Renee Ryan's Blog - Posts Tagged "weinführers"

After France surrendered to Germany in June 1940, the Nazis moved quickly, cutting the country in half, with Northern France, the occupied zone, and Southern France, the free zone. The Champagne region was deep within the occupied zone and placed under the charge of a special corps of officers, or what the French called the weinführers, many of whom had direct connections with the wine trade prior to the war.

Originally, the Champenois thought this was a positive turn of events. In fact, one of the producers in Champagne was even quoted as saying after the war, “If you were going to shoved around, it was better to be shoved around by a winemaker than a beer-drinking Nazi lout.”

Unfortunately, this proved untrue. Under strict orders from Berlin, the Champenois were expected to supply nearly 400,000 bottles of champagne a week and at a fraction of its worth. Adding insult to injury, they were only allowed to sell their product to the German army or German-owned businesses. Once again, at a ridiculously low price.

And so began a large resistance movement that included switching labels, filling bottles with water, hiding the most valuable blends behind fake walls, and other dangerous acts of sabotage. My upcoming release, The Widows of Champagne, opens with one of these fearless acts. Interested in seeing how I portrayed these heroic acts. The book is up for preorder now.
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My upcoming WWII Historical novel The Widows of Champagne (https://amzn.to/3lUTjPk and https://bit.ly/3x1xl2e) is set, obviously, in the champagne region of northern France.

For centuries, countless bloody battles were waged in the area. Champagne’s secret weapon lay beneath the villages and vineyards. Dating all the way back to the Roman Empire, caves, also called crayères, were cut into the chalky limestone for transportation and storage.
After the Romans were thrown out, the hundreds of miles of these caves were used to store food. It wasn’t until 1769 that local vintner Nicolas Ruinart renovated the cavities and tunnels beneath his property to store his champagne. By 1915, nearly all the caves beneath Champagne were retrofitted with level floors. Staircases and elevators were added next.

Sadly, Champagne’s vineyards were heavily bombed during both battles of the Marne, but its cellars remained largely unscathed. Thousands of citizens took refuge in the crayères during the war, alongside the French military, who pinned up canvas curtains to make walls. They created makeshift desks with planks of wood over stacked Champagne bottles. Religious services were regularly conducted beneath ground, and even school was taught. Then the war ended, and the region had 21 years to recover before hostilities started up all over again in 1940.

And so begins the story of The Widows of Champagne...

September 3, 1939, mere hours after England declared war on Germany, France followed suit. Nothing happened for eight months. No skirmishes, no bullets flying, no bombs dropped, nothing. They called it the Phoney War.

The French were confident the Germans didn’t stand a chance against their mighty army, which was indeed strong—on paper. Plus, they had the Maginot Line. Named after the minister of war, Andre Maginot, the Maginot Line was basically a series of concrete and barbed wire fortifications on the eastern border. Basically a glorified trench, the barrier was constructed to prevent a direct attack from Germany. But it was technology from WWI and German panzers were formidable.

In the end, the Maginot line inspired a false sense of security and turned out to be strategically ineffective. The Germans simply went around the fortification and invaded through Belgium. France suffered a notoriously quick defeat, falling approximately six weeks after the first German panzers touched French soil.