11. The Jewish Anti-Semite
Perhaps the parents of Stella Kubler (1922 – 1994) should not have coddled her so much. Born and raised as the only child of an assimilated middle-class Jewish family in Berlin, Stella was treated like a princess by her overprotective parents. She grew up financially comfortable, but not as wealthy as other students in her Jewish school. That ate at Stella, and left her harboring resentments against her richer schoolmates. During WWII, she became infamous for collaborating with the Gestapo to track down and denounce other Jews hiding from the Nazis. Many of those denounced by her was her former schoolmates and their families, whom she repaid in spades for their crime of being richer than Stella’s family.
A Wannabe Aryan
When Germany began rounding up Jews and sending them to the death camps, 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 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 finding other Jews’ hiding places, having lived in hiding themselves, and went at it with a will.