← Back to the front page

History’s Top Executioners of All Time

Khalid Elhassan June 5, 2020 34 min

15. Becoming a “Jew Catcher”

Stella Kubler and two fellow Jew Cathcers. Donna Dietch

During WWII, Stella Kubler secured false identity papers that listed her as a German Aryan. She was blond and blue-eyed, so it worked for a while. However, Stella 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 their 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.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.