THE WEINFÜHRER
In 1940, the Reich appoints Heinz Bömers — a German wine merchant, twenty years a friend of France's great châteaux — to plunder them as their conqueror. He spends four years quietly conspiring with French cellar masters to hide thousands of bottles instead. At Liberation, the Allies nearly kill him for being German. The French save his life.
The false cellar walls. The two sets of ledgers. The first growths relabeled as table wine. The Rothschild girl hidden on a Médoc farm. The young French sergeant who found France's stolen wine in Hitler's own cellar.
Heinz Bömers was the real Weinführer of occupied Bordeaux. An original screenplay drawn from the public historical record.
The film opens in May 1945, high in the Bavarian Alps, where a young French sergeant blows open the cellar beneath Hitler's Kehlsteinhaus and finds rack after rack of France's stolen wine.
Five years earlier, Berlin appoints Heinz Bömers — a Bremen merchant who has bought from these châteaux for twenty years — as Weinführer, with absolute authority over the region's cellars and orders to strip them for the Reich. Heinz accepts. Then, quietly, he does the opposite: false partitions in the cellars, one ledger for Berlin and one for the truth, relabeled table wine shipped north while the first growths sleep in the dark. Discovery means execution.
In the château above the cellars lives a six-year-old girl. Heinz meets her once, among her dolls, and promises to leave her out of his book. Every choice he makes for the next four years is priced against that promise. Her mother, Baroness Elisabeth de Rothschild, believes her Catholic name protects her. It does not — and in June 1944 the Gestapo take her in front of her daughter, one officer's private mercy all that leaves the child behind.
At Liberation, the Resistance sees only a German. The men who save Heinz's life are the Frenchmen he spent four years protecting — and in Hitler's mountain cellar, one bottle with the wrong crimp tells the audience what no one in the film will ever know: the conspiracy reached all the way to the top of the world.
Heinz Bömers
Handed the keys to the cellars he spent twenty years learning to love. Chooses the wine, and the people, over the flag — and risks execution to do it.
Marcel
Builds the false walls and keeps the second ledger. At Liberation, his word is the only thing standing between Heinz and a firing squad.
Baroness Elisabeth de Rothschild
Refuses her seat beside the German ambassador's wife — a gesture the occupiers do not forget. Her courage is quiet, absolute, and costly.
Philippine de Rothschild
Raised on a farm under her mother's maiden name. She waits out the war on a stone wall — and ends the film as the keeper of the conspiracy's secret.
Colonel Vogler
The most dangerous man in his orbit — a mentor whose true allegiance stays hidden until it matters. What he chooses not to report keeps Heinz alive.
Lukas
Sees everything from the front seat, learning across four years what his country has become. When Heinz stays to face the FFI, Lukas stays too.
Dufour
Sells his neighbours' wine to the Germans at three times the price — then appears at Liberation in a fresh tricolore armband to denounce Heinz.
Sgt. Bernard de Nonancourt
A young soldier marching across Europe with a list of France's stolen bottles, who opens and closes the story inside Hitler's mountain cellar.
“They mourn the glass. They forget the vine.”