Adolph Hitler was not exactly the life of the party. No meat, no smoking, no drinking.
But that didn’t mean he couldn’t appreciate the lure of the finer vices in life to those of, ah. . . less puritanical natures. And so it is that in 1944, when Berlin was being hammered by Allied bombers and Der Fuhrer’s “Thousand Year Reich” was shrinking down to a few square blocks in the center of town, he had the SS move a stash of good food, booze and smokes numbered in the hundreds of boxes out of the capital city and into a villa on a sprawling estate just north of Dresden.
What was left of the giant cache of champagne, cognac, coffee, chocolate, butter, cigarettes and more was discovered in a secret underground chamber in the Marcolinipalais Villa at the Wasserschloss Moritzburg estate by German chef-restaurateur Silvio Steizer, who was renovating the villa for a new restaurant. A ledger also found on the property detailed the goodies, which had been pilfered from all over Europe and sent to the villa for safekeeping.
The food didn’t last long after the estate was overrun by the Red Army in 1945, but for some reason the sticky-fingered Commies left an undisclosed number of bottles of champagne and Hennessey cognac, which have been donated to historians for, ahem. . . research.
So at least some good will come out of them.