It might have been something as simple as a portion of white asparagus. Peeled, steamed and served with a delicious sauce, as Germans traditionally eat it. And with real butter, a scarcity in wartime. While the rest of the country struggled to get even coffee, or had to spread margarine diluted with flour on their bread, Margot Wölk could have savored the expensive vegetable dish -- if not for the fear of dying, that is. Wölk was one of 15 young women who were forced to taste Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's food for some two and a half years during World War II. 
 
 The 24-year-old secretary had fled from her parents' bombed-out Berlin apartment in the winter of 1941, traveling to her mother-in-law's home in the East Prussian village of Gross-Partsch, now Parcz, Poland. It was an idyllic, green setting, and she lived in a house with a large garden. But less than three kilometers (1.9 miles) away was the location that Hitler had chosen for his Eastern Front headquarters -- the Wolf's Lair. 
 
 "The mayor of the little nest was an old Nazi," says Wölk. "I'd hardly arrived when the SS showed up at the door and demanded, 'Come with us!'" 
 
 Sitting in the same apartment in Berlin's Schmargendorf area where she was born 95 years ago, she carefully eats tiny pieces of crumb cake from a silver fork. "Delicious," she says. Wölk has learned to enjoy food again, but it wasn't easy. 
 
 Hitler's thugs brought her and the other young women to barracks in nearby Krausendorf, where cooks prepared the food for the Wolf's Lair in a two-story building. The service personnel filled platters with vegetables, sauces, noodle dishes and exotic fruits, placing them in a room with a large wooden table, where the food had to be tasted. "There was never meat because Hitler was a vegetarian," Wölk recalls. "The food was good -- very good. But we couldn't enjoy it." 
 
 Trapped at the Wolf's Lair 
 
 There were rumors that the Allies had plans to poison Hitler. After the women confirmed that the food was safe, members of the SS brought it to the main headquarters in crates. Each morning at 8 a.m., Wölk was rousted from bed by the SS, who shouted "Margot, get up!" from beneath her window. She was only needed if Hitler was actually at the Wolf's Lair, though she never actually saw him. 
 
 Thus a young woman who had refused to join the League of German Girls (BDM), the girl's version of Hitler Youth, and whose father had been hauled off for refusing to join the Nazi party, became Hitler's helper. Each day, her life was on the line for a man she deeply despised. 
 
 Flight, however, was not an option. Allied bombs had damaged her Schmargendorf apartment, which stood in knee-deep water. Her husband Karl was at war, though having heard nothing from him in two years, she had long since assumed he was dead. "Where was I supposed to go?" she asks. At least in Gross-Partsch she had her mother-in-law and her own bed. 
 
 Then July 20, 1944 arrived. A few soldiers had invited women from the area to a film showing in a tent near the headquarters, when Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg's bomb exploded. "The explosion ripped us off the wooden benches," Wölk says. Then someone yelled, "Hitler is dead!" But the assassination plot had failed. "He walked away with a few bruises," Wölk says dryly. 
 
 After that, the Nazis tightened security around the Wolf's Lair, and the tasters were no longer allowed to live at home. Instead, they were boarded in an empty school nearby. "We were guarded like caged animals," Wölk says. 
 
 Escape to Berlin 
 
 Then one night an SS officer used a ladder to get into the room where she was sleeping and raped her. She says that she remained silent during the attack. "The old pig," Wölk says, adding that she had never felt so helpless. "The next morning the ladder was still lying in front of the building." She remains quiet and matter-of-fact, saying it's important to her that her story be taken seriously. 
 
 When the Soviet army was just a few kilometers away from reaching the Wolf's Lair, a lieutenant took her aside and told her, "Go, get out of here!" He put her on a train to Berlin, and it saved her life. After the war she saw him again there, and he told her that all of the other food tasters had been shot by Soviet soldiers. 
 
 Her life was saved a second time by a Berlin doctor who took her in after she fled the Wolf's Lair. When SS soldiers showed up at his practice searching for the fugitive, he lied to them and they left. 
 
 As she returned to Schmargendorf, however, she fell into the hands of the Soviet army. For two weeks, they raped her repeatedly, inflicting such brutal injuries that she was never able to bear children. She pauses at the painful memory. "I was so desperate," the 95-year-old whispers. "I didn't want to live anymore." 
 
 A Survival Trick 
 
 It wasn't until she was reunited with her husband Karl in 1946 that she began to have hope again, Wölk says. He was marked by years of war and imprisonment, but she nursed him back to health, and the couple spent another 34 happy years together. 
 
 Wölk smiles when she thinks of her husband. After all of her experiences, she is not a bitter woman. Quite the contrary, in fact. She's dressed up in a royal blue sweater and a necklace of wooden beads. She's also put on makeup, or "painted herself," as she calls it. Despite the past, she says she has always tried to be happy. "I didn't lose my humor," she says. "Though it got more sarcastic." 
 
 Instead, she decided not to take it all too seriously. "That was always my trick to survival," she says. 
 
 But for a long time, Wölk didn't want to even think about what happened in Gross-Partsch, much less discuss it. The experience came to her often in dreams, however. It wasn't until this winter, when a local journalist paid her a visit for her 95th birthday and began asking questions, that she spoke about what she calls the worst years of her life. At that moment, she suddenly decided to break her silence. "I just wanted to say what happened there," she says. "That Hitler was a really repugnant man. And a pig." 
 
 This article originally appeared in German on einestages.de, SPIEGEL ONLINE's history portal. ||||| FILE - In this June 8, 2006 file photo Rochus Misch one of Hitler's bodyguards throughout the war stands at the place of Hitler's bunker, as he talks to journalists during the unveiling of a new information... (Associated Press) 
 
 He was Adolf Hitler's devoted bodyguard for most of World War II and the last remaining witness to the Nazi leader's final hours in his Berlin bunker. To the very end, SS Staff Sgt. Rochus Misch was proud of it all. 
 
 For years, he accompanied Hitler nearly everywhere he went, sticking by the man he affectionately called "boss" until the dictator and his wife, Eva Braun, killed themselves as defeat at the hands of the Allies drew nearer. The loyal SS officer remained in what he called the "coffin of concrete" for days after Hitler's death, finally escaping as Berlin crumbled around him and the Soviets swarmed the city. 
 
 Even in his later years, during a 2005 interview with The Associated Press in which he recounted Hitler's claustrophobic, chaotic final days, Misch still cut the image of an SS man. He had a rigid posture, broad shoulders, neatly combed white hair _ and no apologies for his close relationship with the most reviled man of the 20th century. 
 
 "He was no brute. He was no monster. He was no superman," Misch said. 
 
 The 96-year-old Misch died Thursday, one of the last of a generation that bears direct responsibility for German brutality during World War II. In his interview with the AP, he stayed away from the central questions of guilt and responsibility, saying he knew nothing of the murder of 6 million Jews and that Hitler never brought up the Final Solution in his presence. 
 
 "That was never a topic," he said emphatically. "Never." 
 
 In the forward to the English-language version of his book, "The Last Witness" _ due for publication in October _ he wrote that it was a different "reality" then and he never asked questions during what he considered just his "regular day at work." 
 
 In the AP interview, he appeared to have little empathy for those he did not directly know, and even for some he did. 
 
 Misch was moved nearly to tears when talking about Joseph and Magda Goebbels' decision to kill their six children in the Berlin bunker before committing suicide themselves. But he was also able to guffaw about a family friend, "a real lefty," being thrown into the Sachsenhausen concentration camp outside Berlin and noting upon his release that "the paper shirts (at the camp) were uncomfortable." 
 
 Born July 29, 1917, in the tiny Silesian town of Alt Schalkowitz, in what today is Poland, Misch was orphaned at an early age. 
 
 Against the backdrop of the bloody Russian revolution and the rise of Stalin, combined with the post-World War I popularity of the Communist Party in Germany, Misch said he decided at 20 to join the SS _ an organization he saw as a counterweight to the threat from the left. 
 
 He signed up for the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, a Berlin-based unit that originally was founded as the Fuehrer's personal bodyguard. 
 
 "It was anti-communist, against Stalin _ to protect Europe," Misch said, noting that thousands of other Western Europeans served in the Waffen SS. "I signed up in the war against Bolshevism, not for Adolf Hitler." 
 
 But when Hitler's armies invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, Misch found himself in the vanguard when his SS division was attached to a regular army unit for the blitzkrieg attack. As German forces quickly closed in on Warsaw, Misch, who spoke some Polish, was sent with a party to negotiate the surrender of a fortress and was told by the troops inside that they needed time to think about the offer. 
 
 "As we were walking away they opened fire," Misch said at his home in Berlin. "A bullet came through here and right out, two centimeters from my heart." 
 
 After his evacuation to Germany and convalescence, he was appointed in May 1940 to serve as one of two SS men who would serve as Hitler's bodyguards and general assistants, doing everything from answering the telephones to greeting dignitaries _ and once running flowers to one of the Fuehrer's favorite musicians who had just gotten engaged. 
 
 Misch and SS comrade Johannes Hentschel accompanied Hitler almost everywhere he went, including his Alpine retreat in Berchtesgaden and his forward "Wolf's Lair" headquarters. He lived between Hitler's apartments in the New Reich Chancellery and the home in a working-class Berlin neighborhood that he kept until his death. 
 
 "He was a wonderful boss," Misch said. "I lived with him for five years. We were the closest people who worked with him ... we were always there. Hitler was never without us day and night." 
 
 In the last eight to 10 days of Hitler's life, Misch followed him to live underground, protected by the so-called Fuehrerbunker's heavily reinforced concrete ceilings and walls. 
 
 "Hentschel ran the lights, air and water and I did the telephones _ there was nobody else," he said. "When someone would come downstairs we couldn't even offer them a place to sit. It was far too small _ little cells of 10 or 12 square meters. It was no bunker to live in. It was an air-raid bunker." 
 
 After the Soviet assault began, Misch remembered generals and Nazi brass coming and going as they tried desperately to cobble together a defense of the capital with the ragtag remains of the German military. 
 
 He remembered that on April 22, two days before two Soviet armies completed their encirclement of the city, Hitler said, "That's it. The war is lost. Everybody can go." 
 
 "Everyone except those who still had jobs to do like us _ we had to stay," Misch said. "The lights, water, telephone ... those had to be kept going, but everybody else was allowed to go and almost all were gone immediately." 
 
 But that same day, Hitler clung to hope given by what turned out to be a false report that the Western Allies had called upon Germany to hold Berlin for two more weeks against the Soviets so that they could battle communism together. 
 
 "He still believed in a union between West and East," Misch said. "Hitler liked England _ except for (then-Prime Minister Winston) Churchill _ and didn't think that a people like the English would bind themselves with the communists to crush Germany." 
 
 On April 28, Misch saw the familiar figures of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and Hitler confidant Martin Bormann enter the bunker with a man he had never seen before. 
 
 "I asked who it was, and they said that's the civil magistrate who has come to perform Hitler's marriage," Misch said. 
 
 That night, Hitler and longtime mistress Eva Braun were married in a short ceremony in which they both pledged they were of pure Aryan descent before taking their vows and signing a registry book. 
 
 Two days later, Misch saw Goebbels and Bormann again, this time talking with Hitler and his adjutant, SS Maj. Otto Guensche, in the bunker's corridor outside the telephone operator's room. 
 
 "I saw him go into his room ... and someone, Guensche, said that he shouldn't be disturbed. And that meant `Now it's happening,'" Misch said. "We all knew that it was happening. He said he wasn't going to leave Berlin, he would stay here." 
 
 "We heard no shot, we heard nothing, but one of those who was in the hallway, I don't remember if it was Guensche or Bormann, said `Linge, Linge, I think it's done,'" Misch said, referring to Hitler's valet Heinz Linge. 
 
 "Then everything was really quiet, everything was still ... who opened the door I don't remember, Guensche or Linge. They opened the door, and I naturally looked, and then there was a short pause and the second door was opened... and I saw Hitler lying on the table like so," Misch said, putting his head down on his hands on his living-room table. 
 
 "And Eva lay like so on the sofa with knees up, her head to him. I don't remember now if Hitler sat on the sofa or on a chair next to it." Eva Braun had died of poisoning and Hitler had shot himself. 
 
 The silence and anticipation then gave way to chaos, when Misch ran up to the chancellery to tell his superior the news and then back downstairs, where Hitler's corpse had been put on the floor with a blanket over it. 
 
 "Then they bundled Hitler up and said `What do we do now?'" Misch said. "As they took Hitler out ... they walked by me about three or four meters away, I saw his shoes sticking outside the sack." 
 
 After the bodies were carried outside, an SS guard ran down the stairs and tried to get Misch to join the spectacle outside as the two were covered in gasoline and set alight. 
 
 "He said `The boss is being burned. Come on out,'" Misch recalled. But instead Misch hastily retreated deeper into the bunker to talk with comrade Hentschel. 
 
 "I said `Do you think we're going to be killed?' and he said `Why do you think that?'" Misch said. "I said `I saw the Gestapo upstairs in the ... chancellery and it could be that they'll want to kill us as witnesses.'" 
 
 But Misch stuck to his post _ taking and directing telephone calls with Goebbels as his new boss until May 2, when he was given permission to flee. 
 
 "Everybody was upstairs in the ... chancellery, there were things to eat and drink there, downstairs in the bunker there was nothing. It was a coffin of concrete," he said. "Then Goebbels finally came down and said, `You have a chance to live. You don't have to stay here and die.'" 
 
 Misch grabbed the rucksack he had packed and fled with a few others into the rubble of Berlin. Working his way through cellars and subways, Misch bumped into a large group of civilians seeking shelter in one tunnel. 
 
 "Two were playing music," he said, remembering how incongruous the scene seemed to him. "I came out of the death bunker of concrete, and here were two people playing music on guitar." 
 
 Misch later heard German voices above through an air ventilation shaft and climbed up to try his luck. But the voices came from about 300 soldiers who had been taken prisoner, and the Soviet guards grabbed him as well. 
 
 Following the German surrender May 7, Misch was taken to the Soviet Union, where he spent the next nine years in prisoner of war camps before being allowed to return to Berlin in 1954. He reunited with his wife Gerda, whom he had married in 1942 and who died in 1997, and opened up a shop. 
 
 In 2005, Sitting at his table next to a pile of mail from "fans" to whom he sent autographed photographs of himself in full SS uniform outside the Wolf's Lair, he leafed through his well-thumbed photo album remembering his days with the most infamous people in recent history. 
 
 "Here is Hitler _ my boss _ Eva, a friend of Eva ...," he said. "Very normal. Not like what is written." 
 
 He turned the page to photos of Braun in the idyllic setting of the Berghof, Hitler's Bavarian mountain residence, and lit up as he remembered a moment from those days. 
 
 "This small black dog comes running and gets under the fence, and Hitler said, `My God, what is this? Racial mixing?'" ||||| The instability created in Europe by the First World War (1914-18) set the stage for another international conflict–World War II–which broke out two decades later and would prove even more devastating. Rising to power in an economically and politically unstable Germany, Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist (Nazi Party) rearmed the nation and signed strategic treaties with Italy and Japan to further his ambitions of world domination. Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 drove Great Britain and France to declare war on Germany, and World War II had begun. Over the next six years, the conflict would take more lives and destroy more land and property around the globe than any previous war. Among the estimated 45-60 million people killed were 6 million Jews murdered in Nazi concentration camps as part of Hitler’s diabolical “Final Solution,” now known as the Holocaust. 
 
 Leading up to World War II 
 
 The devastation of the Great War (as World War I was known at the time) had greatly destabilized Europe, and in many respects World War II grew out of issues left unresolved by that earlier conflict. In particular, political and economic instability in Germany, and lingering resentment over the harsh terms imposed by the Versailles Treaty, fueled the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist (Nazi) Party. 
 
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 Did you know? As early as 1923, in his memoir and propaganda tract "Mein Kampf" (My Struggle), Adolf Hitler had predicted a general European war that would result in "the extermination of the Jewish race in Germany." 
 
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 After becoming Reich Chancellor in 1933, Hitler swiftly consolidated power, anointing himself Führer (supreme leader) in 1934. Obsessed with the idea of the superiority of the “pure” German race, which he called “Aryan,” Hitler believed that war was the only way to gain the necessary “Lebensraum,” or living space, for that race to expand. In the mid-1930s, he began the rearmament of Germany, secretly and in violation of the Versailles Treaty. After signing alliances with Italy and Japan against the Soviet Union, Hitler sent troops to occupy Austria in 1938 and the following year annexed Czechoslovakia. Hitler’s open aggression went unchecked, as the United States and Soviet Union were concentrated on internal politics at the time, and neither France nor Britain (the two other nations most devastated by the Great War) were eager for confrontation. 
 
 Outbreak of World War II (1939) 
 
 In late August 1939, Hitler and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin signed the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, which incited a frenzy of worry in London and Paris. Hitler had long planned an invasion of Poland, a nation to which Great Britain and France had guaranteed military support if it was attacked by Germany. The pact with Stalin meant that Hitler would not face a war on two fronts once he invaded Poland, and would have Soviet assistance in conquering and dividing the nation itself. On September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland from the west; two days later, France and Britain declared war on Germany, beginning World War II. 
 
 On September 17, Soviet troops invaded Poland from the east. Under attack from both sides, Poland fell quickly, and by early 1940 Germany and the Soviet Union had divided control over the nation, according to a secret protocol appended to the Nonaggression Pact. Stalin’s forces then moved to occupy the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) and defeated a resistant Finland in the Russo-Finish War. During the six months following the invasion of Poland, the lack of action on the part of Germany and the Allies in the west led to talk in the news media of a “phony war.” At sea, however, the British and German navies faced off in heated battle, and lethal German U-boat submarines struck at merchant shipping bound for Britain, sinking more than 100 vessels in the first four months of World War II. 
 
 World War II in the West (1940-41) 
 
 On April 9, 1940, Germany simultaneously invaded Norway and occupied Denmark, and the war began in earnest. On May 10, German forces swept through Belgium and the Netherlands in what became known as “blitzkrieg,” or lightning war. Three days later, Hitler’s troops crossed the Meuse River and struck French forces at Sedan, located at the northern end of the Maginot Line, an elaborate chain of fortifications constructed after World War I and considered an impenetrable defensive barrier. In fact, the Germans broke through the line with their tanks and planes and continued to the rear, rendering it useless. The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was evacuated by sea from Dunkirk in late May, while in the south French forces mounted a doomed resistance. With France on the verge of collapse, Benito Mussolini of Italy put his Pact of Steel with Hitler into action, and Italy declared war against France and Britain on June 10. 
 
 On June 14, German forces entered Paris; a new government formed by Marshal Philippe Petain (France’s hero of World War I) requested an armistice two nights later. France was subsequently divided into two zones, one under German military occupation and the other under Petain’s government, installed at Vichy. Hitler now turned his attention to Britain, which had the defensive advantage of being separated from the Continent by the English Channel. 
 
 To pave the way for an amphibious invasion (dubbed Operation Sea Lion), German planes bombed Britain extensively throughout the summer of 1940, including night raids on London and other industrial centers that caused heavy civilian casualties and damage. The Royal Air Force (RAF) eventually defeated the Luftwaffe (German Air Force) in the Battle of Britain, and Hitler postponed his plans to invade. With Britain’s defensive resources pushed to the limit, Prime Minister Winston Churchill began receiving crucial aid from the U.S. under the Lend-Lease Act, passed by Congress in early 1941. 
 
 Operation Barbarossa (1941-42) 
 
 By early 1941, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria had joined the Axis, and German troops overran Yugoslavia and Greece that April. Hitler’s conquest of the Balkans was a precursor for his real objective: an invasion of the Soviet Union, whose vast territory would give the German master race the “Lebensraum” it needed. The other half of Hitler’s strategy was the extermination of the Jews from throughout German-occupied Europe. Plans for the “Final Solution” were introduced around the time of the Soviet offensive, and over the next three years more than 4 million Jews would perish in the death camps established in occupied Poland. 
 
 On June 22, 1941, Hitler ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union, codenamed Operation Barbarossa. Though Soviet tanks and aircraft greatly outnumbered the Germans’, their air technology was largely obsolete, and the impact of the surprise invasion helped Germans get within 200 miles of Moscow by mid-July. Arguments between Hitler and his commanders delayed the next German advance until October, when it was stalled by a Soviet counteroffensive and the onset of harsh winter weather. 
 
 World War II in the Pacific (1941-43) 
 
 With Britain facing Germany in Europe, the United States was the only nation capable of combating Japanese aggression, which by late 1941 included an expansion of its ongoing war with China and the seizure of European colonial holdings in the Far East. On December 7, 1941, 360 Japanese aircraft attacked the major U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, taking the Americans completely by surprise and claiming the lives of more than 2,300 troops. The attack on Pearl Harbor served to unify American public opinion in favor of entering World War II, and on December 8 Congress declared war on Japan with only one dissenting vote. Germany and the other Axis Powers promptly declared war on the United States. 
 
 After a long string of Japanese victories, the U.S. Pacific Fleet won the Battle of Midway in June 1942, which proved to be a turning point in the war. On Guadalcanal, one of the southern Solomon Islands, the Allies also had success against Japanese forces in a series of battles from August 1942 to February 1943, helping turn the tide further in the Pacific. In mid-1943, Allied naval forces began an aggressive counterattack against Japan, involving a series of amphibious assaults on key Japanese-held islands in the Pacific. This “island-hopping” strategy proved successful, and Allied forces moved closer to their ultimate goal of invading the Japanese homeland. 
 
 Toward Allied Victory in World War II (1943-45) 
 
 In North Africa, British and American forces had defeated the Italians and Germans by 1943. An Allied invasion of Sicily and Italy followed, and Mussolini’s government fell in July 1943, though Allied fighting against the Germans in Italy would continue until 1945. 
 
 On World War II’s Eastern Front, a Soviet counteroffensive launched in November 1942 ended the bloody Battle of Stalingrad, which had seen some of the fiercest combat of the war. The approach of winter, along with dwindling food and medical supplies, spelled the end for German troops there, and the last of them surrendered on January 31, 1943. 
 
 On June 6, 1944–celebrated as “D-Day”–the Allied began a massive invasion of Europe, landing 156,000 British, Canadian and American soldiers on the beaches of Normandy, France. In response, Hitler poured all the remaining strength of his army into Western Europe, ensuring Germany’s defeat in the east. Soviet troops soon advanced into Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania, while Hitler gathered his forces to drive the Americans and British back from Germany in the Battle of the Bulge (December 1944-January 1945), the last major German offensive of the war. 
 
 An intensive aerial bombardment in February 1945 preceded the Allied land invasion of Germany, and by the time Germany formally surrendered on May 8, Soviet forces had occupied much of the country. Hitler was already dead, having committed suicide on April 30 in his Berlin bunker. 
 
 World War II Ends (1945) 
 
 At the Potsdam Conference of July-August 1945, U.S. President Harry S. Truman (who had taken office after Roosevelt’s death in April), Churchill and Stalin discussed the ongoing war with Japan as well as the peace settlement with Germany. Post-war Germany would be divided into four occupation zones, to be controlled by the Soviet Union, Britain, the United States and France. On the divisive matter of Eastern Europe’s future, Churchill and Truman acquiesced to Stalin, as they needed Soviet cooperation in the war against Japan. 
 
 Heavy casualties sustained in the campaigns at Iwo Jima (February 1945) and Okinawa (April-June 1945), and fears of the even costlier land invasion of Japan led Truman to authorize the use of a new and devastating weapon–the atomic bomb–on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August. On August 10, the Japanese government issued a statement declaring they would accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, and on September 2, U.S. General Douglas MacArthur accepted Japan’s formal surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. 
 
 World War II proved to be the most devastating international conflict in history, taking the lives of some 35 to 60 million people, including 6 million Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis. Millions more were injured, and still more lost their homes and property. The legacy of the war would include the spread of communism from the Soviet Union into eastern Europe as well as its eventual triumph in China, and the global shift in power from Europe to two rival superpowers–the United States and the Soviet Union–that would soon face off against each other in the Cold War. 
 
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– Margot Wölk spent two and a half years tasting Adolf Hitler's food, living in fear that one of the delicious dishes might be poisoned. Now 95, Wölk—who, with time, learned to take pleasure in eating again—just started talking about her experiences. "There was never meat because Hitler was a vegetarian," Wölk tells der Spiegel. "The food was good—very good. But we couldn't enjoy it." As Germany went hungry, Wölk tasted things like white asparagus in sauce made with real butter, noodle dishes, and exotic fruits. She was ordered into the food-tasting service by the SS after she fled Berlin for the East Prussian village of Gross-Partsch, located less than two miles from Hitler's "Wolf's Lair," at age 24. She and 14 other young women made sure the Allied forces hadn't poisoned the food; then it was served to Hitler. A lieutenant ultimately saved her life when the Soviet army was closing in, sending her on a train to Berlin. She later learned the other food tasters were shot by the Soviet soldiers; she herself was eventually caught by the Soviet army, and raped repeatedly. In 1946, she was finally reunited with her husband, who had been at war and imprisoned. She finally decided to talk about her life because, she says, "I just wanted to say what happened there. That Hitler was a really repugnant man. And a pig." Hers is not the only fascinating World War II story to emerge this week: The AP reports that a Virginia farm, used during the war as a refuge for Jews escaping Germany, has been added to the state's Landmarks Register.