JUST THE DIET WOULD MAKE YOU WEEP:

Every meal could have been her last. And when she had finished eating the bland vegetarian dishes put before her, 25-year-old Margot Wölk and her young female colleagues would burst into tears and "cry like dogs" because they were grateful still to be alive.

Margot Wölk was no Nazi, but she was one of 15 young women who were employed at Adolf Hitler's heavily guarded Prussian "Wolf's Lair" headquarters during the Second World War. Her job was to taste the Nazi leader's food before it reached his lips, to make sure it wasn't poisoned.

She was the only one to survive. All her colleagues were rounded up and shot by the advancing Red Army in January 1945. Now a frail 96-year-old widow, Margot Wölk has overcome feelings of shame and broken decades of silence about her time as Hitler's food taster to tell her story to German television.

"The food was always vegetarian," she told Berlin's RBB television channel, for a programme about her harrowing and sometimes horrific experiences, which was aired on Tuesday. "There were constant rumours that the British were out to poison Hitler. He never ate meat. We were given rice, noodles, peppers, peas and cauliflower," she recalled.

But she added: "Some of the girls started to shed tears as they began eating because they were so afraid. We had to eat it all up. Then we had to wait an hour, and every time we were frightened that we were going to be ill. We used to cry like dogs because we were so glad to have survived."

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