Drink (62 page)

30 CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

In the same year that America cut back on state intervention in the personal habits of its citizens, Germany opted to travel in the opposite direction. Its new chancellor, Adolf Hitler, had a vision of greatness for his country, based on the sacrifice of individual rights to what he perceived to be the common good. Hitler had spent most of his adult life dry. He had sworn to live sober after getting drunk for the first time in 1905, to celebrate passing an exam, and waking up the next morning in a ditch with a hole in his memory. He did not, however, attempt to enforce his preferences in the matter of drinking upon Germany, for it would have been impossible to remove beer from the Teutonic ideal, based on racial purity and total devotion to his wishes, which he aimed to create. Indeed, he exploited the historic importance of beer to the national psyche by staging his first attempt at power in the Bürgerbräukeller—a Munich brew cellar. The location was chosen not only on account of its size—it accommodated several thousand drinkers—but also for its patriotic decor, which Hitler believed would make his audience receptive to his strident brand of nationalism. The putsch failed, and Hitler spent some months in prison, where he resolved to achieve power through legal means. His philosophy began to find favor with Germans in the late 1920s, principally for economic reasons. The country had yet to recover from the onerous restitution provisions of the Treaty of Versailles that had ended World War I, and when the Great Depression struck, Hitler’s
Nazi
Party, with its declared aim to restore Germany to its former eminence, attracted increasing support. By 1932 the Nazis were the largest party in the Reichstag.

A propaganda picture-book, intended to endear Hitler to his countrymen, was published in the same year and made a virtue of his abstemious habits: “It is almost unknown that Hitler does not drink alcohol or smoke, or that he is a vegetarian. Without insisting that anyone follow his example, even in his closest circle, he holds like iron to his self-established principles.” There were pragmatic reasons, other than cultural, for not insisting that the rest of the nation also renounce alcohol, for the manufacture of beer, schnapps, and wine made an important contribution to the German economy. In 1933, the drinks industry employed over a hundred thousand workers, representing 2.2 percent of the entire German workforce, and spending on alcohol accounted for 9 percent of the country’s national income in the same year. Interestingly, Hitler’s holier-than-thou approach had enormous appeal. It was as if his self-denial was a sacrifice made on behalf of all Germans—while they did their best to drown their sorrows, the little Austrian was dedicating every waking hour to the welfare of the nation.

In 1933, Hitler assumed totalitarian powers and set to fashioning his new Reich in accordance with his ideals. His chosen tools were
gleichschaltung
(“synchronizing”), eugenics, and militarism. The
gleichschaltung
policy involved the elimination of non-Nazi organizations, including trade unions and other political parties, and the institution of various Nazi youth and cultural programs in their stead. The eugenics program focused on sterilization. Hitler had declared in his autobiography,
Mein Kampf,
that “whoever is not bodily and spiritually healthy and worthy, shall not have the right to pass on the suffering in the body of his children.” Alcoholics were considered to belong to this caste of undesirables and were included as a category within the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, which decreed “whoever suffers from severe alcoholism can be sterilized.” An initial quota of 10,000 alcoholics, out of a estimated total of 410,000 “defectives,” was set. The sterilization program did not achieve its targets—it was supplanted by genocide—but several thousand irredeemable drunks were nonetheless neutered. Hamburg was the most dangerous place for hard drinkers to live: “By 1935, 561 (or 41 percent) out of the 1,364 biologically defective persons who had been sterilized were severe alcoholics.”

Undesirable citizens who did not quite merit sterilization were sent to concentration camps. These were managed by Heinrich Himmler, dry Obergruppenführer of the SS, and commenced operations in March 1933. Here Jews, gypsies, Mormons, homosexuals, trade unionists, and avid drinkers could be detained indefinitely, for no cause. Each group of deviants was labeled with a colored triangle. Alcoholics wore a black one. They formed a small minority of inmates, for as Hitler consolidated his power over Germany his propagandists succeeded in attaching a mild stigma to drinking. Booze was painted as a threat to education—a poison that might impede the training of young Germans. “The Educational Principles of the New Germany,” published in a Nazi women’s glossy (1937), advocated abstinence for the warriors in waiting: “The idea of the healthy and strong German should not be mere empty talk. Parents can help here. They will train our youth in simplicity and cleanliness. They will train them, even when they are older, not to waste their spare time by dubious or even harmful activities such as card playing, drinking alcohol, and bad music, but rather to prepare their bodies for their future tasks.”

The future tasks the article had in mind were martial. In 1938 Hitler forced Austria into unification with Germany and annexed parts of Czechoslovakia.
Time
magazine made him man of the year. In 1939 he followed up by occupying Prague and invading Poland, an ally of both Britain and France, thus precipitating World War II. As France prepared for war, considerable attention was paid to ensuring that its soldiers would receive the all-important wine or
pinard
ration. By 1939 its reputation as a military beverage had been inflated to heroic proportions. Pinard, it was believed, had saved France in the last war, and a regular supply of wine would be vital to national survival in the forthcoming conflict. A lobbying organization was established to promote this notion, and it staged a gala in November 1939, attended by Parisian high society and various government ministers, at which soldiers were served warm and aromatic pinard from vats by models dressed in French blue. In 1940, only weeks before the fighting commenced, the French Chamber of Deputies was advised that “wine, the pride of France, is a symbol of strength; it is associated with warlike virtues,” and it was predicted that the beer-drinking Germans would have no chance against the poilus. The deputies took heed and earmarked transport to ensure enough wine got to where it was needed. Over a third of all railroad cars designed to carry liquid in bulk were requisitioned for the carriage of pinard, much of which, in the event, was abandoned to the Germans shortly after its arrival at the front.

France folded against the Nazi blitzkrieg within two months. In the scramble for excuses, the wine ration was singled out for special abuse. France had failed because its soldiers had been drunk at critical moments. Under the terms of its armistice, the country was divided into occupied and unoccupied zones. The Germans took back the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine outright and occupied north and northwestern France and its entire Atlantic coast. The remaining 40 percent of the country was left under the
Vichy
regime of Marshal Philippe Pétain. Vichy France moved quickly against drinking. Pétain, who had written eulogies to pinard prior to the war, now blamed alcoholism for “undermining the will of the army.” In August 1940 the sale of booze was prohibited “in cafés and restaurants on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.” The same laws also introduced, for the first time in French history, a minimum drinking age: No one under fourteen was permitted to consume alcohol.

More repressive legislation followed. In September 1941 drinking places were divided into five categories, ranging from those that sold no alcohol, through cafés offering beer and wine, to full-service bars. No new examples of this last category could be opened at all, and severe quotas were placed on all establishments serving drinks. In 1943 more legislation was introduced to aid enforcement: Prefects could close a café for up to three months and the secretary of the interior for up to a year “to preserve order and health.” In consequence of these measures, the number of drinking places in Vichy France fell by a third between 1940 and the end of the war.

While the Vichy regime was denying wine to its own countrymen, the Germans who occupied France were helping themselves to it. They associated drinking with victory, rather than defeat, and shortly after the armistice Nazi agents were appointed for the Burgundy, Bordeaux, and Champagne regions. Their duties were to source fine wines for the German administration and its armed forces. Between them they managed to extract an average of nearly nine hundred thousand bottles a day for the duration of the occupation. Producers in each of the regions were obliged to sell their vintages to them at debased rates of exchange. Demand was vast, especially for champagne. More than two million bottles of it had been looted in the first fortnight of the occupation alone—a notable exception to the German policy of behaving well in occupied France. The agent selected for the Champagne region, Otto Klaebisch, was expected to source a further half-million bottles per week.

Resistance, overt and covert, was immediate. Faced with the choice of selling their stocks of vintage champagne to the Germans, or relabeling the 1939, which was almost undrinkable, as “Special Cuvée for the Wehrmacht” they chose the latter course. François Taittinger, of the eponymous producer, was imprisoned for selling champagne so bad it tasted like “fizzy ditch water” to the Reich. He did not help his case by riposting, “Who cares? It’s not as if it’s going to be drunk by people who know anything about champagne!” when accused of the crime. His spirit was typical of the district. Since champagne was used to celebrate fresh Nazi victories, the destination to which it was shipped served as a clue as to where they would strike next. The French resistance passed this information on to British intelligence, who were warned of the impending North African campaign when they received the news in late 1941 that thousands of cases of fizz had been requisitioned for “a very hot country.”

A similar spirit of defiance prevailed in Bordeaux and Burgundy. Whenever possible, trash wine was substituted for good, or barrels were drained of their vintages and filled with water before they were sent to Germany. Producers hid their best wine—in caves, under wood-piles, in walled-up cellars. They also sheltered Jews, a number of whom had owned vineyards in Bordeaux. Nazi policies toward Jews were applied in France: Their property was confiscated, or
Aryanized,
and they themselves were deported to concentration camps. The Vichy regime itself “Aryanized” several important Jewish-owned estates, notably those of Baron Philippe de Rothschild, proprietor of Château Lafitte and Château Mouton Rothschild, although this step was taken to keep them under nominally French control.

The years 1939-41 were bad vintages in most French regions on account of the weather. Moreover, yields were low, so that in order to maintain their quotas producers were forced to sell their reserves. Delicacies such as Pol Roger ’28 were shipped to Germany, from whence they were dispersed to combat zones and private cellars. The redistribution of French wine was managed by Herman Goering, who was all for wringing France dry of its last drop of “bottled sunshine”: “In the old days, the rule was plunder. Now, outward forms have become more humane. Nevertheless, I intend to plunder, and plunder copiously.” He accumulated more than ten thousand bottles of prime French vintages (some of which was “ditchwater” relabeled) for his own cellar. The rest was directed to fellow officers in the Luftwaffe, the Werhmacht, and the
Shutzstaffel,
or SS.

The SS were the executors of the Holocaust. In late 1941, the Nazis adopted a program of genocide against Jews and other
untermenschen
(“subhumans”): “The Führer has ordered that the Jewish question be solved once and for all and that we, the SS, are to implement that order.” Initially, massacres were carried out with firearms. Women, children, and those too old to be used for slave labor were machine-gunned in batches and buried in communal graves. The work, however, sickened even the Aryan volunteers detailed to carry out the task. According to a Nazi report, “Many members of the Einsatzkommandos [SS death squads], unable to endure wading through blood any longer, had committed suicide. Some had even gone mad. Most of the members of these kommandos had to rely on alcohol when carrying out their horrible work.”

The death squads were not the only wing of the SS to try to drown their humanity with drink. A portion of the vintages commandeered from France was supplied to the officials of concentration camps, where the process of exterminating
untermenschen
was expedited by the use of gas chambers. The selection of victims for the chambers was carried out by qualified doctors, who also supervised their operation and in some cases provided death certificates. The inconsistency of such activities with the Hippocratic oath need not be elaborated. According to their own accounts, doctors had to drink heavily in order to dull their feelings: “The selections [of people to be gassed] were mostly an ordeal. Namely to stand all night. And it wasn’t just standing all night—but the next day was completely ruined because one got drunk every time. . . . A certain number of bottles were provided for each section and everybody drank and toasted the others. . . . One could not stay out of it.” Auschwitz doctors also drank deep when off duty. The officers’ club was stocked with champagne and cognac, and they used these to acclimatize newcomers to the total absence of ethics. One old hand recalled the process: After a few glasses, an Auschwitz debutante would ask, “How can these things be done here?” Then there was something like a general answer . . . which clarified everything. “What is better for him [the prisoner]—whether he croaks in shit or goes to heaven in [a cloud of] gas?”

Great Britain was the last European bastion against the Nazis. Throughout 1940 and 1941 it was attacked by waves of German bombers whose aim was to kill and cow as many civilians as possible, as much as to destroy military targets or attain the air superiority deemed necessary for an invasion. Shipping convoys carrying essential supplies to Britain were likewise bombed from the air, and torpedoed by German submarines, resulting in the imposition of rationing for the entire nation. As had been the case in World War I, austerity measures were introduced to preserve grain for food instead of brewing. This time, however, such measures recognized that alcohol could help morale on the home front. This more relaxed attitude toward drink was embodied in the figure of Sir Winston Churchill, who explained his philosophy thus: “My rule of life prescribe[s] as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars and also the drinking of alcohol before, after, and if need be during all meals and in the intervals between them.” Churchill usually began each day with a glass of champagne,
⁶⁶
or a weak whisky and water. He drank wine with his lunch and dinner, and more whisky and water in between times. Despite the steady intake, he was seldom intoxicated, indeed, expressed his abhorrence for the state: “My father taught me to have the utmost contempt for people who get drunk.”