Initially during World War II the balance of power was clear. The “Blitzkrieg-strategy” was successful in France and Nazi Germany tyrannized French civilians for four years. The core areas of wine and champagne cultivation fell under the zone occupied by Germany. The Third Reich was not only after the valuable works of art of France, Hermann Göring, the commander in chief of the German air force, saw in the French delicacies another possibility to defeat his opponent. He thus ordered his soldiers to expropriate wines and good food from the French. However, the physical strength of the German army was constantly countered by the inventive creativity of the French population. This résistence began even before the Germans invaded France in 1940.
A book that describes this period in detail is "Wine and War" by the American couple Don and Petit Kladstrup. Their book tells among other things the story of how the French winegrowers defended themselves against the German occupation and only let them believe that the French let themselves be oppressed. French winegrowers hid their valuable champagne and wine bottles, behind erected walls, under vegetable fields and threw boxes of champagne and wine into the swamps. To make new walls look old, they brought spiders into the cellar and rubbed the walls with dirt. Some French certainly remembered the toast from the First World War "Here's one less for the Germans if they win, one less for my heirs if we do" and drank their best wines before the Germans conquered their territory. But these first moves made by the winegrowers were only the beginning of their underground fight against the occupying forces.
Leading the German occupying forces by the nose became a leisure activity for the winegrowers. They manipulated the wine barrels so that they would lose their contents during the crossing. The Germans would open the empty barrels with joyful anticipation. If a bottle had a promising label, this did not necessarily ensure the quality of the wine with in it. Of course, the Germans did not trust the French, so it was important for them that the entire logistics were managed by the three leading German wine connoisseurs. They were responsible for bringing the true treasures from the champagne houses to Germany. But for Heinz Bömer, one out of the three commissioners, his love for wine was stronger than his love for the fatherland. The National Socialists focused a little too much on expertise and too little on party affiliation. Heinz Bömer was forced to join the party under threat of expropriation. Convinced of the final defeat of the Germans and anxious not to ruin his good reputation for the time after the capitulation of the Reich, he cooperated successfully with the French. The commissioner helped the winegrowers to hide the precious wines in the French wine cellars. He procured valuable labels from Rothschild and gave them to the winegrowers. They labelled their worst wine with the famous label of Rothschild. Today the winegrowers say that this wine would still be lying in the cellars if the Nazis had not sacrificed themselves to drink it.
But the French also took advantage of the German focus on bureaucracy. Books were forged so that the Germans could verify in writing that the precious wines had already been shipped from France before they were conquered, thus stopping them from searching for the liquid gold. Or the French winegrowers falsified the written orders of German Nazi heads, issuing personal orders that the officers of the regiments should not let their soldiers sleep in the wine cellars for fear that they would drink the wine.
The language barrier turned out to be a serious weakness in transporting wine for the German soldiers. How could a Frenchman know the difference between Hamburg and Homburg and so it could happen that a cargo appeared in the north of Germany, although it should have been delivered to the west of Germany. With a strange regularity train carriage were sacrificed to faulty indications, causing the trains to derail and their contents to mysteriously disappear.
The Germans were not so blind that they believed that the unfortunate wine transports were a coincidence. But the French were smart enough to know who to annoy and who not. As soon as the champagne or wine had to be delivered to locations where the Nazis leaders met, only the most valuable goods were delivered. Why should the powerful Nazis take on this secondary problem and sacrifice time and means to deal with it if it didn’t affect them personally? The French played with the German soldiers and helped slowly weaken their morale.
Although they received 320 million bottles a year during the siege, the Germans did not manage to get hold of the true treasures of France, because they underestimated the skill, courage and ingenuity of the French and their commitment to their cultural heritage. Adolf Hitler fortunately was not interested in the taste content of the wine and champagne, but only in its cultural and financial value. He kept them safe and untouched in his bunkers in the mountains. The valuable bottles that fell into the hands of the Germans were retrieved by the French during their invasion of Berchtesgaden, when they emptied the cellar of Adolf Hitler and took a half a million bottles of the finest champagne and wine back home.