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Stella Goldschlag

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Stella Kübler
BornStella Goldschlag
(1922-07-10)10 July 1922
Died26 October 1994(1994-10-26) (aged 72)
NationalityGerman
Known forCollaboration

Stella Ingrid Goldschlag, also known as Stella Kübler-Isaacksohn and Stella Kübler (10 July 1922 – 26 October 1994) was a German Jewish woman who collaborated with the Gestapo during World War II, exposing and denouncing Berlin's underground Jews.

Early life

She was born Stella Goldschlag and raised in Berlin as the only child in a middle-class, assimilated Jewish family. After the 1933 seizure of power by the Nazis, she, like other Jewish children, was forbidden to go to a state school by Nazi racial policies, so she attended the Goldschmidt School, set up by the local Jewish community. At school, she was known for her beauty and vivacity.

The family fell on hard times when the 1933 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service was used to purge Jews from positions of influence and her father, Gerhard Goldschlag [de], lost his job with the newsreel company Gaumont. Her parents attempted to leave Germany after Kristallnacht in 1938 to escape the Nazi regime, but were unable to gain visas for other countries. Goldschlag completed her education in 1938, training as a fashion designer at the School of Applied Art in Nürnbergerstraße.

Going underground and collaboration

In 1941, Goldschlag married a Jewish musician, Manfred Kübler. They had met when both were working as Jewish forced-labourers in a war plant in Berlin. In about 1942, when the large deportation programme of Berlin Jews into extermination camps began, she disappeared underground, using forged papers to pass as a non-Jew — owing to her blonde-haired, blue-eyed 'Aryan' appearance.

In the spring of 1943, Goldschlag and her parents were arrested by the Nazis. She was subjected to torture. In order to avoid deportation of herself and her parents, she agreed to become a "catcher" (Template:Lang-de) for the Gestapo, hunting down Jews hiding as non-Jews (referred to as "submerged", Template:Lang-de). She was promised a salary of 300 Reichsmark for each Jew that she betrayed.

Goldschlag proceeded to comb Berlin for such Jews and, as she was familiar with a large number of Jewish people from her years at her segregated Jewish school, she was very successful at locating her former schoolmates and handing their information over to the Gestapo, while posing as a submerged herself. Some of Goldschlag's efforts to apprehend Jews in hiding included promising them food and accommodation, meanwhile turning them over to the Nazi authorities; she would also follow clues provided to her by the Gestapo. The data concerning the number of her victims varies, depending on different sources of information, from between 600 and 3,000 Jews. Goldschlag's charisma and striking good looks were a great advantage in her pursuit of underground Jews. The Nazis called her "blonde poison".

The Nazis would break their promise of sparing the lives of Goldschlag's parents. They were deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp; from there they were later transported to Auschwitz and murdered. Goldschlag's husband, Manfred, was deported in 1943 to Auschwitz, along with his family. Goldschlag still continued her work for the Gestapo until March 1945. During that time, she met and married her second husband, Rolf Isaaksohn, on 29 October 1944. Isaksohn was a fellow Jewish collaborator with the Nazis known also as a Greifer ("catcher").

The end of the war and after

At the end of World War II, Goldschlag went into hiding. She was found and arrested by the Soviets in October 1945 and sentenced to ten years of hard labor. Following the completion of her sentence, she moved to West Berlin. There she was again tried and convicted, and sentenced to ten years' imprisonment. She did not have to serve the second sentence because of the time already served in the Soviet prison.

After the war, Goldschlag, according to author Irving Abrahamson, "convert to Christianity and bec an open anti-Semite".

Goldschlag supposedly committed suicide in 1994 by drowning in Freiburg.

Personal life

Goldschlag was married five times: following the deportation of her first husband, Manfred Kübler, she married fellow Jewish collaborator and Greifer Rolf Isaaksohn on 29 October 1944, who was shot dead attempting to escape to Denmark as the Soviets advanced. After the war, she was married to three non-Jews, starting with Friedheim Schellenberg. Her last husband died in 1984.

Goldschlag's only child, Yvonne Meissl, was taken from her and became a nurse in Israel.

In biographies and fiction

Peter Wyden, a Berlin schoolmate whose family had been able to obtain US visas in 1937 and who later learned about Goldschlag's role as a "catcher" while he was working for the US Army, tracked down and interviewed Goldschlag in 1988, and wrote Stella, a 1992 biography of her.

Goldschlag is mentioned in The Forger, Cioma Schonhaus's 2004 account of living as an underground Jew in Berlin, and in Berlin at War by Roger Moorhouse (2010).

Fiction

In 2019, the German journalist Takis Würger published a novel based on Goldschlag's life, Stella [de], which was published by Carl Hanser Verlag. It received largely negative reviews. Critics described the work as "Holocaust kitsch", but it sold well.

Goldschlag is a minor character in the 2017 German docudrama, Die Unsichtbaren – Wir wollen leben (English title The Invisibles).

Goldschlag appears in Chris Petit's 2016 novel The Butchers of Berlin. Here, her actions as a "catcher" are in the background of the main story.

In the 2001 novel The Good German, the character Renate Naumann (named Lena Brandt in the 2006 film adaptation) is loosely based on Goldschlag.

References

  1. "The Holocaust Chronicle article on Stella Kübler". Retrieved 2008-05-19.
  2. "Nicht Alle Waren Moerder". Archived from the original on June 26, 2016.
  3. ^ Diana Tovar, Summary of Peter Wyden's Stella University of California, Santa Barbara (Fall 2005). Retrieved July 29, 2011
  4. The Forger, Cioma Schonhaus, Granta Books, 2004, pp140-141
  5. Carsten Dams and Michael Stolle, The Gestapo: Power and Terror in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 71.
  6. ^ "SAGA PETER WYDEN AND STELLA GOLDSCHLAG..." Los Angeles Times. 1992-12-21. Retrieved 2020-10-10.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  7. Abrahamson, Irving (3 January 1993). "She Saved Herself In The Holocaust By Betraying Others". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved 2 January 2014.
  8. Dominik Bloedner: Die Greiferin, newspaper article in: Badische-Zeitung.de, No. 249/43, 74th year, October 26 2019, Magazin, page III).
  9. dreamer, Mythili the (2020-08-11). "The Jewish Sex Spy Who Betrayed Her Own People". Medium. Retrieved 2020-10-10.
  10. Wyden, Peter (1992). Stella: One Woman's True Tale of Evil, Betrayal, and Survival in Hitler's Germany.
  11. The Forger, Cioma Schonhaus (Granta Books, 2004)
  12. Lambeck, Petra (16 January 2019). "Novel based on Jew 'catcher' Stella Kubler stirs controversy". Deutsche Welle. Retrieved 13 August 2019.
  13. Petit, Chris (2016). The Butchers of Berlin.
  14. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286511330_Blonde_poison_the_Holocaust_and_the_case_of_Stella_Goldschlag_in_Joseph_Kanon's_The_Good_German
  15. Lake, Anthony (2016). ""Blonde poison": The Holocaust and the case of Stella Goldschlag in Joseph Kanon's The Good German". Holocaust Studies. 22: 84–99. doi:10.1080/17504902.2015.1117839. S2CID 147248046.
  • Dams, Carsten, and Michael Stolle. The Gestapo: Power and Terror in the Third Reich. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
  • Gross, Leonard. The Last Jews in Berlin. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982. ISBN 0-671-24727-1.
  • Wyden, Peter. Stella: One Woman's True Tale of Evil, Betrayal, and Survival in Hitler's Germany. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. Anchor Books, 1993. ISBN 978-0385471794
  • Petit, Chris. The Butchers of Berlin. London: Simon & Schuster, 2016. ISBN 978-1471143403
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