Margot woelk biography

Margot Wölk (sometimes Woelk; 27 December 1917 – 2014) was a German secretary who was among 15 young women who, in 1942, were selected to taste German leader Adolf Hitler's food at the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia for two-and-a-half years to confirm that it was safe.
Margot Wölk was a German secretary who was among 15 young women who, in 1942, were selected to taste German leader Adolf Hitler's food at the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia for two-and-a-half years to confirm that it was safe.
Margot Wölk, whose surname was sometimes spelled 'Woelk', was born on the 27th of December 1917 in Wilmersdorf, in Berlin.

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History – Margot Wölk, Adolf Hitler's Food Taster

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.

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

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Margot Wölk

German secretary, Adolf Hitler's personal food taster

Margot Wölk (sometimes Woelk; 27 December 1917^[1] – 2014) was a German secretary who was among 15 young women who, in 1942, were selected to taste German leader Adolf Hitler's food at the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia for two-and-a-half years to confirm that it was safe.^[2] She was the only one of the 15 to survive World War II, and her background as Hitler's food taster was not revealed until a newspaper interview on her 95th birthday in December 2012.^[3]

Early life

Wölk was born in Wilmersdorf, the inner city locality of Berlin, in 1917.^[2] As a young woman Wölk said she had refused to join the League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel or BDM), the girl's segment of the Hitler Youth, and her father had been condemned for refusing to join the Nazi Party.^[2] She was married and worked as a secretary during the beginning of the war, but left her parents' bombed-out Berlin apartment in the winter of 1941, to relocate to her mother-

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Writing Her Hidden Life

As I point out in my Author’s Note for the book, the idea for Her Hidden Life came from an Associated Press article published in April 2013. The true story of a woman, Margot Woelk, who tasted Adolf Hitler’s food to protect him from poisoning captured my imagination and spurred my desire to write the story. Mrs. Woelk had kept her former job a well-kept secret until she was ninety-five.

For years, I wanted to pen what I called, for lack of a better term, “a holocaust novel.” As time progressed, however, I felt I lacked enough familiarity with the literal and cultural subtexts of that tragedy to write about it with authority, despite extensive research. I also came to the realization that I could offer little to an already distinguished body of work that existed in many mediums, including books and film. One only has to think of Night by Elie Wiesel, or the films Schindler’s List, and The Pianist. To match the excellence of such heart-wrenching stories seemed too daunting a task. But when I read the AP article, I realized that Her Hidden Life wou