Stella Kübler

Stella Kübler (born Goldschlag, 1922—1994) [cite web|url=http://www.holocaustchronicle.org/staticpages/421.html|title=The Holocaust Chronicle article on Stella Kübler|accessdate=2008-05-19] was a Jewish woman who collaborated with the Nazis, exposing and denouncing underground Jews during World War II on behalf of the Gestapo.

Stella Goldschlag was born and raised in Berlin to a comfortably middle-class, assimilated Jewish family. After the seizure of power by the Nazis, she, like other Jewish children, was forbidden to go to public school, so she attended a school set up by the Jewish community, where she was known for her beauty and vivacity. Her parents attempted to leave Germany to escape the Reich, but were unable to get visas for other countries. After Stella completing her education she trained as a fashion designer at the School of Applied Art in Nurnbergerstrasse. [The Forger, Cioma Schonhaus, Granta Books, 2004, pp140-141]

In 1941, she married a Jewish musician, Manfred Kübler. She worked as a Jewish forced-labourer with him in a war plant in Berlin. In about 1942, when the large deporation programme of Berlin Jews into extermination camps began, she disappeared underground, using forged papers to pass as a non-Jew—an endeavor helped by her blonde-haired, blue-eyed, classically beautiful, 'Aryan' appearance.

In the spring of 1943, she was arrested by the Nazis. Though under threat of deportation and/or death, she resisted the Gestapo's orders to help them to find more hidden Jews. However, after her parents were captured and threatened with death unless she collaborated, Stella agreed to act as a "catcher" for the Gestapo, combing Berlin in search of Jews hiding as non-Jews, referred to as "U-Boats". Familiar with a large number of Jewish people from her years at her segregated school, Kübler was very successful at finding her former schoolmates and handing their information over to the Gestapo, while pretending to be a U-Boat herself. The first person she denounced was her husband. The data concerning the number of her victims varies, depending on different sources of information, from between 600 to 3000 Jews. Kübler's charisma and striking good looks were a great advantage in her pursuit of underground Jews. The Nazis called her "blonde poison". She is mentioned in "The Forger", Cioma Schonhaus' 2004 account of living as an underground Jew in Berlin [The Forger, Cioma Schonhaus, Granta Books, 2004] .

Despite her collaboration, the Nazis eventually deported her parents to a concentration camp, where they were killed. Her husband was deported in 1943 to Auschwitz with his family. That did not prevent Kübler from further collaboration with the Nazis. She continued this work until March 1945. During this time, she met and married Rolf Isaaksohn, a non-Jew, with whom she had a daughter.

At the end of the war she went into hiding, but was found and arrested by the Soviets in October 1945 and sentenced to ten years camp detention. Afterwards she moved to West Berlin. Here she was again tried and convicted, and punished with ten year's detention. However she did not have to serve these because of time already served in the Soviet prison. In 1992, Peter Wyden, a Berlin schoolmate whose family was able to get visas for the U.S., wrote a biography of Stella.

She suffered from severe depression due to her loneliness and guilt because of her activities during the war. She committed suicide in 1994 by jumping from the window of her apartment.

Sources

*Wyden, Peter: "Stella". New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992
*Gross, Leonard. "The Last Jews in Berlin". New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982. ISBN 0671247271.
* [http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/33d/projects/jewishlife/JewishStellaDiana.htm Summary] of Peter Wyden's book "Stella"