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History’s Top Executioners of All Time

Khalid Elhassan June 5, 2020 34 min

14. Going After Fellow Jews With a Will

Stella Kubler had not chosen to become a Jew Catcher of her own free will. However, how she exercised what freedom of choice she had 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.

The gate of Auschwitz Concentration Camp, where the Nazis sent Stella Kubler’s parents. Yad Vashem

Notwithstanding her zeal, the Nazis reneged on their promises to Stella, and deported her parents to their death in an extermination 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 be declared an Aryan after the war.

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.