A Jewish Winemaker in Nazi Germany

Written by Ruth Landy

Photos by Landy Family Archive

Heinrich and Erna Levy on honeymoon in Switzerland in June 1914.

I deeply miss a man I never had a chance to meet: Heinrich Levy, my Jewish grandfather, a winemaker in Germany’s Rhineland during the 1920s and ’30s. He had a passion for his trade and the Rhineland’s bucolic landscapes, perfect for grape growing.

After a successful decade in the business, my grandfather’s world started collapsing after Hitler came to power in the early 1930s. As anti-Semitic persecution accelerated in Germany, he became gravely ill with cancer. Heinrich died in November 1938, age 63, in a Jewish hospital in Frankfurt. It was the month of Kristallnacht (the night of shattered glass), a nationwide pogrom of terror against Jews.

There’s so much I wanted to learn from him. What world did my grandfather inhabit as a Jew in the German wine trade in the years before World War II? It’s one that seems to have vanished, decimated by the Holocaust, with a web search for information yielding meager results.

But I had a trove of precious records that might bring what was lost back to life. I pulled out the old photographs and vintage postcards from the family’s well-worn album, along with my father, Ernest’s, hand- typed recollections. I spoke to my aunt Sue, the last living family member with firsthand experience of the Nazi era. If I could delve into my grandfather’s winemaker past, its joys and sorrows, perhaps I could recapture a buried part of my own identity. This is our story, about wine, place, family, religious identity and fascism. It’s the first time it’s being shared in public.

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The southwest corner of Germany, known as the Rhineland or Pfalz, is best known for its turbulent history and scenic geography. Traversed by the Rhine river, it’s a storybook landscape. Well-kept villages are surrounded by terraced vineyards producing some of Europe’s greatest white wines. Its food and wine culture closely mirrors that of Alsace in neighboring France. Riesling is the region’s preeminent white wine grape, prized for its intense aromas, high acidity and full body. Capable of aging for decades, it has a remarkable range, from bone dry to richly sweet dessert wines, reflecting differences in terroir and vinification.

Jews had lived in the Rhineland for as long as anyone could remember. They first accompanied Caesar’s Roman legions as they swept northward, supplying them with food and goods. We have written records of our family’s presence there going back to the mid-19th century. Our family were Reform Jews who attended Landau’s stately synagogue. Heinrich sat on the council and Sue sang in the choir.

A postcard from the Rhineland, where the storybook landscape was popular among locals and travelers.

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Heinrich and his older brother Hermann opened their wine business in the market town of Landau shortly after Germany’s humiliating defeat in World War I. With prices depressed the brothers were able to afford a property with two apartments, office space, cellars to store and age their wine, and good transportation access. Heinrich moved in with his beloved wife Erna, and that’s where they raised their family while also running the business.

The Levy brothers’ beginnings in the wine trade were humble: traveling by bicycle to surrounding villages, tasting local wines and carrying back samples in small bottles to share with interested buyers. Jews couldn’t own agricultural land in my grandfather’s time, but they had long been winemakers, fermenting, blending and aging grapes they bought, and seeking buyers for the finished wine.

The brothers named their firm “Hermann Levy — Landau (Pfalz).” My grandfather had a way with people, so he did most of the selling, visiting clients twice a year. The Levy brothers were best known as wholesale suppliers of quality, unpretentious white wines meant for daily drinking. Their offerings ranged from light-bodied table wines such as Liebfrauenmilch to refined Rieslings from the northern Pfalz where the most prestigious estates are located.

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“The harvest in autumn was the most colorful season at home. Horse-drawn wagons came through the iron gate into our courtyard, laden with grapes. The workers used pitchforks to lift the fruit into big metal baskets strapped to their backs. It was like a scene out of the Middle Ages.”—Childhood memories of Heinrich Levy’s daughter Sue

At harvest time, Heinrich, a family man, became all business: “During that period, my father was totally focused on which grapes to buy, waiting for them to arrive and making sure they were immediately put into the hydraulic press,” Ernest remembered. Winemaking permeated the home atmosphere. “There was a very distinctive smell, the odor of grapes as they begin to turn. It was nice and musty, a smell one can never forget!”

Once the grapes had been pressed, the juice was immediately put in barrels and left to ferment in a large underground cellar at the bottom of the garden. Heinrich and Hermann regularly sampled their wines as they aged. The cool, dark cellar contained a variety of wines, and clients could order special blends for their customers. The key was knowing when to stop the fermentation process to achieve optimum sugar and alcohol levels. Winemakers were permitted to add sugar to their wines but had to record this on their labels.

“It was always a matter of great interest to measure the sugar content of the wine at harvest-time using special instruments which determined the level immediately,” Ernest recalled. “There were stories of people going to jail in Landau for misrepresentation. It was always bad when a case like this was discovered, because it risked giving the town and region a bad name. But the family firm was always above reproach and proud of it.”

Trust in a wine salesman was critical in a trade where the product itself could be so easily adulterated.

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Anti-Semitism ebbed and flowed through German history over the centuries, and wine fraud was an ongoing industry challenge. Wine growers and politicians in the late 19th century were quick to identify the source of the problem: the Jews. In 1884, Germany’s largest wine trade publication, Deutsche Weinzeitung, published a piece saying “[the] greatest threat to vintners is not from the legion of vineyard enemies: fungi...natural disasters, vine diseases... Rather, the vintners’ greatest enemy is the two- legged pest, the winemaker without grapes.” This Jewish enemy “practices his trade in the darkness of a cellar or laboratory,” threatening the livelihood of hardworking, honest German vintners, according to a story titled “Reaping the Judenfrage,” by Kevin D. Goldberg for the spring 2013 edition of Agricultural History.

In the late 1920s, the same tropes returned with ferocity as Germany faced economic devastation and political turmoil. Still, the family business prospered for most of the decade. Then the stock market crashed in 1929, Hitler entered national politics and established a Nazi dictatorship in 1933. That’s when Heinrich and Hermann started losing customers due to economic boycotts and mounting anti-Semitism.

“Since the name of the business was ‘Hermann Levy’ my father and uncle thought about how to change it,” Ernest recalled. “They found a defunct business called Herman Lehr, which they adopted as another label. The people who bought the wine knew very well where it came from but maybe they preferred having bottles on their shelves with a non-Jewish-sounding name.”

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It was the Nazis who invented modern German wine culture in the 1930s. That’s the bold thesis of Peter Jacob, a German wine historian and oenologist, in a July 2010 piece for The Wine Rambler. Jacob shines a light on the Nazi regime’s appropriation of agriculture as the backbone of the nation. The farming sector, including viticulture, was brought under party control with the appointment of “farmers leaders” at all levels working within a powerful new organization, the Reichsnährstand or Imperial Agricultural Estate.

In 1934, a hot, dry year resulted in dramatic over- production by German vineyards. Hitler seized on this to develop a nationwide campaign to increase sales via a weeklong Festival of German Grape and Wine. This enabled the Nazis to market German wines as part of their “blood and soil” ideology that would later be appropriated by white supremacists in the U.S., notably during their deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. It was one that depicted rural farmers as protectors of German purity against urbanized, inferior Jews. Wine festivals were reestablished in Germany in the 1950s and they remain a major draw for tourists and locals alike.

Though still a teenager, it was Ernest who saw the Nazi threat most clearly, beseeching his elders to heed the danger: “I vividly remember family reunions where my uncles, as well as my own father, paid little attention to what a youngster like myself had to say about the grim prospects facing us all.”

As sales in the family business continued spiraling downward, Heinrich’s health was deteriorating. When my father’s emigration visa came through in April 1937, he carried a list of family wines his father had given him on his ocean crossing to New York. It was a last-ditch effort to generate sales in America as firms like theirs were being ruined in Germany.

The brothers realized that they had no choice but to sell the business. On Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938, violence against Jews broke out across the Reich. My grandmother went to visit her dying husband in the hospital and learned all the Jewish doctors had been arrested. The beautiful synagogue in Landau was burnt to the ground. There was only one small ray of light in that dark month: The family property survived intact after a longtime employee stood outside the front gate, preventing looters from entering. Two weeks later, my grandfather died. The business was wound down and the property sold at a steep loss to a local produce merchant, and later to a businessman. He made sauerkraut, and used the cellar for its production.

Ernest Levy carried a list of the family’s wine with him when he fled Nazi Germany for the U.S. in 1937.

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Erna miraculously survived the Holocaust, settling in California to be close to Sue’s family. My grandmother continued observing Jewish traditions till the end of her life.

I remember visiting her modest one-bedroom apart- ment near the university campus in Berkeley. On Fri- days, she would prepare a special sabbath dinner to observe the holy day. Before the meal, she lit the can- dles and said the blessings, gesturing with her deli- cate, weathered hands: a prayer for the sabbath, for the wine and for the bread.

“Blessed are You, God, ruler of the Universe who creates the fruit of the vine.”

Professional wine tasting in Landau in the early 1900s. Almost seventy percent of the town’s merchants were Jewish according to a 1912 survey.

Heinrich’s winemaking has touched all of us, in one way or another. My cousin David is making wine from grapes on his small plot of land in Sonoma. I’m sure I owe my love of vineyard landscapes to my grandfather. I sense his presence not just in researching my past, but any time a shared glass of fine wine opens up a deep conversation. Sometimes I even have the enchanting feeling that it’s wine, not blood, that flows through my veins.

[ This story was featured in Whetstone Volume 06 ]