It seems that the goddess Fortuna accompanied Hitler on the different occasions in which he was tried to eliminate, either individually as the Swiss student Maurice Bavaud or the carpenter Georg Elser, or in perfectly orchestrated operations such as Valkyrie. Even so, and as was logical, security measures were increased, such as using tasters to taste all the Führer's food. This is the story of one of them… Margot Wölk , the only one that survived the war.
Margot
When the war started, Karl , Margot's husband, was recruited to go to the front and she, a 23-year-old secretary, was left alone in Berlin. She had not heard from her husband for two years and her apartment had been damaged by Allied bombing, so she decided to leave Berlin and take refuge in the house that her in-laws had in Gross-Partsch (today Parcz , Poland), a small town in the middle of the forest. An idyllic place with a small inconvenience... the Wolf's Lair (one of Hitler's headquarters) was about three kilometers away. Margot was able to enjoy that idyllic place for a short time because, just a few days after her arrival, several members of the SS showed up and took her and 14 other young people from the town to use them as tasters of Hitler's food. They were housed in a building near the bunker and each morning they had to taste the food that came out of the kitchens.
There was never meat because Hitler was a vegetarian. The food was very good, but we were never able to enjoy it thinking it might be poisoned.
Everything changed on July 20, 1944 when the briefcase that Colonel Van Stauffenber he had left to kill Hitler:the guard was reinforced and the tasters were removed from the complex and locked up in an old abandoned school where they only left to do their job. There she would live one of the worst moments… one night an SS officer entered the school and raped her. Margot, bite the bullet, and tried to get on with her life hiding that memory of her deep within her soul. In 1945, before the advance of the Red Army, Hitler ordered the demolition of the Wolf's Lair with explosives and they left the place. A German officer took her away from her and told her to run away from her. She margot managed to get to Berlin where she took refuge in the house of a doctor friend of hers... the SS was looking for her. In 1945 the Soviets entered Berlin, the war was over... but not for Margot:for two weeks in the hands of the Red Army, she was repeatedly raped causing such brutal injuries that she was never able to have children.
In 1946, she met the officer who had saved her life at the Wolf's Lair and told him that the rest of the catadoras had died there. She was lonely and desperate, she had no desire to live until she... she was reunited with her husband . They supported each other and were happy for 34 years. Karl passed away in 1980. On many occasions, Margot's dreams made her relive those moments but she never said anything until last winter, when she received a visit from a local journalist on the occasion of her 95th birthday, she decided to break her silence and tell her story.
Sources:Spiegel, SDPnoticias