A Jewish Anti-Semite Who Delivered Thousands of Jews Into the Nazis’ Clutches
Stella Kubler (1922 – 1994) was born and raised as the only child of an assimilated middle-class Jewish family in Berlin, and was treated like a princess by overprotective parents. Stella grew up financially comfortable, but not as rich as her schoolmates in a Jewish school. That gnawed at her and left her harboring resentments against her richer schoolmates. During WWII, Stella became infamous for collaborating with the Gestapo to track down and denounce other Jews hiding from the Nazis. Many of those denounced by her were her former schoolmates and their families, whom she repaid in spades for their crime of being richer than Stella’s family.
During WWII, Stella secured forged identity papers that listed her as a German Aryan. She was blond and blue-eyed, so it worked for a while. However, she and her boyfriend were eventually denounced to the Gestapo by a “Jew Catcher” – a Jew working for the Gestapo to find other Jews in hiding. To save their necks, her boyfriend, and future husband, offered the Nazis his services.
The Gestapo put the couple to work as Catchers, paying them 300 Reichsmarks for every Jew they turned in, and promising to spare Stella’s parents so long as she kept producing. The duo had good instincts for hiding places, having lived in hiding themselves. Stella was particularly effective because she knew many of Berlin’s Jews from her years in a segregated Jewish school.
Stella had not chosen to become a Catcher of her own free will. However, how she exercised what freedom of choice she did have while working as a Catcher was entirely within her control. She exercised that freedom of choice by pursuing hidden Jews with remarkable zeal. Even after the Jews she turned in were arrested, and her task was over, Stella enthusiastically took part in beating, torturing, and humiliating the arrestees.
Notwithstanding her zeal, the Nazis reneged on their promises to Stella, and deported her parents to their death in a camp. Her husband and his family were sent to Auschwitz in 1943. Despite that, Stella’s enthusiasm for seeking out hidden Jews and denouncing them to the Gestapo did not wane. Betting on a German victory, she secured a promise from a high-ranking Gestapo official in 1944, that she would get declared an Aryan after the war.
By war’s end, Stella had been responsible for the arrest, deportation, and subsequent murder of untold hundreds of Jews. Estimates of the total number of her victims ranged from a low of 600, to possibly as high as 3000. Their numbers included many of her personal friends, former schoolmates and their families, and even some of her own relatives.
Nonetheless, Stella got off light. She was captured by the Soviets, tried, and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment. After her release, she moved to West Berlin, where she was tried by the West German authorities, and sentenced to 10 years. However, she did not serve any time of that sentence. She then converted to Christianity and became a lifelong anti-Semite. In 1994, she took her own life by jumping out the window of her Berlin apartment.
