History – Margot Wölk, Adolf Hitler's Food Taster

Margot Wölk

While researching food tasters, especially medieval royal ones, I stumbled across Margot Wölk, who had been one of Adolf Hitler’s food tasters.

I guess if I’d thought about it, it would have been obvious that someone like Hitler would have food tasters, but that had never occurred to me.

Margot Wölk, whose surname was sometimes spelled ‘Woelk’, was born on the 27th of December 1917 in Wilmersdorf, in Berlin.

It appears that the Wölk family were not supporters of the Nazi Party; despite the harsh ridicule he was subjected to, her father refused to join the party and Margot didn’t join the League of German Girls, which was the girl’s section of the Hitler Youth.

In 1939, she and her husband, Karl, had a hurried marriage before he was deployed with the Wehrmacht.

Margot with husband Karl (spiegel.de)

Working as a secretary, Margot was forced to leave her Berlin home when RAF bombs damaged the roof of her apartment building.

It had been 2 years since she’d heard from her husband, and she assumed he was dead.

Leaving Berlin in 1942, she travelled to her in-laws’ home in Gross-Partsch, East Prussia (now Parcz in Poland), arriving there in September.

Margot Wölk in the garden of her mother-in-law’s house (mdig.com.br)

Unbeknownst to Margot, she was now living barely 6 miles away from Rastenburg, the Eastern Front headquarters of Adolf Hitler.

Also known as ‘Wolfsschanze’, or the Wolf’s Lair, the heavily defended complex had been built in 1941 to oversee Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Adolf Hitler's Bunker in ‘Wolfsschanze’, or the Wolf’s Lair (Wikipedia)

When the order came that the Führer required food testers, the local mayor chose 15 young women, including Margot, who were then taken to the nearby village of Krausendorf (now Kruszewiec, Poland) where Hitler’s meals were prepared.

The women were driven there 5 days a week by bus in time for the tasting which took place between 11:00 and 12:00.

Having endured less-than-appetizing rations, the food now placed before these women must have been unimaginably delicious and bursting with flavour.

Although there was no meat and fish – apparently Hitler believed it would be easier to poison him with meat or fish – the vegetables and fruit were only the freshest and the best.

Each day, the women sat around a big table in front of plates heaped with the food prepared for that day, which included rice, noodles, and dumplings, so they didn’t go hungry.

Despite that, those meals can’t have been enjoyable; they must have been constantly plagued with fear that the next spoonful might be the one laced with poison.

Once it had been confirmed the food was safe, it was packed into crates and taken to the main headquarters by members of the ‘Schutzstaffel’, more commonly known as the SS.

According to Margot, she never met Hitler although she would see him in a field near the house playing with his beloved dog.

The 20th of July 1944 marked a turning point in the lives of the food testers and many Germans.

This was the day Operation Valkyrie was implemented, which was supposed to begin with the assassination of Hitler.

Operation Valkyrie was originally an emergency continuity of government operations plan issued to Germany’s Territorial Reserve Army to execute and implement.

But a few German Army officers had modified it, intending to use it to take control of German cities, disarm the SS, and arrest the Nazi leadership once Hitler had been assassinated.

Hitler’s death, as opposed to his arrest, was imperative as that would free German soldiers from their oath of loyalty.

One of the key players was Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Staufffenberg whose position as Chief of Staff of the Reserve Army gave him access to Hitler.

Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg (1907-1944) (Wikipedia)

Colonel Stauffenberg (L), Wilhelm Keitel (R) at Rastenburg 15 July 1944 (Wikipedia)

Although he had agreed with the Nazi Party’s nationalistic aspects, he had come to believe Hitler was losing the war, and he disagreed with the criminal character of the dictatorship.

After he and his fellow conspirators failed to find other officers who had access to Hitler to carry out the assassination, Stauffenberg decided he would do it.

However, he was also required to be at the Berlin headquarters for the implementation of Valkyrie; taking responsibility for both phases greatly reduced the chance of success.

On the 20th of July, the day Stauffenberg chose for the assassination attempt, a last-minute change of plan meant he only had time to arm 1 of the 2 bombs.

The military conferences usually took place in the concrete bunker, but the stifling temperature of the hot summer day led to the location being changed to Albert Speer’s wooden hut.

If the bomb had gone off inside the concrete bunker, it was highly likely the concussion blast would have killed Hitler.

In the briefing room, Stauffenberg placed the briefcase which held the bomb under the table, as close to Hitler as he could.

After a few minutes, he excused himself and left the room, which meant he had no way of knowing when another officer moved the briefcase, placing it behind the thick oak leg of the table.

When the bomb detonated, Stauffenberg believed none could have survived, and quickly drove, with his aide-de-camp, to a nearby airfield and left for Berlin.

The bomb had killed 4 people, injuring most of the survivors.

Damaged hut after the bomb blast 20 July 1944 (Wikipedia)

But the Führer had been shielded from the blast by the solid table leg and was only slightly wounded.

And his vengeance was terrible.

Hitler would use the 20th of July assassination plot as an excuse to destroy anyone he believed opposed him.

Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators were captured and executed.

More than 200 Germans were condemned in show trials and executed.

This purge would eventually result in over 20,000 Germans dead or sent to concentration camps.

The lives of Margot and her fellow food testers were also impacted.

Instead of being allowed home each day, they were ordered to stay in an empty school building, even when Hitler wasn’t at the Wolf’s Lair, and only allowed home at the weekends.

The women were guarded by the SS the entire time.

By the autumn of that same year, rumours reached those at the Wolf’s Lair that the Russian Army had breached the Eastern Front.

Luckily for Margot, she’d made a good friend who was an army officer, not an SS man.

He told her to leave as soon as she could as the Russians were only a few miles away and they would, most likely, punish all those in the Führer’s employ, even the food testers.

She packed her suitcase and fled to the train station, making her way back to Berlin.

There, she had to go into hiding to avoid being found by the SS as she’d had no authorisation to leave the Wolf’s Lair.

It was her mother’s old doctor who saved her life, allowing her to hide in his house.

However, Margot didn’t escape unscathed.

When the Soviet Army reached Berlin, she was found by soldiers and held for 14 days and nights, repeatedly raped by the drunk soldiers.

The horrific ordeal left her unable to bear children.

Storming the Reichstag - Vassili Subbotin (daily mail)

But there was good to come.

In early 1946, a uniformed man came to her door whom she didn’t recognise.

It was her husband, Karl.

He’d been captured by the Russians and had spent 2 years in a prisoner-of-war camp.

Back in their apartment, which Margot had had to leave in 1942 because of bomb damage, Karl was devastated when he learned what Margot had been through, and they were heartbroken when they learned they’d never have children.

But they’d both survived, found one another again, and remained happily together until Karl’s death in 1980.

Margot also found out just how lucky she had been.

Soon after the war, she met her army officer friend again, the one who’d told her to leave the Wolf’s Lair, and he had shocking news for her – her fellow food testers, all 14 of them, had been shot by the Russian army.

In the years to come, constantly plagued by nightmares of her experiences during the war, Margot never talked about her time as a food tester.

In December 2012, on her 95th birthday, still living in that same apartment, she had a visit from a journalist from the daily newspaper, ‘Berliner Zeitung’.

As he asked her questions about her life, she suddenly decided it was time to speak of what she called, ‘the worst years of her life’.

Margot Wölk died in April 2014, aged 96.

It never fails to amaze me, how a chance change in circumstances alters someone’s life so much.

Although I wish she’d never had to go through such a thing, I’m grateful that Margot Wölk spoke of her time as Hitler’s food tester or we’d never have known much, if anything, of what those women had gone through.