Wine and the Nazi Occupation of France

When Germany overran France in June 1940, it coveted not only the country’s factories and farms but its cellars. Within a fortnight of the invasion the plunder of French wine had begun — and what followed was a strange, four-year contest of greed and guile: German “wine leaders” requisitioning by the trainload, and French growers walling up their treasures, ageing the fresh plaster with spiders’ webs, and fobbing off the conqueror with their worst. It ended with a French sergeant blowing open Hitler’s private cellar¹. (Part of the great turning points in wine history.)

France falls, and the thirst arrives

The German victory of 1940 left most of France under occupation or the collaborationist Vichy regime, and its celebrated vineyards fell within the occupier’s reach. Wine was both a luxury the German elite craved and a valuable asset the Reich could seize — and France, the greatest wine country on earth, was now at its mercy¹.

The weinführers: wine merchants in uniform

To organise the plunder methodically rather than let soldiers simply loot, Berlin appointed a wine buyer to each great region — men the French nicknamed weinführers. Tellingly, they were not soldiers but wine merchants who had traded with France for years, and who now returned in uniform to buy and requisition on a colossal scale for the German market and military². For more, see Acker, America’s oldest wine shop.

Champagne under the boot

Champagne was a special prize, demanded by the millions of bottles — Klaebisch’s opening order alone ran to some twelve million in half a year. The pressure was so relentless that in 1941 the region’s growers and houses were forced to organise collectively to deal with him, creating the body that became the Comité Champagne — an institution that, ironically, helped Champagne emerge from the war stronger and more united than before³.

Bordeaux and the enemy who owned a château

Bordeaux’s weinführer embodied the war’s awkward intimacies. Heinz Bömers was a Bremen wine importer who had dealt in Bordeaux for decades — and whose own family owned Château Smith Haut Lafitte, a respected Graves estate. He set up on the Bordeaux quays and brokered the wine trade between the growers and the Reich, a German buyer who knew the region’s cellars better than almost anyone⁴.

Plunder from the top

The appetite reached the summit of the Reich. The foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, had himself been a wine and spirits merchant before politics — he had married into the Henkell sparkling-wine family — and senior Nazis coveted the greatest French labels. Beyond the official requisitions, the finest private cellars were marked for outright looting by the regime’s elite⁵.

The vignerons fight back

The growers resisted with cunning worthy of a spy novel. They built false walls across their cellars and aged the new brickwork with cobwebs and grime so it looked untouched, hiding their greatest vintages behind them. They sent the Germans their most mediocre wine in grand bottles, deliberately misdirected shipments — routing Champagne to Homburg instead of Hamburg — and even dusted inferior wine with carpet grit to give it a false air of dignified age⁶.

They walled up their treasure, aged the plaster with spiders’ webs, and toasted the conqueror with their worst.— on the vignerons’ quiet resistance⁶

Some went much further than trickery. Cellars and the wine trade hid Jewish refugees and smuggled Resistance fighters across the demarcation line inside wine barrels, and growers sabotaged the trains carrying wine east. The cellar became a theatre of the Resistance.

The sergeant who found Hitler’s cellar

The story’s most cinematic chapter came at the very end. Bernard de Nonancourt — a young Resistance fighter from a Champagne family, serving in General Leclerc’s 2nd Armoured Division — reached Hitler’s mountain retreat, the Kehlsteinhaus or “Eagle’s Nest,” above Berchtesgaden in 1945⁷.

Blowing open the steel doors of the private cellar, his men found some half a million bottles — among them cases of the magnificent 1928 Salon Champagne, looted from France in 1940. De Nonancourt survived the war, went on to run the house of Laurent-Perrier for over half a century, and eventually bought Salon itself — a remarkable closing of the circle⁸.

Liberation and legacy

When France was liberated in 1944–45, hidden hoards emerged from behind their false walls, and vast quantities of looted French wine were recovered from German hands⁹.

The vineyards had survived, the buried vintages came home, and the wartime ordeal hardened into one of French wine’s proudest legends — a story of endurance, ingenuity and quiet defiance that the great houses still tell today¹⁰.

Frequently asked questions

Read more

• Wine through crisis and conflict
• The Dutch merchant fleet and wine
• Wine and the French state

References

1. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Vichy France. www.britannica.com ↩
2. Don & Petie Kladstrup — Wine and War: The French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France’s Greatest Treasure. www.donandpetiekladstrup.com ↩
3. Comité Champagne — the wines of Champagne. www.champagne.fr ↩
4. Revue Far Ouest — Le vin de Bordeaux et les nazis. www.revue-farouest.fr ↩
5. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Joachim von Ribbentrop. www.britannica.com ↩
6. Encyclopaedia Britannica — French Resistance. www.britannica.com ↩
7. UPI — Frenchman Who Found Hitler’s Wine Dies. www.upi.com ↩
8. VinePair — 11 Things You Should Know About Champagne Laurent-Perrier. vinepair.com ↩
9. Encyclopaedia Britannica — World War II. www.britannica.com ↩
10. Imperial War Museums — the occupation of France. www.iwm.org.uk ↩

Recommended reading

Wine and War
Don & Petie Kladstrup
The definitive, gripping account of French wine under the Nazi occupation.

Vintage: The Story of Wine
Hugh Johnson
Sets the wartime years within wine’s longer history.

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