The story is almost too compelling to be true: a group of war-weary young women, long deprived of sufficient food, are herded together to dine on abundant vegetarian delicacies three times a day. The only price: risking their lives with each bite as they may have consumed deadly poison intended forAdolf Hitler.
The extraordinary account by then 95-year-old Margot Wölk created a sensation when itfirst appeared in a Berlin tabloidmore than a decade ago. Her decision to break what she called decades of silence about her wartime experiences captured the imagination ofGerman reporters, thenglobal media, finally inspiring adocumentary,two novelsanda play.
This month, a movie “based on a true story”, will be released in German cinemas, reviving fascination with the curious tale of Wölk and her “colleagues”, as she called them.
The Tasters is based on a 2018 Italian historical fiction novel by Rosella Postorino, translated into English as At the Wolf’s Table. Italian director Silvio Soldini said he approached the material as rooted in fact and liked that it turned a spotlight on to a rare women-centred narrative in the still booming market for films about the second world war and the Holocaust.
“It was quite unusual – telling for once a storyabout war and violence, without focusing on the man at war,” Soldini said. “Instead we show how these women are affected, in this ‘small’ world in which they are forced to do something awful: constantly play Russian roulette for more than one year.”
In Soldini’s film, the protagonist Rosa traces the rough outlines of Wölk’s stranger-than-fiction story, in which Hitler is never seen but whose shadow looms large.
The secretary in her mid-20s flees her war-damaged flat in Berlin for her in-laws’ modest house in East Prussia, in today’s Poland – a refuge that happens to be just down the road from Hitler’s heavily guardedWolf’s Lair military headquarters.
With her soldier husband missing on the eastern front, Rosa and the elderly couple scrape by on the meagre bounty from their small garden until one day SS officers arrive and bundle her off in a bus.
Suddenly she is surrounded by a group of “healthy” young German women – all single or widowed – who are presented with an opulent meat-free feast prepared by a chef in a starched white uniform. But they soon learn there’s a terrifying catch.
“There was never meat because Hitler was a vegetarian,” Wölk told German media in 2013. “The food was good – very good. But we couldn’t enjoy it.”
Wölk said she and 14 other women – in the film the group is half that size – spent more than two years forced to work as food tasters for Hitler, forming a tightknit sisterhood in circumstances beyond their control.
During that time, fears for the Führer’s life in his inner circle hurtled between the risk of a poisoning attempt by the allies and the paranoia touched off bythe narrowly failed 20 July 1944 German officers’ bombing plot at the Wolf’s Lair.
When the Soviet army finally came closing in, Wölk said she escaped with the help of a Nazi officer on a train to Berlin – scenes suspensefully dramatised in the film. She made it back to the devastated capital alive but later heard that all 14 of her “colleagues” were shot by the Red Army troops.
Postorino’s novel, which has not been translated into German, and Soldini’s film largely adhere to Wölk’s spectacular story, while adding flourishes including an affair with a Nazi officer.
Scholars have produced detailed accounts of Hitler’s 800 days at the Wolf’s Lair including his legume-heavy diet sweetened by plentiful fruit-topped cakes. As he was teetotal, alcohol wasverbotenin favour of mineral water and the occasional cup of coffee.
Journalist and historian Felix Bohr, who has just published Vor dem Untergang: Hitlers Jahre in der Wolfsschanze (Before the Downfall: Hitler’s Years in the Wolf’s Lair), says that as gripping as Wölk’s story is, there is “no evidence” beyond her interviews that it is true.
“I spent three years in the archives researching Hitler’s time there and none of the accounts of secretaries, cooks, servants, military staff or other people who were there – up to 2,000 at a given time – mentioned a team of women food tasters,” he said.
“The Wolf’s Lair was the most high-security place in all of the so-called Third Reich and so what you did have was an elaborate system to protect the food supply including strict rules for shipping and storage as well as inspections of everything allowed in the restricted zone.”
Bohr is at pains to stress that he found no concrete proof that Wölk’s account was untrue, nor did he believe she had wilfully lied in her last years until her death in 2014.
“Of course memories 70 years after the war can be deceptive – we’re all marked by the stories we’ve read and seen on television. It’s very possible she was bussed for work duty, something the Nazis did with women all the time. But I think scepticism is called for with the rest of the story.”
As for the lavish meals, Bohr said his research had turned up frequent complaints by visitors to Hitler’s hidden enclave about the “bland” menu often consisting of bean soup, boiled vegetables and potatoes.
Fellow journalist and author Sven Felix Kellerhofffirst raised doubts about Wölk’s story in 2014, noting that Hitler employed two dedicated cooks, both women, who sampled the food for taste and would have been stricken had any fast-acting poison been slipped in.
Actor Elisa Schlott, 31, who plays Rosa in the film, says she wasn’t troubled by doubts about the specific veracity of Wölk’s account because her story of suffering and survival remains powerful, especially asyounger Germans today help lift the far-right AfD to record heights in the polls.
She says she was “shocked” to learn about the strong support for the Nazis among women at the time “although it was a misogynistic party. It reminded me of today’s‘tradwives’ on social mediawho do everything for their husbands – maybe a similar kind of backlash against progress.”
She speculates that Wölk’s wartime ordeal might have distorted her memories in old age.
“I see no reason why she would have made it up,” she says. “On the other hand, traumatic experiences in war have an impact on the brain, which is why we can’t be 100% sure.
“But this isn’t a film about Hitler,” Schlott says. “It’s about these women and the community they built under the dark cloud of the Nazi period.”
Soldini, 66, said nearly half a million people had seen the film in Italy since its release in late March – respectable for an arthouse picture in German with a little-known cast. It also didbrisk business at the Berlin film festival’s European Film Marketin February, selling in several international territories.
People are still drawn to war dramas, Soldini says, particularly now in a fraught age “in which the world seems nearer to this story than it was even two or three years ago”.
The director chooses to believe Wölk’s story is true. “But if it wasn’t, it doesn’t make much difference to me. The film and the book say something important about power, dictatorship, violence and their impact on women.”