A Couple Who Sold Their Souls to the Nazis
To evade the Nazi dragnet thrown to catch Jews, Stella Kubler hid, and used forged IDs that listed her as Aryan. She was able to pull that off because of her blue-eyed and blond-haired Aryan appearance. However, she was eventually denounced to the Gestapo by a “Jew Catcher” – a Jew who worked for the Gestapo to find other Jews on the run from the Nazis. Her boyfriend and later-husband offered the Nazis his and Stella’s services, and bragged that he could “assemble an entire train” of Jewish deportees. The Nazis accepted the offer. The duo wed, in a marriage that brought together two horrible people. They collected 300 Reichsmarks for every Jew they turned in, and a promise to spare Stella’s parents.
Since they had themselves lived on the lam from the Nazis, the couple instinctively knew where to look for hidden Jews. Stella in particular, because she knew many of Berlin’s Jews from her years in a segregated Jewish school, was highly effective. The decision to become a Jew Catcher might not have been of Stella’s own free will. However, how she exercised what freedom of choice she had as a Catcher was entirely within her control. She pursued hidden Jews with tremendous zeal and inventiveness. Even after her victims’ arrest, when her job as a Catcher was presumably over, Stella enthusiastically helped the Nazis beat, torture, and humiliate the Jewish prisoners.
