Wine And War:: The French, The Nazis, And The Ba...

: Some figures, like Bordeaux merchant Louis Eschenauer, were convicted and imprisoned after the war for doing extensive business with the enemy.

Immediately after the fall of Paris in 1940, the Nazi leadership began a widespread campaign to pillage French wine, which they viewed as one of the country's most valuable national assets. Wine and War: The French, the Nazis, and the Ba...

In the 2001 bestseller , authors Don and Petie Kladstrup explore a little-known front of World War II: the fight to protect France's vineyards and cellars from German plunder. The Systematic Plunder of French Wine : Some figures, like Bordeaux merchant Louis Eschenauer,

: The Reich dispatched official German wine merchants, known as weinführers , to every major wine region (such as Burgundy, Bordeaux, and Champagne) to coordinate the massive collection and resale of fine vintages at a profit. The Systematic Plunder of French Wine : The

: Many producers built fake walls to conceal their most precious bottles or buried them underground. The owners of Paris's famed La Tour d'Argent restaurant, for instance, rushed to build a wall to hide 20,000 bottles before the Germans arrived.