Wine And War: The French, The Nazis And The Battle For France's Greatest Treasure Part 3

Although there was no mention of Alsace in the armistice agreement, the region was annexed outright on August 7 and everything French was outlawed. Street signs were changed to German, Hugel et Fils became Hgel und Shne and the wearing of berets was forbidden. "If you even said bonjour, you could go to a concentration camp," Andre's brother Johnny recalled. A cousin of the Hugels did, in fact, get sent to a camp when he refused to sign a statement saying he was of Germanic origin.

"You had to obey the rules, there was no alternative," Andre said. "In order to go on to high school, I had to join the Hitler Youth." Brothers Johnny and Georges faced a grimmer prospect: they had to join the German army.

Georges was the first, because he was the oldest. It was not a happy moment, "but I did what I had to," said Georges. "I was afraid my family might get sent to a camp. I saw some other guys run away and their families were sent to Poland."

Unlike others, the people of Alsace had little confidence in Marshal Petain. "He was a weak man," Georges said. "Sure, he was the 'hero of Verdun' and all that, but he was weak. The only reason soldiers liked him is that they thought there was less chance of being killed when he was in charge; that was because he never did much. A lot of officers felt he needed a good kick in the pants."

Now that they were part of Germany again, the Hugels had to figure out how to keep their wine business running and, as Papa Hugel said, "adapt to the new economic situation." In one respect, it was not terribly complicated: Germany was the only customer. "All of our wine, like everyone else's, was blocked by the Germans," Andre said. "We could not sell to our traditional customers like Great Britain; we could only sell to Germany and at prices the Germans set." The Germans, he said, may not have stolen their wine in the usual sense, "but they did steal it legally and ma.s.sively. They emptied Alsace of its wine."

Madame Marie Hugel, however, had more immediate concerns. Three weeks after the annexation, she was told to report to German headquarters. No one was sure why, although it was no secret that authorities were upset about Monsieur Hugel's refusal to join the n.a.z.i Party. Letters and notices had been sent urging residents of Riquewihr to join, but Monsieur Hugel had steadfastly ignored them. Now there were rumors that their business might be closed and that the family could be deported.

"My mother was frightened," Andre said. "She did not know what to expect."

When she arrived at headquarters, an officer informed her that her loyalty to Germany was in question. "We are aware that you always speak French to your children," the German said. "Why do you hate Germans?"

Madame Hugel, momentarily taken aback, quickly recovered. "What do you mean?" she asked. "How can you say I hate Germans? My own brother is German, and I also have two sons who are about to fight for your Fhrer!"

Her response caught the officer by surprise, but he seemed satisfied. A few minutes later, he excused her. As she turned to go, the German stopped her and added a gentle warning. "Madame, we are the Wehrmacht; we are not the bad ones and you shall have no further trouble from us, but once the yellows come, it will be awful."

He was referring to the Gestapo.

No one, in those first few weeks, personified the pain of defeat more than Gaston Huet. When German troops arrived at his bunker, he and his men surrendered immediately. At gunpoint, they were ordered to stand up and start walking, "but a very courteous officer told us not to worry, that we would be released soon," Huet said.

He and his men were marched from Calais into Belgium. With each pa.s.sing mile, more and more prisoners joined the column. At Bastogne, they were herded into railway cars used for hauling cattle to slaughter.

"We were completely exhausted," Huet said. "We had walked more than two hundred miles and had become just machines, no longer able to think." There had been little food, just a bit of bread, and the water was tainted. Dead animals, killed in battles that had raged there, lay everywhere. "We knew they would pollute the water in ditches, which was the only water we had to drink," Huet said. Once in a while, he and his men found rhubarb along the road and mixed it in to make the water taste better, but "there was always the smell of the stable." Everyone became ill.

As they neared the German border, the size of their column had mushroomed. It now numbered in the thousands. "I was stunned," Huet said. "The sheer number of French soldiers taken prisoner was amazing; it was something I never imagined."

Although Huet still held out a flicker of hope Allied forces might rescue them, those hopes vanished when they crossed into Germany. On June 17, three weeks after their capture, they entered Oflag IV D, a prisoner-of-war camp for officers in Silesia, where they would spend the next five years.

"The moment I saw that place," said Huet, "I knew right away the war was over for me."

THREE.

The Weinfhrers WHILE THE WAR WAS OVER FOR HUET AND OTHER POWs, it was only beginning on another front-the wine front.

Wine was the one commodity the German leaders.h.i.+p was intimately connected with-personally, professionally and socially.

Men like Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and former Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen, now amba.s.sador to Austria, had come to n.a.z.i posts directly from the wine trade. So had military leaders including Captain Ernst Khnemann, commander of the port of Bordeaux and a wine merchant who had spent a great deal of time in the region before the war. General Moritz von Faber du Faur, the senior officer in Bordeaux, was a leading economist who also had a special interest in wine.

Others in the n.a.z.i top bra.s.s such as Field Marshal Gring and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels prided themselves on their knowledge of wine and possessed vast collections. Whereas Goebbels's tastes ran to fine Burgundy, Gring preferred great Bordeaux, especially Chteau Lafite-Rothschild. According to Albert Speer, an architect who served as the Third Reich's Minister for Armaments and Munitions, few things gave Gring more pleasure than sitting down late at night and uncorking a great bottle of Lafite-Rothschild. Speer said the only time he ever got close to Gring as a person was when the field marshal shared a special bottle of Lafite with him.

Foreign Minister Ribbentrop was a great lover of champagne, a taste he acquired when he represented the champagne houses of Mumm and Pommery in Germany. He had made a fortune in the wine trade after wooing, then marrying Anneliese Henkel, daughter of Otto Henkel, "the king of German champagne." (Henkel was Germany's largest sparkling wine producer, although the "wine" he made reportedly was nothing more than apple juice "juiced up" by a team of engineers in Hamburg.) With the fortune he made-and married-Ribbentrop had no trouble financing his political ambitions. To add a whiff of aristocracy to his lineage, he styled himself Joachim von Ribbentrop. His veneer of charm and elegance soon caught the attention of Hitler, who took him to meet President Paul von Hindenburg. Hindenburg, a real von, was not impressed. "Spare me your little champagne peddler," he told Hitler. But Hitler was impressed. He considered Ribbentrop "greater than Bismarck," and believed he was the ideal person to oversee the Armistice Commission, the body responsible for establis.h.i.+ng Germany's economic policy for France.

About the only one in the top leaders.h.i.+p who was not interested in wine was the Fhrer himself. After one taste of a great French wine, Hitler is reported to have pushed it away, calling it "nothing but vulgar vinegar."

Historians, however, are divided over the extent of Hitler's asceticism. While some say he did not drink at all, others claim he frequently drank beer and diluted wine. "His asceticism," according to Hitler biographer Robert Payne, "was a fiction invented by Goebbels to emphasize his total dedication, his self-control, the distance that separated him from other men."

This did not make for very enjoyable evenings when Hitler got his entourage together in front of the jade-green fireplace at the Fhrer's house at Berchtesgaden. As Speer wrote, "To animate these rather barren evenings, sparkling wine was handed around and, after the occupation of France, confiscated champagne of a cheap brand; Gring and his air marshals had appropriated the best brands. From one o'clock on, some members of the company, in spite of all their efforts to control themselves, could no longer repress their yawns. But the social occasion dragged on in monotonous, wearying emptiness for another hour or more, until at last Eva Braun had a few words with Hitler and was permitted to go upstairs. Hitler would stand up about a quarter of an hour later, to bid his company goodnight. Those who remained, liberated, often followed those numbing hours with a gay party over champagne and cognac."

Ascetic or not, when Hitler looked at the men surrounding him, he quickly understood how prestigious and profitable wine could be. He decided that Germany should obtain the very best of France's wines, and Gring quickly seconded the motion, telling occupation commissioners that France was "fattened with such good food that it is shameful." He admonished the Reich's soldiers in France to "transform yourselves into a pack of hunting dogs, and always be on the lookout for what will be useful to the people of Germany."

To get the best wine, however, the n.a.z.i leaders.h.i.+p did not want a pack; it wanted pointers, men who knew not only wine but also the people who made and sold it. So the Reich's economic planners turned directly to the German wine trade, creating a corps of what some called "wine merchants in uniform."

The French had another name for them: the weinfhrers.

Their job as Beauftragter fr den Weinimport Frankreich (agents for importing wines from France) was to buy as much good French wine as possible and send it back to Germany, where it would be resold internationally for a huge profit to help pay for the Third Reich's war.

To do the selecting and buying, the Third Reich decided to send Otto Klaebisch of Mattes-Mller, a sparkling wine producer and Germany's agent for several champagne houses, to Champagne. Adolph Segnitz, head of A. Segnitz and Company and Germany's agent for the Domaine de la Romanee-Conti, went to Burgundy. The most important of them all, Heinz Bmers, who headed Germany's largest wine importing firm, Reidemeister & Ulrichs, was a.s.signed to Bordeaux.

German authorities, however, had made a mistake. The weinfhrers were, indeed, wine merchants and wine experts, but they were much more than that. They also were friends of many French wine producers and merchants. Their connection through generations of doing business together had long since transcended commercial matters; they had trained in each other's firms and spoke each other's language fluently. They were even G.o.dfathers to each other's children.

The weinfhrers also were keenly aware of something Maurice Drouhin stressed to his son at the beginning of the war: "One day, whether in five months or in five years, this war will be over, and France will still be next to Germany. We will still have to live together."

Heinz Bmers was late, and his children could hardly believe it. Their father was never, ever late, nor would he permit them to be, especially for family events like the regular Sunday afternoon game of croquet.

When Bmers finally emerged from the house, he apologized, explaining that he had been listening to the news on the radio. It was September 3, 1939, and he had just heard that Britain and France had declared war on Germany. Ushering his older son, Heinz Jr., away from the other children, Bmers said, "I expect to be called into the army soon, and then I don't know if I will be able to speak to you again privately, so I will tell you today that we have lost this war. Don't speak about this with anybody, not with your brothers and sisters, and especially not with your friends at school. It would be dangerous for the whole family." Before Heinz Jr. could reply, his father added, "It is important to me that you understand how I feel. I want you to be prepared for what is ahead."

Although Heinz Jr. was only thirteen years old then, he never forgot that moment. "I have always had in my heart these words and his conviction that Germany would lose. My father told me the United States surely would come in to help the British. He felt that Germany, even though it was very powerful at that moment, could never defeat a country as big as the United States."

At the time, the family was at its summer house near Bremen. Bmers looked around wistfully as they closed up the house that weekend to return home. "I don't know if we will have the opportunity to come back here next year," he said to his family. His concerns were well founded; they would not return for seven years.

When the Bmerses arrived home, an unexpected visitor was there to greet them. It was the headmaster of young Heinz's school. "Please help me, Herr Bmers," he pleaded. "Your son is the only student in our school who does not belong to a n.a.z.i organization. If you do not let him join one, there will be many problems for the school." Bmers had consistently refused to sign papers enrolling his son in the Hitler Youth, so he asked what other n.a.z.i groups were part of the school. The headmaster gave him a list, and Bmers noted the school orchestra among them. "How often does the orchestra rehea.r.s.e?" he asked. When he was told that it met three times a week, he said, "All right. Heinz plays the flute, so he will join the orchestra."

After the headmaster had left with the signed papers, Bmers told his son that he should go to practice only once a week. "If anyone gives you trouble and says you must go more often, you tell them you are obeying your father and they must talk to me." No one ever did.

The Bmers family already had a reputation for disagreeing with the n.a.z.is, and especially with Hermann Gring. In 1930, Gring had been prime minister of the German state of Middle Saxony when Bmers's father was a senator from Bremen. Senator Bmers had made no effort to conceal his contempt for Gring and his politics, and when the prime minister came to Bremen, Bmers refused to see him. Gring was incensed and did not forget the slight.

Four years later, after Senator Bmers's death, Heinz Bmers was told he would lose the family business unless he became a member of the n.a.z.i Party. Reluctantly, Bmers joined. "He had to think of his family, to protect them," Heinz Jr. said. "He had to make compromises and I know he suffered from that. But he was always convinced the n.a.z.i time was a temporary time, so you had to do all you could to survive."

That is why when Bmers, forty-seven, who had been excused from active military duty for health reasons, received a cable in May 1940 from the German Ministry of the Economy offering him the job of Beauftragter in Bordeaux, he agreed to go. "It was a job he could have refused, I think," Heinz Jr. said, "but I think he felt that this was someplace where he could help, could make things easier for everybody. He had many, many friends in Bordeaux."

Bmers accepted the job on several conditions: that he not be paid by the n.a.z.is and would pay his own way; that he be free to change as many marks into francs as he wished; that he not be required to wear a uniform; and that he have the authority to "step in" if he felt the actions of German troops were inappropriate. "He was afraid that some of these n.a.z.is, like Gring, would like to have some very nice old Mouton-Rothschilds, and he could imagine that some of the soldiers would think they should just pick them up for him," Heinz Jr. said.

Bmers arrived in Bordeaux just after the armistice was signed. In a way, it was like a homecoming. Prior to World War I, his family had owned Chteau Smith-Haut-Lafitte and made wine there until the French government confiscated it along with other German-owned property. In the years that followed, Bmers, working from his offices in Bremen, imported French wines and developed a close relations.h.i.+p with key producers.

So for many Bordelais, his arrival in 1940 posed a cruel dilemma: their old friend and business colleague now represented the enemy. To allay fears, one of Bmers's first acts as weinfhrer was to call wine people together and rea.s.sure them he was still their friend. "Let us try to continue our business as normally as possible," he said, "but when I leave one day, I hope you will have better stocks of wine than you have now." It was his way of telling them that he had their interests at heart and that when the war was over, he hoped to continue doing business with them.

"He came around and said h.e.l.lo to all of us," said May-Eliane Miailhe de Lencquesaing. "Of course, we all knew him from before the war, when he would come here, so we said to him, 'As long as you are not wearing a uniform, you may come over in the evening and have dinner with us as usual.' "

Nevertheless, many Bordelais were apprehensive. "Bmers was a very powerful man," said Jean-Henri Schler of Chteau Kirwan. "If you did not want to sell him your wine, he could order you to do so."

Even Daniel Lawton, who had trained in the Bmers firm in Bremen and who ran one of Bordeaux's oldest brokerage houses, got a taste of Bmers's temper. When he heard Bmers's demands for wine and the prices the Germans would pay, Lawton had no hesitation about standing up to Bmers and refusing.

Bmers was incensed. Glaring at Lawton, he warned, "If you don't agree to sell us wine on our terms, there will be sentries with bayonets in front of all Bordeaux cellars tomorrow!"

"Go right ahead, do it," Lawton replied.

It didn't happen. Bordeaux wine merchants, however, had little or no alternative but to deal with Bmers. "We could no longer sell our wines to Great Britain or the United States," said Schler. "It was all closed up. We had a choice: we could sell our wines to the Germans or we could throw them into the Gironde River."

Hugues Lawton, whose father had defied Bmers, agreed. "You had to deal with a situation you did not want. Once you are defeated, you have to do what you are told."

Although many Bordelais considered Bmers tough, even autocratic, they respected him. They had been worried he would go after Bordeaux's finest wines, treasures that one producer said const.i.tuted an "inestimable museum of wine." Another worried aloud, "Will this integral part of French civilization be confiscated, pillaged, sent with the Renoirs, the Matisses, the Georges de La Tours to the other side of the Rhine?"

Bmers vowed that would not happen, even though his overlords in Germany were putting heavy pressure on him.

Instead, he did the Bordelais a favor: he relieved them of ma.s.sive stocks of poor-quality wine that had acc.u.mulated after the harvests of the 1930s. One of his purchases alone amounted to the equivalent of a million bottles.

Bmers did most of his business with negociants, wine merchants who bought wine in bulk from growers, bottled it and then resold it. One of them was Louis Eschenauer, whose firm had specialized in exporting to Germany long before the war. "Uncle Louis," as he was called, was almost as famous for his close friends.h.i.+ps with German leaders such as Ribbentrop as he was for his outstanding knowledge of wine. Eschenauer, who was seventy when Bordeaux was occupied, had done extensive business with all of the German leaders as well as Heinz Bmers during the prewar years and his business now, as a result, was flouris.h.i.+ng. "Eschenauer was one of my father's best friends," Heinz Jr. said, "and I know he worked with him a lot, tasting wines together and choosing wines to buy."

But Eschenauer was only one of many negociants who were competing for Bmers's attention and trying to grab as much of his business as they could. According to Bmers's secretary, Gertrude Kircher, the behavior of the Bordeaux wine establishment ranged from "absolute commercial cynicism to absolute toadyism. It was embarra.s.sing how they bowed and sc.r.a.ped to him." They threw big parties, one after another, and did everything they could to get the weinfhrer to attend. "They would call up and tell me the names of all the other important people who had been invited," Kircher said. "They told me what they planned to serve, what was on the menu; they pretended they wanted to talk to my boss about German music and literature. Herr Bmers found it all ridiculous."

Bmers had his own shopping list and list of suppliers. He preferred working with the old connections he and his family had established over the years, people like the Miailhes, who owned several chteaux and vineyards around Bordeaux.

"He was a very honest man," May-Eliane Miailhe de Lencquesaing said. "My parents used to tell me, 'Thanks to Mr. Bmers, we still have our wine.' He tried his best to keep a good balance, not to make the Germans angry and to take care of his French friends."

But it was sometimes a dangerous job. According to Jean-Henri Schler, "Bmers had to walk a tightrope. It was a bit of a double game he had to play."

Helping him play it was a merchant named Roger Descas, Vichy's representative to the German Economic Service Headquarters in Paris. Like Louis Eschenauer, Descas was an old friend of Bmers. He was also the man with whom Bmers negotiated wine prices and quotas. Descas, however, was at a disadvantage. If he set prices too high, he risked sparking inflation or even worse, retaliation from the German authorities. On the other hand, if prices were too low, French wine producers would be in an uproar.

Bmers understood, and sympathized. "I have an idea," the weinfhrer said in a phone call to Descas. "Why don't you meet me for dinner. I'll explain everything when I see you."

The two met that evening at La Cremaillere, one of Paris's top restaurants. There, as they dined on filet de boeuf en crote and turbot en sauce champagne, Bmers outlined what he had in mind. "It requires a bit of acting," he said. "You and I will meet here the evening before we are scheduled to appear at the economic offices; we'll work out all the details and decide then how much wine I can buy and what you should be paid for it. The next morning, however, when we present our cases, we'll pretend to get into an argument, one which hopefully will dispel any notion that we are in collusion."

Descas did not have to think about it for long. "Let's do it," he said to Bmers.

When the two men arrived at the Htel Majestic, where the German economic offices were located, they went through the usual formalities. Each gave a short speech stating what he thought was fair. Then the real show started. Bmers accused Descas of trying to squeeze him and demanded that he lower his prices. Descas argued that the prices were fair and said it was the weinfhrer who was doing the squeezing. Bmers pretended to fly into a rage and the argument became more heated. Finally, by the end of the morning, the two reached an agreement on a set of figures. They were the very figures they had worked out the night before.

"This worked very well," Heinz Jr. said. "My father said the government representatives usually accepted his figures the first time and were satisfied he was getting the best deal."

But not always. On several occasions, Bmers was called to Paris to answer complaints that he was being too friendly with the French wine merchants.

Those meetings, however, were nothing compared with those he faced when he was summoned, on three occasions, to Gring's office in Berlin. There, Bmers got the full brunt of the field marshal's fury.

"It was frightening," Bmers later recalled. "He said I was being too cozy with the French wine trade and practically accused me of treason. I told him, 'If you are not satisfied with my work, I will finish and go home.' But he knew I was an expert on Bordeaux wine and the best man for the job, so finally he did not do anything. But I cannot tell you how very disagreeable and even terrifying those meetings were."

Twice a year, Bmers was given leave to return to Germany and spend time with his family. When he went back for Christmas in 1941, there had been a dramatic change: Britain's Royal Air Force was making nightly bombing raids over Germany and the United States had just entered the war. Even worse, Hitler had launched a "war of annihilation" against the Soviet Union, an offensive he predicted would be over in six weeks. It had now been six months, and no end was in sight. The Russian winter had set in and German troops, stretched thin to begin with, were dying in the paralyzing cold.

These events convinced Bmers more than ever that Germany would lose the war, and he moved his family to Bavaria, where he hoped it would be safer. "Every day you would hear that this young boy or that one, someone you knew very well, was killed," Heinz Jr. said. "It was terrible. Every night we heard the bombers going to Munich, where my two sisters were attending the university. Terrible, terrible. Even now when I try to explain this, well, it is something you just can't explain, but we had to live with it."

The following summer, on his next visit home, Bmers was told that his brother-in-law, a Lutheran pastor, had been arrested after the SS discovered he was saying a prayer for Jews at the end of each service. "My mother was distraught; she was very close to her brother, so she asked my father to try to help," Heinz said.

Bmers went to the SS headquarters in Berlin to plead for him. The officer in charge told him to "speak his piece." When Bmers had finished, the officer said, "Okay, are you done now? Because I want to tell you something. We know your brother-in-law is a good German; we know about all the medals he won in World War I. But he is not a good n.a.z.i. He deserves the death penalty."

Bmers returned from the meeting so badly shaken that he could not even remember what he had said to the SS officer. The officer, however, eventually agreed to release the brother-in-law, sending him to work in the post office and forbidding him to continue in his pastoral duties. "You are lucky," the officer told Bmers. "I should have sent him to a concentration camp."

"My father hated the n.a.z.is," Heinz Jr. said. "He was absolutely anti-Hitler and considered him a criminal."

But Bmers reserved a special loathing for Gring. He regarded him as a pretentious thug whose evil was matched only by his greed. It was Gring he was thinking of when he told the Bordelais that if any Germans, regardless of their rank or position, ever approached them and demanded their wine, they should call him immediately and he would come and put a stop to it. "That happened, absolutely that happened," Heinz Jr. said. "He took his car and went out-I am not sure where this was-and ordered the troops to leave immediately. And they did."

But Bmers could not be everywhere, and there were always those who conspired to get around the system. Working with French merchants who illegally cut their prices, some German officers, with no papers or official authorization, would drive their military trucks directly up to the vineyards and haul away ma.s.sive amounts of wine.

Bmers suspected Gring was behind many of these incidents. He was sure the field marshal wanted to get his hands on as many bottles of great wine as possible. On one occasion, Bmers received an order from Gring for several cases of wine from Chteau Mouton-Rothschild. "Mouton is too good for the likes of him," Bmers thought, so he asked workers at the chteau, one of the few which did its own bottling, to help with a bit of deception. The weinfhrer sent them bottles of vin ordinaire and instructed them to glue on Mouton labels. The workers were only too happy to comply. The bottles of wine were then s.h.i.+pped to Gring's office in Berlin. Bmers never heard a word of complaint from the field marshal.

There was, however, a limit to how far the weinfhrer would go. When a group of negociants suggested the German leaders.h.i.+p would never know the difference if he bought cheap wine from the Midi rather than their grands crus to fill orders, Bmers was furious. A few bottles to deceive his nemesis was one thing; a wholesale scam which could compromise his professional reputation was quite another. Most of the Bordelais seemed to respect that.

Hardly any of them considered him a n.a.z.i. Bmers confessed to one producer that he was thrilled to be able to "throw away his uniform" and do business in his usual way. "He did as little as possible to harm the wine trade," one merchant said. Even British wine authority Harry Waugh, who dealt extensively with wine producers in Bordeaux both before and after the occupation, described Bmers as "sympathetic."

Others went much further. "He saved our wine," May-Eliane Miailhe de Lencquesaing said. "He made sure no one had to sell too much wine, and he made sure it was always paid for. After he came, no more wine was stolen."

In late October 1940, shortly after arriving in Beaune, Adolph Segnitz, the newly appointed weinfhrer of Burgundy, received an unsigned note. "Please be advised," it said, "that some here are trying to cheat you. They are hiding their best wines and selling you wines that are not so good."

A few days later, Segnitz summoned winegrowers to a meeting. Holding up the note, he informed them, "I have something here that I would like to read to you." When he had finished, there was an awkward silence. Some in the audience squirmed nervously in their seats. After several seconds, Segnitz continued, "Now I wish to tell you something. For me, this note means nothing. As far as I am concerned, it does not exist." With that, he tore it up. The relief was almost tangible.

"He hated turncoats," said Mademoiselle Yvonne Tridon, secretary for the Syndicat des Negociants en Vins Fins de Bourgogne. "He didn't approve of French turning in French."

Growers who had been listening to Segnitz considered him a man of honor with whom they could do business. "He never threatened us or accused anyone of trying to cheat," said Beaune negociant and winemaker Louis Latour. "He was the only German we could talk to because he was from our world."

Segnitz's family ran a wine firm in Bremen which had been importing fine French wines since its founding in 1859. A few years before World War II, Adolph Segnitz took over A. Segnitz and Company and began specializing in Burgundy. He was fascinated by the land, its history and culture, and he especially loved the wines that were produced there.

"He was a real Francophile," recalled Mademoiselle Tridon. "We never thought of him as a stranger or foreigner because he was always coming by. He worked well with people here and no one was afraid of him."

Segnitz was in his sixties when n.a.z.i officials offered him the job of Beauftragter in Burgundy. Like his friend Heinz Bmers in Bordeaux, he despised the n.a.z.is and did not relish working for them. He agreed to do so, however, on condition that he be given a free hand to do his job and that Berlin would not interfere. "My father was very clear about that," his son Hermann said. "He was determined to be completely independent."

From the beginning, Segnitz tried to a.s.sure the Burgundy wine community that he understood their problems and sympathized with the hards.h.i.+ps caused by the occupation. "But let us work together and try to make the best of things so that we have something when this war is finished," he said. Segnitz promised there would be no strong-arm tactics and that winegrowers could decide for themselves if they wished to do business with him. "I am here to buy wine," he said. "If you wish to sell your wine to me, fine, but I shall not force you to sell."

One of those who chose not to was Maison Louis Latour. "My grandfather absolutely refused to deal with any German wine merchant after World War I," said his grandson Louis. "Germany had been a major market for us before the war but my grandfather was so upset that he vowed he would never do business with anyone from Germany again." Grandfather Latour died shortly after Segnitz arrived but his son had the same att.i.tude. "My father liked Segnitz personally but he was just like my grandfather and refused to sell him any wine," Louis said. Segnitz accepted it and did not try to force him.

Although Segnitz came to Burgundy "with a lot of money in his pocket," there was not much wine for him to buy. Harvests between 1939 and 1941 had been minuscule. The weather had been awful, with the early summers too dry, followed by days of heavy rain and sometimes hail. In 1939, which was mediocre at best, there were so few grapes to pick that the harvest took ten days instead of the usual two or three weeks. Even if the growing season had been perfect, the situation would have been difficult because most of the young men who picked the grapes had been mobilized into the army.

In 1940 conditions were even worse. This time, the harvest took only three days. Because grapes had not fully ripened, winemakers wanted to chaptalize, or add sugar to their wine to boost its alcoholic strength, but that was impossible because of a sugar shortage. It was also difficult for winemakers to clarify their wine-that is, to remove the particulate matter that often makes red wine cloudy. Normally clarifying, or fining, was done by adding egg white, which clings to the tiny particles and drags them to the bottom. Eggs, however, were even more scarce than sugar. As a result, many winemakers had to resort to what their fathers and grandfathers did. They used charcoal to fine their wines.

According to the Marquis d'Angerville, one of Burgundy's leading winemakers, "Our wine was so bad in 1940 that we did not bother vinifying; we just poured it into the ground."

The following year was not much better. Most able-bodied men who would have been working the vineyards were now in German prisoner-of-war camps. In addition, according to the government's Revue de Viticulture, chemical fertilizers were "practically nonexistent" and rations of insecticides were "inadequate."