oversight. The world of wine and vineyards has been weighed down for ages by a host of laughable tales of fiction, catching peoples’ imagination and in particular giving them what they wanted to hear in answer to the questions they had quite rightly asked. The main accounts on this subject, published or not, have persisted for years, simply passing on a host of anecdotes and comments, all more or less fanciful, collected from interviews in which the lack of esprit critique and conclusive archives can be clearly felt. The brief lapse of time since the events, together with often insufficient fact-checking, has meant that certain authors have reproduced the much-expected good story, that of a world of wine revealing boldness and bravery in the face of brutality, blackmail, injustice and exactions.

In these tales, which everybody has kept up, the reader discovers what the great majority of French wine producers did to protect their wines, forsaking easy profits, in spite of everything. These very consensual and prevailing accounts, perpetuated by the professionals themselves – who are frequently the descendants of those involved at the time – often reveal the incredible ingenuity the French wine merchants and winemakers developed to deceive the occupiers, supplying them with the most frightful plonk under the labels of the country’s most famous wines. Having escaped the official plundering, many wine merchants then defied the occupying authorities by hiding their treasure behind false walls in the well-kept secrets of their cellars. It was sometimes right under the very noses of the highest German military authorities who, all things considered, were always described as being not very bright, that many heroic deeds of commercial resistance against the occupier enabled France’s good wines to be saved and through them the excellence of the country’s national heritage.

In truth, bravery and boldness very rarely attained the level of these tales. When looking through the mass of historical archives that we have, the most fantastic anecdotes, often drawn from an imagination worthy of the comedy film la Grande Vadrouille (1966), give way to a more brutal history. The story of French wine during the 1940-44 German occupation was in fact a tragedy that we have tried for a very long time to forget.

The chain of events seems to reveal the situation’s ruthless destiny. It shows how a world collapsed, letting itself go to compromise and the basest cowardice. Among all the moral values society had set up at the beginning of the twentieth century, the historian would wear himself out making an inventory of the myriad signs of slavish concessions, incredible greed, covert nastiness and revolting treachery of people entirely obsessed with the sole idea of making huge profits quickly, whatever the cost to their conscience and to the national interest.

This assessment, made by a lot of professionals, did not just apply to the wine trade and for some time now, historians have shown all the ambiguity of people, in particular among the economic and financial milieus (just to remain within the same sector), who hastily converted themselves to the successful New Order.¹ Bearing this in mind, it is important to remember that the defeat the French suffered at the time created a period of extreme turmoil, almost beyond belief for those who lived through it, in which the most modest individuals could suddenly become heroes and the most blameless characters lapse into the most abject cowardice. Here tragedy was at its most cathartic, except that it is not the historian’s job to judge the facts. It is his responsibility, however, since he is in a way a public mentor, to give an account of what happened and to try and explain it. We will not answer the question of whether commercial logic ought to outweigh patriotic considerations, though we do have to show how rapidly the sole law of financial gain spread in those troubled times, without denigrating those who did their work honestly, running their business to a premature and definitive end.

It is therefore easy to understand that the Second World War and the German Occupation of the country were events which reshaped the French winemaking scene and its stability in depth. In these circumstances and from the historical viewpoint, there could be no question of breaking the continuity of what logically preceded it and made it possible; nor could it be treated as wholly incidental in character. At the very opposite end of this idea though, the views of the professionals of the wine trade, and of all those associated with it, generally didn’t adapt to things changing so abruptly, being called into question, or even breaking down.

Time scales in the history of the wine world, which is often very conventional and patiently reinvented by the people involved, are often long and often immemorial, in which traditions thought to be ancestral don’t often match the evocation of crises and wars; these tend to break the harmony of what is expected. In a general way, the obsessional desire of the wine world to want to protect the vineyards from the hazards of the weather and to place them in the perpetuity of a natural, biological and geological order, thought to be better, can’t accept that there are moments of disorder, crisis and questioning. For that reason, the effects of the Second World War and of the Occupation, if they are not disproved, are then often transformed into fleeting moments so as to test that perpetuity which triumphs in the end.

Studying this very particular period depends on both a problem of method and a central historical account.² It is a question of defining and putting into context the place the period has in a long line of eras which people thought of as peculiar and whose effects can be understood sometimes only several decades later, on condition that prevailing opinions are surpassed and sources are totally mastered.

By looking more closely at the winemaking world during the period of the Occupation in order to understand it better, the historian is very quickly confronted with a whole series of restrictions peculiar to those times. The main difficulties immediately appear the moment we choose to try and go beyond the commonly held views that it was a tough period, marked by difficulties and restrictions. It was indeed a question here of difficulties and restrictions because wine production and its trade were entirely plunged into a very strict, administered economy, and upset by countless restrictions and shortages. But as soon as we start investigating the reality of the new economic mechanisms that had been set up, and the scope of the transactions carried out, the obstacles to research become very much more substantial.

The first overall difficulty concerns the interpretations that the people involved made at the time, which naturally gives rise to very consensual and benevolent views. In fact, the Occupation period was thought of everywhere as a moment that was dramatic indeed, but in the end ephemeral; it only upset the organisation in the field without calling into question the sector’s earlier stability. In the end, it was through the courage and abnegation of certain people that a return to normal was possible.³ Thus, in most of the wine regions, it seemed that the whole affair had already been settled for a long time. The stability within the property, the upkeep of the production framework and the surprising permanence of the people with professional, corporation or union responsibilities, bore witness to a period seen as a test for the vineyard and its people: they had known how to keep and tend the reputation and the quality of what they produced. This period of dirigisme, of disorganisation within the commercial circuits and of penury, did not apparently provoke any restructuring in the wine regions, despite the shock brought about by the implementation of the Occupier-imposed quotas and the weight of the new political direction brought in by Vichy. All in all, the evidence shows that the whole thing was best forgotten.

In these circumstances, going against what everybody has understood and recognised and starting to research into those dark (as they are often called) times was not a simple matter; all the more so since a researcher’s curiosity is almost immediately confronted with two weighty obstacles. To the concern of part of this professional sector, worried about maintaining a harmonious image of its history, must be added the strange volatility of the documentation of which, oddly, at the beginning at least, there had been a lot.

The question therefore of the conditions in which the wine trade was exercised and the scope of the activities connected to it, still causes fear today. It was this fear that led certain people in charge to reply with a flat refusal to our requests. Some winegrowers, wine merchants and heads of professional organisations and associations might have been, rightly or wrongly, worried that among their archives there might be some papers that would bear witness to the compromises made in the past by a family member, a predecessor or a colleague who had not really honoured the reputation of their profession.

Even more serious, once all reservations had been removed, the historian could only note, however, how in a lot of cases there was a considerable amount of interference, or how historical documents relating to this period disappeared, or were even destroyed preventively. In particular this concerned documentation covering a company’s accounting, its sales invoicing and its correspondence.

Although a lot of the vintners and most of the wine merchants have not kept any documents bearing witness to their past activity, gaps in the paperwork of several private archives often identify this period in history very clearly. Besides, the reasons for these gaps can be manifold: the documents vanished accidentally, were destroyed during the last weeks of the German Occupation, or were plundered and stolen during the Liberation, or even seized by the judicial authorities in the autumn of 1944.

It also seems that the accounting documents available and the paperwork dealing with the commercial activities of the wine merchants have been made obscure by a patiently organised double accounting system or by encrypting invoices, beneficiaries, quantities, wine types or shipment values. When such a system is applied, it makes the company’s accounting paperwork totally unusable. Although totally illegal, this system was frequently used. The gaps in the paperwork have not always been filled in, even by adding the patchy sources held in the public archives. Measuring the extent of the winemaking activities during the Occupation gets more complicated when the many financial, fiscal or wine transport archives inside and outside the national borders are destroyed, without any copies of these precious documents being made. In these circumstances, other documents have been used to testify to the reality of the wine trade during the period.

The information used for the whole of the following analysis is therefore supported by archives made up mainly of tax documents established by the French administration, firms’ accounting papers, vineyards’ letters, trades union documents and sources from the judicial sector.

CHAPTER ONE

Wine Goes to War

A universal drink under control

By the end of the 1930s, France was completely won over to the cause of wine. The most popular drink for the French population, it had taken pride of place as much in the culture and the memory of the country as it had in the national economy and its legislation.

It became the patriotic drink par excellence during the Great War, elevating plonk to the rank of the drink of victory; it had imposed itself for a long time now as much on the tables of the humblest citizens as it had on those of the more well-off. From an early age at table, children were used to having their water tainted with wine; it has been associated with the daily life of a population accustomed to drinking alcohol, always consuming it in large quantities. From 1930 to 1939, the French were drinking on average 135 litres of wine a year per person, all ages included, to which had to be added the beer, cider, spirits, alcohols and fancy liqueurs of all sorts that were also being drunk. Of course there was a huge gap between fine wines – luxury products which had become appellation d’origine wines since 1919, then appellation d’origine contrôlée wines after 1935, whose prices were out of reach for most consumers – and the more everyday wines, often very ordinary ones, representing more than 80 per cent of French production.

Whatever the quality, for generations wine had been thought of as a natural, hygienic drink full of properties that raised it to the level of a fortifying beverage with undoubted medicinal virtues. The demonstrations several leading experts from the Paris Académie de Médecine made, were relayed by countless authors and journalists and frequently taken up by guides and successful books. In the famous Mon docteur le vin (My Doctor, Wine), a book prefaced by Marshal Philippe Pétain, wine was defined by comments and demonstrations as being indispensable to the character and the vitality of human beings, both for its spiritual and its physical aspects.¹ These writings, considered by the majority of people as incontestable, were part of the economic and political weight of a viticultural sector that could no longer be ignored.

On the eve of the hostilities which struck France, the country counted the unequalled number of 1,305,882 declared winegrowers for an area of 1,874,162 hectares, with a production of 79,397,799 hectolitres. Each year, roughly 60 billion francs were invested in French vineyards and cellars to enable, directly or indirectly, almost 7 million people to live. From the point of view of production alone, the Oran (in Algeria) and Hérault departments alone produced more than 10 million hectolitres of wine yearly, revealing a very unbalanced viticultural geography corresponding to the great wine growing areas of the interwar period. A first group could be made out by gathering together all the Mediterranean vineyards, those in Provence, Languedoc, Roussillon, and including the Algerian vineyards, to reach a total production of 57 million hectolitres in 1939. The South-West with 12 million hectolitres, the Centre with 6 million hectolitres and the West with 2 million hectolitres outdid the Champagne and Burgundy vineyards in sheer production (with only 1.5 million hectolitres) and those in Alsace, Lorraine, the Moselle and the Jura with roughly 800,000 hectolitres.

Yet these figures conceal the development which had marked the history of the French wine regions for several decades. The wine regions had been through repeated crises, including that of oidium (a fungal disease affecting vines) which ruined the French vineyards in 1848-1856, causing production to drop from 45 million hectolitres to just 11 million in 1854. Wine reached unheard of prices for the times. The discovery of a cure in 1856 quickly brought back prosperity; using sulphur got the better of the crisis. Phylloxera then appeared in 1865 and in turn spread, so much so that almost the whole of the French wine producing capacity was destroyed. In the Hérault department, which had produced 15 million hectolitres in 1869, only 2 million hectolitres were harvested in 1885. With the introduction of American vines in the French wine regions, confidence, and very quickly, prosperity, returned. The crisis that started in 1900 resulted from an outburst of fraud and counterfeiting, and from artificial wines invading the market; these wines were mainly made from currants, enabling substitute products to be made in great quantities. The 1905 law, followed by the supplementary 1907 law together with the struggle against fraud, restored law and order and saved the country from a potential civil war. The 1919 law, decreed within the framework of the Paris Conference, which imposed its terms of reference in all the economic clauses of the peace treaties throughout Europe, subsequently launched the era of appellations d’origine, and the recording and identifying of wine real estate, all supervised by the tribunals.

The 1930s wine growing crisis was very different but nonetheless in line with previous ones because of the outcome, and was caused by an increasing imbalance between wine production and consumption that started at the beginning of the century. Although the areas cultivated in France were smaller in the 1930s than at the end of the previous century (a drop of about 25 per cent, despite the spectacular boom in the Algerian vineyards), the continued increase in yield due to improving growing methods, using more productive grape varieties and developing the resistance to vine diseases, kept the wine sector in a situation of widespread overproduction. Also, in spite of the large harvest variations recorded from one year to the next, influenced by more or less favourable atmospheric conditions, the volume of the harvests had been constantly increasing for more than half a century. One of the major causes of this situation originated with the continued boom of the still developing Algerian vineyards; their annual production had quadrupled, jumping from 5 to 21 million hectolitres, to which were added the Tunisian and Moroccan harvests which, by tripling during the same period, reached 1,300,000 and 621,741 hectolitres respectively in 1939. With such growth, offer easily outstripped demand, meaning a steady consumption of about 75 million hectolitres per year, in a viticultural market mainly limited to within the national borders. In these circumstances, as soon as the harvest, that is Metropolitan France and Algeria together, outdid the consumption threshold, the market was seriously unbalanced, as was the case in 1934 and 1935 when the harvest produced a total of 100 and 103 million hectolitres respectively. In such a situation, the vertiginous drop in wine prices threw the wine regions into alarm and despondency. The average prices fluctuated between 2 and 3 francs and even 1.5 francs per degree, which meant ruin for thousands of little producers and revived the ghosts of the dreaded vintners’ rebellion in the Midi of France.

When this serious trend threatening the whole French viticultural economy was taken into account, measures were finally organised to break with the failings of a liberal economy to try and regulate the wine market. This policy could be summed up in a few words: protectionism, dirigisme, Malthusian economics. It concluded by creating a ‘viticultural status’, in particular with the 30 July 1930 law, setting up a ‘social price’ for wine, i.e. a price which paid the sales price asked for by the wine growers, accepted and controlled by the State; it also created a Comité National des Appellations d’origine des vins et des eaux-de-vie (CNAO – the National Committee for the Appellations of Origin for Wines and Spirits), setting up picking bonuses and staggering wine deliveries (by the decree-law of 30 July 1935). The principles the law makers used to guide them were based on reducing production to a level that was compatible with what the domestic and foreign markets could accept, reabsorbing the surpluses by distilling them, regularising what was on offer by stopping then staggering the sales and researching quality so as to create the Appellations d’Origine controlee (AOC) wines.

This viticultural situation was later perfected and therefore maintained activity and production within the limits of what the national market needed, so that the cost and sales price of wine at the property were stabilised. In 1936, all these dispositions were covered by the Code du Vin (wine code). Remodelled several times just before the war, the Code du Vin was codified by the decree dated 27 July 1938, supplemented by the decree-law of 29 July 1939. It acted both on the winemaking production areas by limiting new plantations and replanting operations, and on wine quality, by demanding a minimum composition for selling it on the everyday consumption market, and by taxing excessive yields – based on the volume of what was available by blocking the harvest surpluses and by distilling that part of the surpluses that were considered superfluous.

At the end of the thirties, these dispositions just about enabled the market to be stabilised by keeping the rates at a high enough level for the producers. Once revalorised, the viticultural market and, consequently, the property capital safeguarded the interests of the little vineyards as a matter of priority. In the wineries and in the cellars however, the stocks were still very large. The vineyards producing ordinary wines with big yields survived, buoyed up by regulations as innovatory as they were fragile. It was this essential and very political debate on the social and economic aspects of wine that prevailed within the main intergovernmental organisation dealing with these affairs.

Wine diplomacy under the influence

Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, as the leader of promoting and defending a regulated and planned economic winemaking model, France intended to have its say on international regulations. In the interest of viticultural economies, the country set itself up in a very active political role from 1919 onwards, after the post-war peace treaties were drawn up imposing very precise economic clauses about respecting appellation d’origine wine directives. It was this desire to export its viticultural regulatory model, backed by the need to consolidate and promote harmonisation worldwide, which presided when the Office International de la Vigne et du Vin was created by international agreement on 29 November 1924.

This remarkable creation was an official intergovernmental institution, which satisfied the wishes of many countries and professional organisations, who were looking for somewhere which favoured worldwide debate and reflection on the subject of wine. From the legal point of view, the Office was a centre for meeting, documentation and study on the subject of growing vines, from producing to commercialising its products and by-products, especially wine. In a context marked by the surge of prohibition which had already spread through the United States and Scandinavia, it was now a matter of promoting a common wine diplomacy among all of the big producing countries in Europe above and around the Mediterranean.

According to its statutes, the Office International was tasked with gathering, studying and publishing information that would demonstrate the beneficial effects of wine. It drew up a programme of new scientific experiments indicating what it would be good to undertake in order to ‘demonstrate how hygienic wine was, and its influence in the struggle against alcoholism.’ It showed its member governments ‘the measures to be taken to ensure that viticultural interests and improving international wine market conditions were protected’, once all of the necessary information, such as the wishes and opinions expressed by the academies and learned groups, and the international or other congresses about producing and commercialising wine had been collected. It indicated ‘the international conventions which it would be a good idea to join’. It submitted to the governments ‘all the proposals that, in the interest of both the consumer and the producer, were likely to guarantee the protection of the appellations d’origine of the