Blitzed: Wine, the Nazis, and Hermann Goering’s Prized Cellar

When Hitler’s armies overran France in 1940⁶, they came for its gold, its art — and its wine. To the French, their greatest cellars were nothing less than the heart and soul of the nation, and the battle to save them became a hidden war of false walls, watered bottles and quiet sabotage, waged against a Reich whose leaders — Hermann Göring above all — meant to drink France dry¹.

The weinführers

The Reich’s campaign against French wine was strikingly organised. Germany appointed a handful of German wine merchants — nicknamed weinführers, or “wine leaders” — and sent them into the great regions to buy and requisition wine for Germany, often at rock-bottom prices¹.

There was a strange twist to it: several of these men had done business in France before the war and knew the growers personally, and some quietly softened the plunder they were sent to carry out¹. Even the collaborationist Vichy regime understood that France’s vineyards were part of its identity, and it worked to keep the Nazis from outright seizing the Jewish-owned estates of Mouton-Rothschild and Lafite-Rothschild³. (See also: wine under the Nazi occupation.)

Hiding the best

The growers fought back with cunning rather than guns. Across France, families walled up their finest bottles behind hastily built partitions, then aged the new brickwork with grime and draped it in fresh cobwebs so it looked untouched for decades⁵.

They hid their greatest bottles behind false walls and a curtain of fresh cobwebs.— the French growers under Occupation⁵

They sent the Germans their thinnest, dullest wine while spiriting the treasures away; they mislabelled bottles, buried caches, and slowed deliveries with a thousand small excuses. It was a quiet, daily resistance, waged cellar by cellar, to keep the soul of French wine out of German hands.

Göring’s thirst

Presiding over the greed was Hermann Göring, Hitler’s second-in-command and the most notorious looter of the age².

Göring stripped occupied Europe of paintings and treasures on an industrial scale, and wine was very much part of the haul. He amassed an enormous private cellar of looted French bottles — the finest Bordeaux, Burgundy and Champagne — to stock his palatial homes and his private train. For the Nazi elite, drinking France’s greatest wines was not just a pleasure but a statement: the conquest of France, poured into a glass.

Liberation and the reckoning

The reckoning came in 1945. As the Reich collapsed, Allied troops — including French and American units — pushed into Hitler’s mountain redoubt at Berchtesgaden and its Eagle’s Nest, and there they found the Nazi leaders’ hoards⁴.

Among the plunder were tens of thousands of bottles of looted wine, including French treasures Göring had spirited east — and, in a fitting irony, much of Hitler’s own vast collection. Soldiers who had fought across a continent toasted victory with the very wine the Nazis had stolen, and in the months that followed a great deal of France’s pillaged heritage was tracked down and brought home¹. The battle for the cellars, fought so quietly for four years, had been won.

Frequently asked questions

Read more

• Wine and the Christmas Truce of 1914
• Rationing of wine in World War I
• Why champagne is connected to wealth

References

1. Don & Petie Kladstrup, Wine and War: The French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France’s Greatest Treasure — via Publishers Weekly. ↑
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Hermann Göring. ↑
3. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Vichy France. ↑
4. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Berchtesgaden. ↑
5. IntoWine — Wine and War (Don and Petie Kladstrup). ↑
6. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Battle of France (1940). ↑

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