The Body That Defines “Champagne” Was Born Under Nazi Occupation

By Ken Wytsma · Researched, fact-checked & verified by the TDIWH Editorial Team.

The word “Champagne” is defended in more than a hundred countries by a single body headquartered in Épernay. It was born in 1941, under German occupation, and its first real job was quiet resistance.

An occupier’s supply office

After the armistice of 1940, Berlin sent a man named Otto Klaebisch to Reims to manage the German thirst for Champagne. He was well chosen for it — born in Cognac, tied to the wine trade before the war — and the locals gave him a nickname that has outlived him: the weinführer. Under his levies, something like fifteen to eighteen million bottles a year flowed to Germany, along with tens of thousands of hectolitres of barrel wine.

In April 1941, a Vichy-era law created the Comité Interprofessionnel du vin de Champagne, the CIVC. On paper it existed to organise this supply under scarcity, allocating quota-only materials and speaking to the Germans with one voice. In practice, that single voice was the point. Where the occupier had been dealing with each house and grower separately, now it had to deal with all of them together.

The man who convened it was Count Robert-Jean de Vogüé, who had run Moët & Chandon since 1930 and created Dom Pérignon. His pitch to the region was blunt: we are all in this together, and we will suffer or survive equally. Alongside him stood Maurice Doyard for the growers.

A committee set up to serve the occupier’s thirst became the growers’ and houses’ united front — and its co-founder went from negotiating with the “weinführer” to a German death cell.

Buying time by the bottle

A united front could not refuse the occupier, but it could slow him down. The committee argued over who supplied whom — the big houses to the Wehrmacht, smaller houses to the bars — and insisted that quality Champagne needed years of cellaring, which turned every consignment into a negotiation and every delay into a small victory. It won “priority factory” status for the region and, by later accounts, secured the release of around seven hundred French prisoners of war judged essential to production.

Underneath the paperwork, the region hid its wine. Growers walled up sections of their chalk cellars and dropped bottles down wells; more than two million bottles were seized in uncontrolled levies even so, and the hidden caches only came to light when the region was liberated in August 1944.

Much of the vivid colour here (champagne watered down for German officers, troop movements guessed from the size of the Wehrmacht’s orders) comes to us through Don and Petie Kladstrup’s Wine and War, and is best read as recounted rather than proven. What the official records do support is the harder core: a levied region, a united committee, and a co-founder who paid for it.

A death cell, then an appellation

In 1943 the Gestapo arrested de Vogüé. By the fullest account he was taken in November, and the charge was resistance; he was condemned to death, then deported into a series of German fortress prisons, Ziegenhain among them, rather than executed. He survived, was liberated in 1945, and went back to rebuild Moët & Chandon into the luxury group it is today. He died in 1976.

The Union des Maisons de Champagne, keeper of the region’s official history, confirms the essential arc: leadership interrupted by arrest and deportation in 1943, a death sentence, a narrow escape from execution. The lurid specifics belong to the memoirists; the sentence and the survival belong to the record.

Here is the part that lands. The institution that today decides who, anywhere on earth, may write “Champagne” on a label began as camouflage under an occupying army. Its founding purpose was to serve the occupier’s thirst. Its real work was to blunt it. The appellation authority you can thank for the word’s meaning was, at the start, a resistance shield.

This day in wine history

• 1940 — After the armistice, Otto Klaebisch is installed at Reims as Germany’s buyer for Champagne; locals call him the “weinführer.”
• 10 April 1941 — Robert-Jean de Vogüé convenes the region’s houses and growers: “We are all in this together.”
• April 1941 — A Vichy-era law creates the CIVC (a completing decree follows in September).
• November 1943 — De Vogüé is arrested by the Gestapo, condemned to death, and deported to German prison camps.
• 1945 — De Vogüé is liberated and returns to lead Moët & Chandon.
• 1976 — Robert-Jean de Vogüé dies; the CIVC he co-founded still governs Champagne.

Frequently asked questions

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For more on wine’s collisions with war and power, see our Turning Points in Wine History collection at This Day in Wine History.

Further reading

As an Amazon Associate, This Day in Wine History earns from qualifying purchases. Book links are affiliate links; cover images are used for identification.

Wine and War: The French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France’s Greatest Treasure
Don and Petie Kladstrup
French vintners protecting their cellars from Nazi occupation and plunder.

Champagne: How the World’s Most Glamorous Wine Triumphed Over War and Hard Times
Don and Petie Kladstrup
How Champagne’s houses endured wars, occupation and hardship to triumph.

Sources

1. Comité Champagne (official), “The Comité Champagne” — founding by the law of April 1941 and its role as custodian of the appellation. champagne.fr
2. “Champagne during WW2: from vines to victory,” Decanter — the 1941 founding, the 10 April meeting, and Klaebisch as “weinführer.” decanter.com
3. Union des Maisons de Champagne, “The Second World War” — the founding instruments, the levy figures, and de Vogüé’s death sentence and deportation. maisons-champagne.com
4. Union des Maisons de Champagne, biography of Robert-Jean de Vogüé — CIVC 1941, arrest 1943, deportation to a fortress (Ziegenhain), liberation 1945. maisons-champagne.com
5. Don & Petie Kladstrup, Wine and War (2001) — the standard narrative of the arrest, death sentence and deportation (colourful details attributed here). goodreads.com

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