[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.
[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-in-law's home in the East Prussian village of Gross-Partsch, now Parcz, Poland.
Less than three kilometers away was the Wolfsschanze (Wolf's Lair), German leader Adolf Hitler's first Eastern Front military headquarters in World War II.
The complex, which would become one of several Führerhauptquartiere (Führer Headquarters) located in various parts of occupied Europe, was built for the start of Operation Barbarossa - the invasion of the Soviet Union - in 1941.
[4] After Wölk's arrival in Gross-Partsch, she and 14 other young women were selected by the local mayor and brought to the barracks in nearby Krausendorf (now Kruszewiec, Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship, Poland), where cooks prepared food for the Wolf's Lair in a two-story building.
[1] 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.
This novel is inspired by her life, but not all that it mentions is reality; the writer decided to start the book by positioning the main character at Hitler's suicide.