Did Hitler really have food tasters? Was his inner circle so paranoid about the risk of assassination by poisoning that young women were forced to sample every dish that was due to pass his lips? That was the account given to a German newspaper in 2012 by the then 95-year-old Margot Wölk, who claimed to have been one of Hitler’s food tasters. Historians have pointed to lack of evidence, with nothing in the records to back up her witness testimony.
Whatever the veracity of the story, it has been turned into a shaky, unconvincing historical drama by Silvio Soldini, whose film is an adaptation of a novel by Rosella Postorino. Elisa Schlott plays the fictional Rosa, a young woman from Berlin whose soldier husband is missing on the eastern front. After heavy bombing in the city, she flees to her in-laws in east Prussia close to Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair military headquarters. One day, the Nazis come knocking for Rosa, and load her on to a van with six other terrified young women.
