Noshing on delicious foods may possibly audio like a desire occupation — but not if it could cause you to fall dead at any moment.
That was the risky truth for a group of 15 younger German girls, who were being utilized for 2½ many years in the 1940s by the Nazis as Adolph Hitler’s flavor testers.
A new off-Broadway show called “H*tler’s Tasters,” which operates at Theatre Row by Might 21, is influenced by the tiny-regarded troop, one of whom last but not least informed her harrowing tale in 2013 at age 95.
“Young ladies, forced to be in a home together, with absolutely nothing else to distract them except for the point that they could die at just about every meal,” playwright Michelle Kholos Brooks, instructed The Submit. “If that is not a condition ripe for drama, I really do not know what is.”
Added the writer: “Just when you think you have listened to just about every frickin’ terrible detail about Hitler.”
Margot Wölk, who died in 2014, was a secretary when she commenced functioning from her will as one particular of the gourmand guinea pigs at 24 a long time previous.
Following her parents’ Berlin apartment was destroyed by Allied bombs, she moved to Gross-Partsch (now Parcz, Poland) to remain with her mother-in-regulation. Her husband Karl was at war. She had misplaced contact with him and believed him to be useless.
Her life shattered, Wölk was rapidly selected by the town’s mayor to be a food taster for the close by “Wolf’s Lair” — the Nazis’ headquarters on the Eastern Front. Females had been introduced on after the Nazis grew to become certain that the British wished to poison Hitler. In 1944, Claus von Stauffenberg’s Operation Valkyrie — a unsuccessful endeavor to assassinate Hitler and wrest manage of Germany from the Nazis — regarded poisoning as a tactic, but scuttled that prepare due to the fact they knew of the tasters.
Wölk, however, claimed afterwards that she was no Nazi. She had previously prevented joining the League of German Girls and secretly hated Hitler. But, becoming watched more than by the SS, she experienced tiny option but to try to eat up.
“The foodstuff was very good — very good,” Wölk instructed the German newspaper Der Spiegel soon after six decades of silence. “But we could not get pleasure from it.”
Wölk and the ladies tried the delicious foods, which have been exceptional for a continent ravaged by war, from 11 a.m. to noon. And, simply because Hitler was a vegetarian, there was no meat ever. “The very best vegetables, asparagus, bell pepper, anything you can picture and generally with a aspect of rice or pasta,” she mentioned in an AP interview. “It was very delicious, but the panic which arrived with the food.”
She added: “Some of the women started out to drop tears as they commenced having since they ended up so afraid. We experienced to take in it all up. Then we had to hold out an hour, and every time we were being frightened that we had been likely to be sick. We employed to cry like pet dogs since we ended up so happy to have survived.”
None of the 15 at any time succumbed to poisoning.
While they ended up only required to get the job done even though Hitler was in residence, they also never ever saw the führer on their own — only his Alsatian canine named Blondi.
1 working day in 1944, as the Soviet Army approached Gross-Partsch, Wölk fled to Berlin by using educate — a risky move that would in the end help save her lifetime. The other 14 tasters, she later on learned, were shot lifeless by the Soviets.
Nevertheless, her trauma wasn’t around. When she arrived at the metropolis, she was apprehended by Soviet soldiers and raped for 14 days — so violently that she could no longer bear small children.
Wölk’s lifestyle improved when she acquired that her partner had not died right after all, and the couple reunited in 1946. She attempted to put the nightmarish experience powering her until finally a journalist approached her on her 95th birthday, just in excess of a 12 months ahead of she died.
Talking about her struggle, the girl mentioned it was her determined, positive frame of mind that saved her alive.
“I did not shed my humor,” she told Der Spiegel. “That was often my trick to survival.”
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