Handwritten letters penned by Adolf Hitler’s personal chef paint a picture of a demanding and picky eater, who subjected her to ‘unimaginable difficulties’.
Constanze Manziarly was 23 years old when she began working as Hitler’s specialist diet cook in 1943, and she stayed with him until his 1945 suicide.
In letters written to her sister, uncovered by a German historian, she complains about her struggle to please vegetarian Hitler – despite the fact that she was a specially trained rawfood cook.
Picky eater: Adolf Hitler, seen sat down for a meal with Josef Goebbels, was a demanding diner who preferred to eat millet and quark with linseed oil
Manziarly tells her sister how in 1944, Hitler’s demands left her ‘feeling that I have one foot in the grave.
‘I am not exaggerating. I encounter unimaginable difficulties that I cannot report.’
Her letters have been published in party by Stefan Dietrich, a researcher in Manziarly’s hometown of Innsbruck, Austria, who was given them by her sister.
Manziarly had originally wanted originally to work as a housekeeping instructor but instead went into a clinic in Berchtesgaden where she studied raw vegetarian food preparation.
Hitler’s infamous mountain home Berghof was located nearby, and the meat-averse and faddish Fuhrer got his meals from the clinic.
Needs of the Fuhrer: Hitler is seen having tea with his mistress Eva Braun at the Berghof, Berchtesgaden, where a young Constanze Manziarly became his personal chef
Soon Manziarly was both preparing the food and transporting it up the Kehlstein Mountain to present to the Fuehrer.
‘I have to stay as long as he is there,’ she wrote in April 1944. ‘It is my cast-iron duty. But what makes me so worn out is the immense burden of responsibility I must bear with it.’
Hitler, who had renounced meat in the 1930s, was enthusiastic about her. ‘I have a cook with a Mozart name!’ – referring to the fact that Manziarly shared a first name.
He soon employed her as his personal chef, and brought her with him to the bunker in Berlin where he lived out his final days.
Mr Dietrich said: ‘It was probably not unlike that scene in The Godfather – Hitler probably made her an offer she couldn’t refuse.’
In another letter she told her sister that ‘all resistance’ to Hitler ‘is futile and would probably end up with me being in court.’
She said there was little in the way of ‘culinary challenges’ in the food she prepared for the dictator: Hitler preferred to eat millet or quark with linseed oil. As a meat substitute he was fond of plates of chopped mushrooms, she wrote.
Frau Manziarly said that since the beginning of WW2 Hitler only ever ate two grated apples for dessert. ‘The Fuehrer ate well,’ she wrote on one menu after a Berghof dinner.
Hitler’s love of his own voice is legendary and his inner circle had to sit up night after night listening to his boring monologues on the Jews, grand strategy and his own amazing leadership qualities.
During this time, said his cook, he would ‘lose control’ and fall upon the cakes that Frau Manziarly had baked for him earlier in the day.
‘I bake a lot every day, often for hours, but in the evening everything is always gone,’ she told her sister.
Hitler was inordinately grateful to his dietitian and in the autumn of 1944 tried to show his affection for her by presenting her with ‘mouse grey thick stockings’ – believing he understood the fashion style of the young woman.
But she wrote to his sister; ‘The boss was falsely taught about ladies’ fashion tastes.’
From October 1944 onwards Frau Manziarly employed a code in the letters to disguise real names and places, perhaps fearing they might be intercepted by the SS in the continuing round-ups of suspects involved in the bomb plot against him in July that year.
Hitler was referred to as the ‘chief doctor,’ the Berghof the ‘resort’ and the Reich Chancellery in Berlin – in the bunker of which he would died in April 1945 – was the ‘recreational home.’
She mentioned how the SS cordon around Hitler always referred to her as ‘Miss Marzipan’
The cook was called ‘Miss Marzipani’ by the SS people in Hitler’s surroundings. But there was nothing light or comical about being so close to him as the war came to its conclusion.
She recorded how she nearly bit her tongue ‘with fright’ when she saw Hitler demonstrating how to use cyanide capsules to his closest advisers
On the evening of April 30, 1945, she cooked a last supper for Hitler – fried eggs with mashed potatoes, not knowing that he was already dead by his own hand.
Two days after the suicide she fled the bunker with Hitler secretary Traudl Junge in a group led by SS-Brigade leader Wilhelm Mohnke.
Junge reported seeing her captured by two Red Army soldiers and led into an underground station. She was never seen again.