to move up and down
Hitler’s food tester opens up about screening meals in the ‘Wolf’s Lair’ after 68 years of secrecy
They were feasts of sublime asparagus — laced with fear. And for more than half a century, Margot Woelk kept her secret hidden from the world, even from her husband. Then, a few months after her 95th birthday, she revealed the truth about her wartime role: Adolf Hitler’s food taster.
Woelk, then in her mid-twenties, spent two and a half years as one of 15 young women who sampled Hitler’s food to make sure it wasn’t poisoned before it was served to the Nazi leader in his “Wolf’s Lair,” the heavily guarded command center in what is now Poland, where he spent much of his time in the final years of World War II.
“He was a vegetarian. He never ate any meat during the entire time I was there,” Woelk said of the Nazi leader. “And Hitler was so paranoid that the British would poison him — that’s why he had 15 girls taste the food before he ate it himself.” (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber; AP Photo/US Army Signal Corps from Eva Braun’s album)
‘Hitler’ clothing store will change its name after uproar, owner says
AHMADABAD, India — The owner of the “Hitler” clothing shop in western India says he will remove the sign and rename his store after hearing people’s complaints.
Rajesh Shah said Tuesday he had chosen the name in memory of his grandfather, a strict disciplinarian whom the family referred to as “Hitler.” (SAM PANTHAKY/AFP/GettyImages)
Hitler clothing store causes stir in India
A clothing store called ‘Hitler’ has upset residents and the small Jewish community in Vastrapur, in Ahmedabad, India. The shop owners do not find the name objectionable.
“Hitler was a nickname given to my business partner Manish Chandani’s grandfather because of his strict nature. Frankly, till the time we applied for the trademark permission, I had only heard that Hitler was a strict man,” Rajesh Shah, the co-owner of the shop told Times Of India. “It was only recently that we read about Hitler on the internet.”
“We had put up a cloth banner for over a month saying ‘Hitler opening shortly’, no one objected to the name then.” (SAM PANTHAKY/AFP/GettyImages)
Exception to the ruler
Stick to the script: Sacha Baron Cohen’s The Dictator abandons improv to follow in the footsteps of filmic fanatics. (Illustration by Steve Murray)
Hitler’s manifesto to be republished in Germany by government
The German state that owns the rights to Adolf Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kampf said Tuesday it would republish an annotated edition of the book 70 years after the Nazi dictator’s suicide
State Finance Minister Markus Soeder told German news agency DPA the decision was taken after talks with advocates and opponents of the move, and said it was aimed at “demystifying” the pages drenched in hatred and paranoid fantasy.
“We want to make clear what nonsense is in there, however with catastrophic consequences,” Soeder said of the book on which much of the Nazis’ genocidal ideology was based. (Photo: David Silverman/Getty Images)
Look inside Adolf Hitler’s secret art collection unearthed in a Czech convent
During the Second World War Hitler moved some of his extensive art collection, rumoured to have contained more than 5,000 pieces, out of Germany to avoid damage from Allied bomb attacks.
Last week, 16 pieces resurfaced in a Czech convent and now they are being seen for the first time since Hitler bought them in the mid 1940s. (Photos: Petr Josek/Reuters)
Robert Fulford: Totalitarian Art and the dictator’s creative liberties
Joseph Stalin, a stout, bandy-legged fellow with bad skin, looked like a rather handsome devil in the official paintings and statues that spread his fame across the Soviet empire from the 1930s to the 1950s. Those commissioned products of official art, depicted in Igor Golomstock’s recent Totalitarian Art (Overlook Press) and in the European parks that show propaganda sculpture as public amusement, are slowly turning the tragedies of communism and fascism into an abrasively funny satire on 20th-century history.
Portraits of Stalin, Mao, Hitler and many lesser despots, when seen at a safe distance in time, amount to a crude visual definition of irony: They state something that everyone knows to be false. Official art says clearly that all dictators are noble and all their subjects are satisfied. The Soviet and German masses are made to appear dedicated, the Chinese happy.
The tyrants differ slightly. In each country, the artists developed a characteristic mood for the leader, presumably at his direction. In Totalitarian Art Stalin usually looks serene, Hitler fierce, Mao jolly. (Photo: David Mdzinarishvili/Reuters)
