Documentary Review: Les Raisins du Reich

There is something startling about the amount of original footage that has been brought together by filmmaker Jean-Christophe Klotz  in the new wartime documentary based on Antoine Dreyfus’ 2021 book Les Raisins du Reich (The Grapes of The Reich).

Broadcast on October 8 on France2, it’s a fascinating and meticulously presented programme diving into a subject that remains sensitive even as we enter the ninth decade since Liberation. For those of us who have read Wine and War, it adds moving and thought-provoking layers and nuance to the stories – largely because it’s one thing to read about the impact of the Nazi Occupation on the French wine industry, but quite another to see Heinz Bömers striding around the La Bouscat racehorse with ‘Uncle’ Louis Eschenauer at his side, both laughing and joking.

The impact of the original footage is stunning and illuminating, with many hundreds of hours distilled down to a 75 minute running time, given context by contemporary interviews with historians, economists and those with intimate knowledge of the events. It’s already caused a stir, because although there were almost 300 prosecutions and sanctions or fines of wine trade members after the war, the details of this period in history are still little known.

Historian Philippe Souleau of CNRS in Bordeaux gives a good illustration of why – he is asked by the film’s narrator if he will name the négociants involved in working closely with the Nazis back in the 1940s. A long pause, and he replies ‘No’. Even today, after 80 years, he worries about defamation.

Florence Mothe, another Bordeaux-based historian, is a little more blunt, saying essentially almost all négociants and grands crus and wine transporters were ‘collaborating’ to a certain extent, even if in many cases it is fairer to see it as forced collaboration.

The documentary heads right back to the 1940 exodus of the French government from Paris, when the long-time mayor of Bordeaux Adrien Marquet (in place since 1925, remaining until the Liberation in 1944) became Minister of the Interior under Pétain’s government. He was instrumental in ensuring the rest of the government was purged of all but Pétain acolytes, and chose to actively work with the Germans instead of the Resistance – ensuring, for example, that Bordeaux was one of only three towns across the whole of France to show the anti-Semitic exhibition La Juif et La France. He paid the price after the war, when on August 29th 1944, he was arrested and imprisoned at Fort du Hâ in the city centre (as was Eschenauer), then put on trial in late 1947 and although acquitted in January 1948, having served 40 months in jail, he was condemned to 10 years of ‘national indignity’, automatically forfeiting his civil rights.

‘The world of Chartrons, the world of wine, wanted to be close to power,’ is the explanation given in the documentary, explained further by the fact that many négociants had already spent decades, even centuries, working with German wine merchants, and at first it seemed entirely practical to continue doing so, particularly when you put into context the financial crisis of the 1930s, when cellars were piled high with unsold bottles. The Nazis were willing not only to take this excess wine off their hands, but to do so, almost always, at a reasonable price.

Economic historian Hubert Bonin says, ‘I don’t know of any négociant who refused’ (although the Kressmans, we are told, pretended not to speak German, despite their family connections with northern Europe heading back centuries).

Much of the information covered here isn’t new – so the three wineführers appointed across France in Bordeaux (Heinz Bömers), Champagne (Otto Klaebisch) and Burgundy (Adolph Segnitz), who enjoyed longstanding close relationships with the trade. But there are some startling and moving new additions. Heinz Bömers’ son, for example, is still alive, and is interviewed throughout. He continued to run the family firm for decades after the war, still buying and selling wine with the major French regions, and confirms that Bömers held various tenders through the war to source wine from négociants, and almost all answered the request and submitted wines. ‘It was a normal negotiation,’ said Bömers, ‘the Germans didn’t set the prices’. He is clear about the role that his father played, also, in purchasing châteaux at below market price when their owners were Jewish. ‘Of course it is uncomfortable to think of my father acting like that,’ he says, ‘but I can’t pretend otherwise’.

There are plenty of fascinating stories uncovered by the documentary team – a cooperative cellar on the demarcation line, for example, was in the Free Zone at first, then the Germans moved the frontier to ensure the cellar, with its all-important bottles of wine, was within the Occupied zone. Then there was Hubert Cruse, from the influential Bordelais négociant family, who joined Free France in London and was parachuted into his home country in 1944 – refusing to be sent back to England despite being severely injured in the drop, continuing to fight in the Vercors mountains of eastern France.

Bordeaux is not the only region covered in the documentary – in Burgundy, the Clos du Maréchal vineyard that was dedicated to Pétain from the Hospices de Beaune is talked about in depth, as are the ‘shared interests’ of the big Champagne houses with the Occupiers. Indeed the documentary ends with the discovery of a stone, hidden in the middle of the Hospice vineyard, with Pétain’s crest, and the date 1944, clearly embossed. It had survived the hurried destruction of the stones that took place at the end of the war.

All in all a complex, fascinating documentary exploring the hard choices of wartime – and, as French television magazine Télérama wrote, illuminating the fact that: ‘despite the official story that the Germans pillaged our great [wine] estates, the reality is much more ambiguous’.

One of the best lines goes to Françoise Taliano-Des Garets, Bordeaux historian, who explains that while it’s understandable that wine merchants are unwilling to talk about what happened, for fear of creating a bad image, ‘it means that nothing has been cleansed’.

If you are in France, the documentary is free to view through to April 2025.