Uncle Louis: The Untold Story

by Don and Petie Kladstrup

Not long after Wine & War was published in 2001, our phone rang and someone, an older man judging from his voice, asked if we were the authors. We said we were. ‘My name is Michel Lung and I just finished reading your book,’ he said.  ‘I live in Bordeaux but am coming to Paris and wonder if we could get together, maybe for coffee.’  Why not, we thought . . . before Lung added, ‘I’m a distant cousin of Louis Eschenauer. He was in your book.’

In our book? That’s an understatement. He was the primary character in Chapter Ten, the one titled The Collaborator.

Eschenauer was Bordeaux’s most prominent wine merchant, an indefatigable négotiant who bought wine in bulk, bottled it and then sold it to customers throughout the world – including the Germans in World War II. In our book, we explained how he did business with them and was close friends with some. We also described how, after the war, he was put on trial and thrown into prison for collaborating with the enemy.

After agreeing to meet Lung, we wondered what we were getting into. Was he upset about our treatment of his cousin? Were we about to get the third degree?

As it turned out, Lung could not have been nicer. His first words were how much he enjoyed our book. ‘And your chapter about my uncle was fair. At the same time, maybe you were a little hard on him. What I mean is that there was another side to Uncle Louis, one I’d like to tell you about.’  In the hour or so we were together, Monsieur Lung described a man who was close to his family and worked hard to keep his business going in spite of the war. ‘Yes, he was friends with a number of important Germans, but rather than me getting into all that, I’d like to invite you to Bordeaux. There are others in the family who would like to meet you and give you a bigger picture.’

We agreed to come. At the same time we couldn’t help feeling a little nervous about the reception we’d receive. If Lung thought were a little hard on Uncle Louis, how did the rest of the family feel?

We fully realised collaboration is still a sensitive issue in France, a chapter of history many people would like to forget and not talk about. When we began working on Wine & War, one person warned we were wasting our time.  ‘Nobody will talk to you!’ At Château Beychevelle, the owner, after agreeing to be interviewed, abruptly called off our meeting, saying, ‘Let the dead rest in peace, let the living live in peace!’

After the war, more than 160,000 people were brought to trial or investigated for collaborating with the enemy. Even President Charles de Gaulle worried about that period and, for the sake of national unity, sought to portray France as ‘a nation of resisters.’

But all of that seemed like ancient history when we headed to Bordeaux. Lung met us at the train station and drove us to his house in Bouliac where twenty or thirty people, some with children, greeted us when we arrived. Everyone was dressed up and a lovely buffet had been prepared. We felt a little awkward, but the atmosphere was warm and friendly and we soon began to relax.

Someone stepped forward and said how pleased they were that we were willing to come. ‘As Michel told you, we wanted to talk to you about Uncle Louis and give you another picture of our distant relative, one that’s a little different from the one in your book.’ He went on to explain that ‘Most of us were just kids back then but what we remember is how he treated us.  Even though we were young, he always treated us with respect, and like adults.’

‘But he never forgot we were children,’ someone else quickly added. ‘He never forgot birthdays, and if we had a problem he was always ready to listen and help if he could.’

The picture they painted was that of a gentle soul, a wise and caring man for whom family meant everything. The picture we presented in Wine & War was more dispassionate, one based on official records and a few interviews with people who knew or worked with him.

‘He was a big man with a big cigar and an even bigger personality,’ Jean Miaihle of Château Coufran told us. ‘Everyone knew Uncle Louis.’

He drove flashy, custom-built cars which attracted a great deal of attention as he cruised down the coast to the resort of Biarritz where he had his mistress installed.  Another passion was horse racing; Eschenauer owned several prize-winning horses. He was also owner of Le Chapon Fin, a restaurant that featured the greatest wines of France and a clientele to match. King Alfonso XIII of Spain and England’s Prince of Wales were just two of his regular customers. ‘You couldn’t get in unless you had a zest of British humour, a rosette of the Legion of Honor or a personal invitation from Uncle Louis,’ one Bordelais recalled.

‘Louis had a real love of luxury,’ said Florence Mothe, a Bordeaux winemaker and writer. ‘With his sumptuous limousines and winters spent in Egypt, he seemed like a character out of F. Scott Fitzgerald.’

Eschenauer was equally flamboyant in business life, flaunting his famous German clients and worldwide contacts. One of his closest associates was Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Third Reich’s Foreign Minister, whom Eschenauer hired before the war to sell some of his wines in Germany. When France declared war on Germany in 1939, Eschenauer, who did more than half of his business with that country, found himself in an uncomfortable position:  some of his best friends and customers were now ‘the enemy.’ With exports to Germany cut off, Eschenauer was suddenly stuck with a huge stock of wine he could no longer sell.

But the crisis was short-lived. In June of the following year, after German forces overran France, an old friend and client came knocking on Eschenauer’s door. It was Heinz Bömers, head of Reidemeister & Ulrichs, Germany’s largest wine company. Bömers told Louis he had just taken on a new job: buying wine for the Third Reich. ‘But it can be profitable for both of us because I am here not just for the Reich; I have permission to buy wine for my own company as well so we can continue our regular business as usual, plus you can sell straight to the German government.’

Bömers explained that before he accepted the job of weinführer, he had insisted on total independence with no restrictions on how much money he could exchange to buy for his personal business. He added that France, now an occupied country, would only be permitted to sell its wine to Germany; all of the other usual export markets such as Britain, Russia and the U.S. were being cut off.  (Author’s note:  This meant Bomers could buy wine at derisory prices, well below their actual market value. At the same time, he took pains not to gouge winemakers, paying them just enough to enable them to maintain operations. He knew, as his son told us, that the war would end one day and that they would have to do business again.)

Louis needed no convincing.  He realised that the arrangement Bömers was proposing was not only practical but potentially lucrative — for both of them. A deal was quickly worked out as other wine merchants looked on with envy. ‘My father and Louis would go out and taste dozens of wines together,’ Bömers’s son said. ‘They trusted each other and were very good friends.’

It was that friendship and his close ties with the German leadership that enabled Eschenauer to greatly increase his fortune. But it also got him in trouble. Many in the Bordeaux business community resented the way he seemed to flaunt his German friendships. He often invited Nazi officials such as Bömers to join him for an afternoon at the racetrack. Louis’s distant cousin Ernst Kühnemann, the officer who commanded the city’s port and naval base, was also a frequent guest. Often, they could be seen strolling arm in arm beside the track, a sight many French spectators found infuriating and disgusting.

‘They may have been cousins,’ recalled one Bordeaux wine merchant, ‘but it created a scandal to see this ’emperor of the Chartrons’ on intimate terms with the commander of the naval base.’

Off the track, the cousins could be seen at Uncle Louis’s restaurant where other German officials, many of them sent by Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, were also being entertained. To accommodate its German clientele, Le Chapon Fin was granted a number of exemptions. While other restaurants were restricted to certain hours and how much they could charge, Le Chapon Fin could serve wine around the clock and charge whatever it wished. Although meat and fish were almost impossible to come by elsewhere, one could still dine very well at Le Chapon Fin.

Such privileges left a bitter taste in the mouths of other Bordelais.  While they struggled to survive, Uncle Louis continued living the high life.

This was something we were eager to discuss with Eschenauer’s kinfolk but we didn’t get very far. They neither claimed he was innocent nor admitted that he profited illegally. They did concede some of the things Louis did may have left a ‘bad impression’ but argued it was the only way he could stay in business since Germany was his only market. ‘What critics sometimes forget is that Uncle Louis used his German connections to help others,’ Michel Lung said. He pointed out that when the Germans tried to requisition the wines of Châteaux Lafite-Rothschild and Mouton-Rothschild, Eschenauer urged Heinz Bömers to step in a prevent it from happening. The weinführer agreed and the wines remained untouched. Baron Philippe, who knew and worked with both Eschenauer and Bömers during the war, later confirmed the story and referred to Uncle Louis as ‘a great friend of mine.’

And yet, with the Germans seizing other Jewish wine estates, which they then sold to non-Jews, Eschenauer was quick to take advantage. He formed a company, the Société des Grands Vins Français, which allowed him to discreetly buy up such properties.

‘He was an opportunist, absolutely,’ Florence Mothe told us, ‘but he was not pro-Nazi; he was just pro-Louis. For Louis, business always came first.’

And in the end, it proved his undoing.

Aftermath…

By the summer of 1944, nearly everyone realised that Germany was about to collapse. Even Heinz Bömers, who was visiting his family in Bavaria, knew the end was in sight and had refused to return to Bordeaux.

After D-Day, as one town after another was liberated, swastikas began appearing over doors of suspected collaborators. The handwriting was literally on the wall, but Louis Eschenauer did not seem to see it – not until his good friend Captain Ernest Kühnemann informed him over lunch at Louis’s restaurant that it would not be long before German forces occupying Bordeaux would be pulling out.

‘Uncle Louis was worried,’ Lung told us. ‘He still tried to put on a good face when he was around us kids but he saw how the Resistance was chasing down suspected collaborators and he wasn’t sure what to do.’

That August, Eschenauer learned that the Germans planned to blow up the port of Bordeaux just before they evacuated. When local politicians with connections to the Resistance pleaded with him to use his influence to save the facility, he jumped at the chance. It was a way, he thought, to be on the winning side and maybe save his neck.

‘But it was to save his business, too,’ Lung added.  ‘If the port were destroyed he couldn’t ship his wine, so he immediately contacted Kuhnemann and begged him not to do that . . . warning that many innocent people could be hurt or killed if the port were blown up.’

What neither Eschenauer nor the Resistance knew was that the Germans probably couldn’t have done that anyway because most of the detonators had been sabotaged a few days earlier by a German soldier who opposed the plan.  But that was a secret the Germans kept to themselves. As we wrote in Wine & War, ‘In a bluff, they promised not to blow up the port if their troops were allowed to leave peacefully without being fired at. The Resistance agreed.’

On August 27, the Germans were gone and Eschenauer breathed a sigh of relief.  Four days later, he was arrested by the Resistance.

Arrest and Imprisonment

His arrest followed that of Marshal Philippe Pétain who headed France’s notorious Vichy government.  Pétain was found guilty and sentenced to death.  Several weeks later, De Gaulle commuted the sentence to life imprisonment, although others in the government like Prime Minister Pierre Laval were tried and executed.

The prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison, or worse, left Eschenauer shaken. If the court had been willing to sentence Marshal Pétain to death, what would it do him, he wondered.

Louis’s trial began on Nov. 9, 1945. He was nervous and frail and suffering from severe depression. The only good news for Uncle Louis was that he would not be executed. An investigating magistrate determined that Eschenauer’s crime of ‘trafficking with the enemy’ had not affected the security of the state. But he was still charged with three counts of economic collaboration, charges he denied when he took the stand. ‘I am not a collaborator,’ he said. ‘I did business with the Germans because I had to. I had to save my business. I also wanted to protect the interests of other négociants and winegrowers.’ Eschenauer admitted that he was well-acquainted with many of the Germans ‘but I also knew how to trick them and string them along. I despised the Nazis; I never helped them. It was the Allies I was trying to help.’

We asked Louis’s descendants what they made of his claim. Was he exaggerating when he talked about tricking the Germans and stringing them along? No one had an answer.

We also wondered what they thought about his testimony concerning Heinz Bömers, a man he once called ‘a good friend.’ In court, Louis branded the weinfuhrer a ‘vulture’ and a ‘violent man’ who was trying to take over his business. ‘I tried to act as a buffer between Bömers and the wine community,’ he said. ‘I prevented him from seizing the best wines and instead gave him plonk, junk.’

‘Do you believe that?’ we asked Eschenauer’s descendants. They were noncommittal and declined to speculate why Uncle Louis had suddenly turned on Bömers. Under different circumstances, we would have pressed for an answer but we were guests here. We had come to Bordeaux to hear them out, not grill them with hard questions.

Eschenauer’s testimony was even less consistent and convincing when he was questioned about a company he set up, the Société des Grand Vins Français. Its purpose, he said, was to buy property for Bömers. In the spring of 1941, the company purchased Châteaux Lestage and Bel-Air, two Jewish-owned wine estates that had been seized and ‘Aryanized’ by the Vichy government.  When he was first asked why he bought them, Louis said it was because he wanted to ‘avoid pressure’ from Bömers whom he accused of trying to take over his business. If Bomer’s got those properties, Louis said, maybe he would try to take over Maison Eschenauer, too.

Under subsequent questioning, however, Eschenauer said the real reason he had bought the two estates was that he was ‘trying to save them for their rightful Jewish owners.’  Court judges were skeptical. When they asked Eschenauer for documents to back up his testimony, Uncle Louis said there were none, that everything had been handled on a verbal basis.

As his three-day trial neared its end, Eschenauer continued to deny any wrongdoing and reiterate he was not a collaborator. He had joined Groupe Collaboration, he said, ‘just to please a friend,’ adding that he never really had anything to do with group.

Uncle Louis’s trial ended on Armistice Day, the day marking victory over Germany in World War I. It was a national holiday and no newspapers would be published. That was the best part as far as the court was concerned. Publicity would be minimal when the verdict was announced.

The panel of judges retired to consider its verdict at 1:15 in the morning. By 3 a.m. they were back in the courtroom.  The verdict: guilty on all charges. The judges dismissed Eschenauer’s claim that he tried to resist demands for wine by Bömers. ‘He willingly agreed to furnish the weinführer with what he wanted and at no point did he ever refuse,’ the judges said. The court also dismissed Eschenauer’s testimony that his company, the Société des Grands Vins Français, bought two ‘Aryanized’ Jewish-owned châteaux in order to save them for their rightful Jewish owners.  ‘The company,’ the court said, ‘was created for only one purpose, to do business with the enemy.’

Uncle Louis was sentenced to two years in prison and fined more than 60 million francs for illegal profiteering. He admitted doing 957 million francs’ worth of business during the war, but it was the way he did business that disturbed authorities most. His courting of German officials at his restaurant and at the racetrack and his flaunting of those relationships made him a natural target. As one Bordelais who knew him said, ‘Louis just went too far.’

His property was confiscated and he was forbidden from doing business in Bordeaux. He also lost all rights as a French citizen. As Uncle Louis was led away, he broke down in tears.

In 1951, the French government passed an amnesty law which allowed many businessmen who had been found guilty of excess profiteering to return to their offices. Louis Eschenauer was amnestied in 1952. He spent the remainder of his days at his château at Camponac in Pessac before passing away in 1958.

We left Bordeaux with mixed feelings. Was Eschenauer a collaborator who got what he deserved? Or someone who simply did what was necessary to survive? Was he a scapegoat, a way for the government to show it was cracking down before hurrying on to other business? One thing is for sure: Louis Eschenauer was far from the only one ‘doing business’ with the enemy.

As we wrote in Wine & War, Uncle Louis was politically conservative and leery of anything that might impede business. What scared him most was the spectre of communism, social upheaval and labour unrest. It was almost with a sigh of relief that he greeted the return of Marshal Philippe Pétain in 1940 to head the country. Pétain’s hatred of communism and decision to collaborate with Germany, Louis felt, offered the best assurance that France would avoid the kind of economic stagnation that had crippled the country in the years before the war.

It’s also important to keep in mind is that collaboration, at that time, had few sinister overtones. It signified the working relationships Pétain hoped to establish with Berlin which would help France rebuild itself.

By 1942, the meaning of collaboration had changed dramatically. It meant hunting down and deporting immigrant Jews, arresting communists and other perceived enemies of the state – doing whatever Berlin wanted.

Did Eschenauer realise what was happening? If he did, would it have made any difference? ‘Business was his first priority,’ explained Florence Mothe. Florence told us she knew Eschenauer well and that her stepfather worked for him. ‘But Louis was not an anti-Semite. I never heard him say one word against Jews.’

Nevertheless, the months preceding Louis’s trial was time of retribution, of settling old scores. At least 4,500 persons were summarily put to death by tribunals set up by the Resistance. In Bordeaux, according to one winegrower who knew Eschenauer, ‘There was a healthy denouncing of others. No one could tell where the finger would point next.’

Fearing the situation was slipping out of control, a spokesman for the Minister of Justice went on the radio to remind the people of France that doing business with the enemy did not necessarily constitute a crime. ‘Not all of it is of the same character,’ he said. Some of it may be interpreted as ‘normal’ and ‘legitimate.’ The law against economic collaboration is ‘aimed at punishing the guilty and not disturbing the innocent.’

A few months later, the regional director of Economic Supervision in Bordeaux went even further.  In a letter to the courts, he encouraged them to ‘conclude their cases and investigations as soon as possible.’

It was under those conditions and in that atmosphere that the trial of Louis Eschenauer took place. The court took only three days to convict him. Documents relating to the trial, part of which was held behind closed doors, were sealed by law that protects a person’s privacy by restricting access to personal papers until sixty years after the person’s death. Eschenauer died in 1958.

One last thought, and it’s something that still puzzles us.  During the war, Uncle Louis considered Heinz Bömers ‘a close friend.’ During his trial, he suddenly turned on the weinführer, portraying him as vulture eager to make off with as much good wine as he could.

Why the flip flop? Were they the words of someone desperate to save his neck? We still wonder because years later, while we were still researching Wine & War, Bömers’s son told us that Eschenauer, shortly before his death, approached him and said, ‘Now I want to tell you something.  I was a friend of your father’s before the war and a friend during it . . . and I am still his friend today.’

Friend or enemy?  Perhaps Eschenauer’s personal papers will provide an answer.

Read an extract from Wine and War here.