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?'"
– 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.