World War II Bordeaux: Life Under Occupation

‘The military presence was everywhere. The tentacles of the German administration reached throughout the Occupied Zone, and no doubt extended well into the Free Zone. Access to supplies disappeared extremely quickly after the soldiers arrived’.

This is from the diary of the late Jean-Paul Gardère, a wine broker and former director of Château Latour, who gave me a copy of them – loose-leaf, hand-typed with scrawled additions studded in the margins throughout – a few years before his death in 2014.

They make for fascinating, somber reading of a time that remains little spoken of in Bordeaux, despite the fact that 2020 marked a full 80 years since Nazi troops reached the city to begin an occupation that lasted from June 28, 1940 until August 28, 1944.

You can still find reminders. Most obviously the submarine base with its 10-metre thick reinforced concrete walls is still standing in downtown Bordeaux, about to become the site of the biggest digital art space in Europe. Along the coast, remnants of the Regelbau bunkers and other military defenses are still visible, if increasingly half-buried in sand. You can even find wartime graffiti in the limestone cellars beneath Château Franc Mayne in St Emilion, as on the attic walls of Château Palmer in Margaux.  Don and Petie Kladstup’s brilliant Wine and War covers certain parts of the war in Bordeaux – mainly the weinführer Heinz Bömers and négociants like Louis Eschenauer who worked closely enough with Bömers to be later found guilty of collaboration. We see less about what everyday life was like in Bordeaux during the war years. Some stories have been shared directly with me – those of Gardère, but also Jean-Michel Cazes, Jacques de Boüard, May-Eliane de Lencquaisang, Daniel Lawton and others. Added to these are things I have learnt from memoirs, letters, châteaux archives, local history books and university dissertations. Piecing all of these memories together paints a picture of a region that was both protected and exposed because of its strategic importance.

The same thing attracted the German army to Bordeaux as has always attracted people to this place – its port, and its location on the Gironde Estuary that made it a vital conduit for transporting men and material. Within hours of arrival the invading army had set up checkpoints, requisitioned homes, unfurled Nazi flags, taken control of the port and set up gun emplacements. The French government was in Bordeaux to witness all of this, having fled Paris two weeks earlier on June 10. The port teemed with soldiers, and the city as a whole was crammed with refugees, many from northern France who had arrived on foot in fear of the occupying army sweeping them out of their homes. The population of the city swelled from 250,000 to one million people, putting further pressure on shops that were already being cleared out by German soldiers sending fabrics, jam, coffee, chocolate and cigarettes back home to their families.

This was just a week after the Armistice had been signed (which itself came a few days after 12 German bombers had killed 65 and wounded 160 in a bombing raid in the heart of Bordeaux city in a move design to put pressure on the French government to sign the ceasefire). Five Gironde parliamentarians had been among the 80 across France who said no to the Armistice, calling it treasonous. One of these was Jean-Emmanuel Roy, mayor of Naujan et Postiac in Entre deux Mers and himself a winemaker who was instrumental in the founding of France’s appellation laws. But like so many others, he then had no choice but to watch it happen.

The demarcation line that divided France into two was created at midnight on the morning of June 25, and passed through the Bordeaux region, almost exactly halfway between Castillon (Occupied) and St Foy la Grande (Free France, under Vichy government control) down through Sauveterre-de-Guyenne in Entre deux Mers to Langon in the southern tip of the Graves. Barsac, Sauternes, Libourne, St Emilion, the Médoc, most of the Graves and Bordeaux city were all occupied. You can trace the exact line on two Michelin maps, numbers 98 and 99, that were created in 1940 and 1941 (if you find the original versions, you will see they were printed without covers to save on paper). It remained in place until March 1, 1943, a few months after the Germans moved in to the supposedly Free zone and brought the rest of France under their control.

All over Occupied Bordeaux, châteaux were immediately requisitioned by German soldiers. In St Emilion that included Soutard, Trottevieille, Clos Fourtet and Ausone – where the German general went to great lengths to ensure he had peace and quiet, stationing guards at every entry point to the château to ensure no one could enter. Over in the Médoc, the first châteaux to be occupied were those with British or Jewish links (most famously those belonging to the Sichels, the Bartons, the Rothschilds), or those with strategic locations such as Grand-Puy-Ducasse on the Pauillac waterfront. As high-profile châteaux under Jewish ownership, both Mouton and Lafite were targeted, with both branches of the family stripped of their French nationality. Baron Philippe de Rothschild was imprisoned by Vichy in 1940, freed in 1941, and crossed the Pyrénées Mountains to join the Free French forces in England in 1942. His autobiography recounts that he arrived back in France as one of the later waves of D-Day Landings, disembarking in the Bay de Seine near Bayeux on June 21st 1944. Baron Elie de Rothschild at Lafite served as an officer in a cavalry regiment in the early years of the war and was captured by the Nazis. Placed first in Nienberg prisoner of war camp, then Colditz Castle and Lubeck, he was released in May 1945, one of a number of Bordeaux prisoners of war that included André Cazes of Lynch Bages, who spent four years first in Nuremburg than in a camp on the Polish frontier near to Dresden, and Thierry Manoncourt of Figeac, who spent three years in a disciplinary camp after refusing to work as a labourer for the Germans. Closer to the city, Haut-Brion was first turned into hospital for French soldiers by its owners, then seized by Germans and turned into a rest home for the Luftwaffe.

At the same time, the Germans set up a whole series of measure to limit the circulation of people, goods and the postal traffic between two zones either side of the ‘Demarcation Line’. Josette de Boüard, who would go on to marry Christian de Boüard of Château Angélus in 1945, remembered in a written history of Saint Emilion that for first year after the Armistice, it was impossible to telephone or even send a postcard from one side to the other (although her husband remembers how aged 17 in 1941 he smuggled a pig over the line with the local baker, butchering it in the cellars of the château).

Gardère wrote that 1941, ‘was undoubtedly the most difficult year of the war. I am sure the administration did what it could, but a lead weight lay across France’. He recounted that the population, ‘lived in permanent fear, struck dumb and in daily worry of finding food’. Electricity was on only once or twice a week, and imports were cut off meaning fuel and food supplies dwindled to almost nothing. May-Eliane de Lencquesaing, long-time owner of Château Pichon Comtesse de Lalande in Pauillac, wrote in her diaries that the vegetable gardens at the chateaux became increasingly important – even though, she added, the gravel soils of the Medoc were never much good at growing anything but vines…

‘Our everyday life is marked by a total lack of basic goods, little heating, a very restricted diet with no sugar, little bread, almost no meat, butter does not exist,’ she wrote. ‘We live according to the rhythm of the season, we grind corn to make a rough flour which serves for the base of most of our food. We roast barley for fake coffee’.

Gardère’s diaries list rations that included 250g of bread per day for women and children (about one baguette), 350g of bread for manual workers and 100g of meat per month. Milk, butter, cheese and vegetable oils were almost never available. Cigarettes came with a ration of five packets every 10 days, and wine was only available for manual labourers, who were allowed around three litres a month. Any men in the Médoc aged 20 to 40 who had not gone off to fight were sent to build the Atlantic Wall along Soulac, Le Verdun, Montalivet and Arcachon – he remembered they would head off in the morning with wine in cans, and return in the evening, trying where possible to do small acts of resistance, ‘petit sabotage’, as he put it, such as, ‘putting as much sand in the bricks as possible to ensure the defenses weren’t strong’.

The black market flourished from 1942, where ‘the clever got very rich and the rest got poorer than ever’. Gardère recalled certain restaurants that would never ask for your ration tickets ‘for a price’. He was writing this around 20 years after the war, trying to capture the memories, and said, ‘my exact figures might be a little off, but I clearly remember the bread rations, and how you could buy fake bread coupons on the black market. If your baker knew you well, sometimes he would accept them and hide them in the middle of the real coupons’.

Bicycles, he wrote, were like gold-dust, and almost anything you wanted had to be swapped for something else – so a bottle of wine for a bag of potatoes, and ‘bad luck for those who had nothing to swap’. Life was easier in the countryside than it was in big towns like Bordeaux, and everyone tried to find relatives with vegetable gardens. By the end of 1943 and into 1944, the Allied bombings increased in intensity, and Gardère, who lived in Soussans just outside Margaux, built a bomb shelter that was 2 metres long and 80 centimetres wide, dug into his garden, covered with a frame with earth piled on top. ‘Plenty of people laughed at me, but when the Allies starting bombing Pauillac and Blaye on August 5 1944, they were lining up to get inside’. Jean-Michel Cazes remembers that on that same day, a few miles up the road, he was sat aged 9 with his 8-year-old sister at Château Lynch Bages watching the bombs fall ‘like fireworks’ on Pauillac town centre. Their mother was taking shelter in Pauillac, barely one kilometre away from the château, in a trench not unlike the one that Gardère had dug, with nothing but her handbag over her head for protection. 45 locals died in those raids, carried out by 306 Lancaster Bombers and 30 Mosquitos from the RAF and American airforce. Cazes also remembers that a few decades after the war, when he was over in Texas, he met one of the pilots who flew the mission.

For much of the population, these moments of high danger were interspersed with life continuing as normal, even among the deprivations. Cazes, who was 4 at the start of the war and 9 at its end, remembers that by 1942 he and his friends had switched from playing German soldiers in the playground to playing Allied soldiers, but most of the time they were fascinated by their new neighbours. Some of his most vivid memories are of soldiers marching through the streets of Pauillac singing German military songs, or walking in formation to go swimming in a local reservoir, in uniform but with their towels slung over their shoulders. With a father held as a prisoner-of-war, Cazes was given an extra ration of biscuits at school, and was invited every few months to the town hall with other boys whose fathers were interned. Once a month he was able to send a letter – or rather to sign a standard form letter attesting to the fact that everything was fine – and every few months they could send a larger parcel containing jam, cigarettes and other small luxuries. For the final year of the war they had no news of André Cazes at all, but in August 1945 he made his way home to Pauillac, weighing just 45 kilos, having been liberated by the Russians.

Entre deux Mers was the site of particularly fierce acts of resistance and retributions. In 1944, fighters from the famous Grand-Pierre Resistance group were shot close to Blasimon abbey, while 25-year old Roger Teillet was caught and eventually hanged by the SS on the Place de Blasimon. On the night of July 10 1944, Resistance fighters were preparing to unload two planes worth of ammunition and parachutists from the British forces at St-Leger de Vignague near Sauveterre-de-Guyenne, but were intercepted, with many of them caught and killed. Even as the Germans retreated after an Allied victory was declared, a few Resistance fighters confronted the retreating German troops and were killed – including 18 year old André Loiseau who died among the vines of Pomerol, according to witnesses who told their stories to the Historical Society of St-Emilion. Yves Damécourt, owner of Château de Bellevue and mayor of Sauveterre, has been instrumental in keeping the memories of these men and women alive. The town’s Porte St Léger gate marks the exact spot where the German guard post was stationed, and a memorial plaque was erected there in 2016.

Other acts of defiance were played out across the region from the first days of the war. St Emilion for example played a secret but crucial role in protecting France’s treasures for future generations. The town’s monolithic church, that dates back to the 12th century, has long been one of France’s most celebrated historic monuments, and was selected by Georges Huisman, Director of Arts under prime minister Édouard Daladier, for a special mission. As the fighting became increasingly inevitable, France began making quiet preparations for the conservation of its most significant works of art, and Huisman put aside a significant budget to produce protective casings for the priceless stained-glass windows that lined cathedrals and churches around the country.

Working in secrecy with Jean Verrier, inspector general of national monuments, together they came up with such an effective plan that within weeks of war being officially declared, over 50,000m2 of glass was carefully taken down, placed in the specially-prepared casings and moved to several top-secret locations for storage until peace returned. One of the most significant stores of this precious glass was in St Emilion’s underground church. Huisman had correctly assessed that this vast stone tomb, crafted into existence eight centuries earlier under the orders of Seigneur Pierre de Castillon, would provide perfect shelter for some of the great treasures of French medieval art including almost certainly the windows from Chartres and Bourges cathedrals. Very few locals ever had any idea what was being stored under their feet – and still less, we can imagine, did the German soldiers.

And all the while, the business of making wine continued. Manoncourt at Figeac came home in 1943 in time to work the harvest not just at his estate but those nearby. With so many men away fighting, he now joined his Figeac cellar master in looking after the vines at Vieux Château Certan and others, trying to keep châteaux going until their workers could return.

The difficulties in actually making wine during the war are well reported. Not only had most of the working age men been sent to fight, but equipment was increasingly difficult to get hold of. Glass bottles were scarce, corks scarcer still, and even the paper used to record harvests and yields became thinner and thinner. Throughout the occupation the locals had to distill part of their wine – often a full half of their harvest – into fuel and industrial alcohol which the Germans needed as solvents or as a basis for explosives. There was no copper to make the famous Bordeaux mixture used to treat powdery mildew because all the metal was being taken and melted down for the German war machine – just at a time when the region was suffering a series of bad harvests (until the victory year of 1945, when the weather perked up). And to make things even tougher, all cows, sheep and oxen that were often used in viticulture had also been requisitioned for the war effort.

Inevitably, the effects of the war years were felt for some time. Rationing continued until 1949, and money was so scarce that paying harvesters was almost impossible, as was buying products for treating the vines, even after the soldiers had left. Broker Edouard Lawton wrote in his diary in 1947, ‘I have been in business since 1891 but never have I seen such a crisis in trading.’ The 1947 vintage was of brilliant quality, and yet he writes, ‘…I wonder how and when trading will commence. Our primeur business is dead. Our old buyers have disappeared, the great châteaux have become storehouses for the trade.’ After the war, many estates – including the First Growths – would regularly declassify their wines because a simple Vin de Table found an easier and more receptive public, who simply had no money to pay for prestigious names.

All of this often fades into the background next to the unease that continues over the role of Bordeaux wine merchants under the Occupation. Much of it with reason. Many of those sent away to fight never returned, and those who were seen to have prospered under the Occupation inevitably became the focus of anger.

Exports of wine to Allied countries became illegal from 1940 onwards – in fact exports to pretty much anywhere but Germany, making it complicated to judge those who continued supplying wine in order to pay their workforce and keep their business from closing. Individual heroics are easy to find – Wine and War recounts the Miaihles at Palmer, for example, hiding two families of Italian Jews under the noses of the German troops who were occupying their château But far more typical are stories like the one that Gardère recounts, where he remembers the screams of his Jewish neighbour Madame Labat at 3am one morning as she was taken away to Bordeaux – from where she was sent to Drancy internment camp near Paris, returning after the Liberation unlike so many others.

In the end a full 43 négociants were investigated for their close relationship with the Occupying forces. Those who were especially active under the Vichy government (including Salles, Cruse, Kressmann, Martin, Lur-Saluces, de Luze and Guestier) were allowed to plead their cause before the finance minister René Pleven on December 1 1944. In the end, almost all were exonerated, with retribution limited to fines. The national armistice that was granted in 1950 and 1951 saw full pardons for the 14 merchant companies that had come under particular suspicion. And 80 years on, the memories of those who remember it all first hand are an increasingly rare and precious resource.

(First Published 2020, On Bordeaux, Academie du Vin Library)