Stella Kubler
Known as “The Blond Ghost” or “Blond Poison“, Stella Kubler (1922 – 1994), nee Goldschlag, 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. Her family was well off, but not as affluent as other Jewish families with whose children she attended school. During WWII, she became infamous for collaborating with the Gestapo to track down and denounce Jews hiding from the Nazis.
Stella had herself gone into hiding using forged IDs listing her as Aryan, which she was able to pull off due to a blue-eyed and blond-haired Aryan appearance. However, she was denounced to the Gestapo four months later by a “Jew Catcher” – a Jew working for the Gestapo to find other Jews in hiding. Her boyfriend and later-husband offered the Nazis his services, bragging that he could “assemble an entire train” of Jewish deportees, and soon the couple were working together as Catchers, collecting 300 Reichsmarks for every Jew they turned in, and a promise to spare Stella’s parents. Having themselves lived in hiding, the couple had an instinct for where to look. Stella in particular, because she knew many of Berlin Jews from her years in a segregated Jewish school, was highly effective.
While the decision to become a Catcher might not have been of her own free will, how she exercised what freedom of choice she had while working as a Catcher was entirely within her control. She pursued hidden Jews with tremendous zeal and inventiveness, and even after their arrest, when her job as a Catcher was presumably over, she enthusiastically participated in the beating, torture, and humiliation of Jewish prisoners.
Despite her services, the Nazis broke their promises and deported Stella’s parents to their death in a camp, and her husband and his family were sent to Auschwitz in 1943. She then met and married her second husband, another Jew Catcher, and kept working enthusiastically for the Gestapo. Betting on a German victory, she obtained a promise from a high-ranking Gestapo official in 1944 that she would get declared an Aryan after the war.
During her career as a Jew Catcher, Stella was responsible for the arrest and subsequent murder of hundreds of Jews, with the total number of her victims ranging from at least 600 to possibly as high as 3000, including many of her personal friends, former schoolmates and their families, and even some of her own relatives. She got off light: captured by the Soviets, she was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment. After her release, she moved to West Berlin, where she has tried again and sentenced to 10 years but served none of them. She then converted to Christianity and became a lifelong anti-semite until her death in 1994, when she committed suicide by jumping out the window of her Berlin apartment.