27 February 1943, Berlin, Germany. The Nazi regime initiates a large-scale operation named "Fabrikaktion," to round up the last remaining Jews in the city and send them to concentration camps. By this time, there are thousands of Jews in the German capital who, until this point, have been spared from previous deportations because of their work as forced laborers in the arms industry.
In the following weeks, most of these workers will be loaded onto cattle trains and transported to Auschwitz, where they will perish in gas chambers. Some Jews, however, manage to avoid capture, go into hiding, and, with forged papers, try to survive underground. However, the possibility of their survival is reduced by the presence of the so-called "catchers"—Jewish collaborators who, in exchange for temporary safety, help the Nazi secret police—the Gestapo—hunt down hidden Jews.
The most successful of the catchers operating in Berlin is Stella Goldschlag. Stella Ingrid Goldschlag was born on 10 July 1922 in Berlin, then part of the Weimar Republic, which was the name given to the democratic German government from 1918 to 1933. Stella grew up in the western part of Berlin, enjoying a typical childhood filled with pretty dresses and the care of overprotective parents who lovingly nicknamed her "Pünktchen," meaning "little dot," as she was the center of their world.
Although the Goldschlag family celebrated the important Jewish holidays, they were fully integrated into German society and considered themselves German. Stella’s father, Gerhard Goldschlag, a World War I veteran, worked as a conductor, composer, and journalist. Meanwhile, her mother, Antonie, before her marriage, pursued a career as a singer.
The Goldschlag family often had economic troubles and sometimes had to rely on welfare as Stella’s father struggled to find stable work. Stella attended elementary school before enrolling at the Hohenzollern High School for Girls. On 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg.
Shortly after, the Nazi regime began implementing its radical anti-Jewish agenda, and in April of the same year, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service was passed, dismissing Jewish professionals from government jobs. This sweeping policy marked the beginning of widespread discrimination, which affected countless Jewish families, including the Goldschlags. Stella’s father, who worked for the Gaumont newsreel company, lost his job during this time, plunging the family into financial difficulties.
In 1935, Jewish children like Stella were no longer allowed to attend state schools. As a result, she enrolled at the Goldschmidt School in Berlin, a prestigious private institution that accommodated around 750 students. These children typically came from affluent families of rabbis, doctors, and businessmen.
The school was known for its exceptional teachers—many of them former university professors or educators dismissed from public schools due to discriminatory policies. Stella stood out among her peers for several reasons. Unlike most students, she attended the school on a scholarship as she came from a modest background.
Her striking appearance, however, drew considerable attention and with her tall, slender frame, light blue eyes, blonde hair, and flawless skin, she was often compared to Hollywood starlets. She was charismatic and popular particularly among the boys. One November day in 1938, Stella was sent home early from school, only to discover that her father was in hiding because Jewish men were being rounded up.
This event came to be known as the Kristallnacht pogrom, or the Night of Broken Glass, which was a series of coordinated violent riots against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and its recently annexed territories on 9–10 November 1938. The violence and arrests marked a turning point for many Jewish families, including Stella's, as the threat to their safety became increasingly apparent. Subsequently, Stella's father decided that the time had come for him, his wife, and his daughter to leave the country.
However, at that point in time, emigration was incredibly difficult without money or influence. While the international community was well aware of the escalating persecution of Jews and the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom was condemned worldwide, nearly all countries imposed strict immigration quotas, including the United States. Gerhard Goldschlag was informed at the American consulate that it would take about two years before his family would be allowed entry.
Other attempts to emigrate also failed, leaving the Goldschlags with no choice but to remain in Germany. The Second World War started on 1 September 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Early in the war, Stella enrolled in an art school where she studied fashion drawing and posed nude as a model for about two years.
In her free time, she sang in a Jewish jazz band, and she briefly found happiness in the fall of 1941, when she married the band’s leader, Manfred Kübler. However, like all Jews, Stella could not escape the rising tide of anti-Semitism. By September 1941, she was required to wear the Star of David, and that same year, she was forced to work in the war industry, which temporarily spared her from deportation to a concentration camp.
Initially, Stella was assigned to the Siemens factory producing electric engines, but she was later transferred to an ammunition plant. On 27 February 1943, during a large-scale operation known as "Fabrikaktion," Stella and her mother were caught in a round-up of Jews at their factory. Acting quickly, they hid in a makeshift shelter and later slipped out through a back door to evade the Gestapo guards.
Their escape was largely due to their blonde hair, which played into the Nazis’ false belief that Jews could not be blonde. Unfortunately, Stella’s husband, Manfred, was arrested, deported to Auschwitz, and was never heard from again. After the "Fabrikaktion" Stella and her parents went into hiding.
A former art school friend and longtime admirer of Stella, Samson Schönhaus—who operated under the alias Günter Rogoff — forged identification papers for her, enabling Stella to travel without raising suspicion. Rogoff was part of a resistance network comprising Jewish and Catholic Poles and had provided at least 40 Jewish prisoners with forged food ration cards, passports, and other identity documents. Due to his underground activities, the Gestapo was intensively searching for him.
On 2 July 1943, while in a pub, Stella was recognized by an acquaintance, Inge Lustig, a Jewish woman working as Greiferin meaning a "catcher" for the Gestapo. Stella was apprehended by Gestapo agents accompanying Inge and taken to their headquarters at 26 Burgstrasse. Stella became a prime target for the Gestapo when they examined her papers and identified them as Rogoff’s work.
Although she was not aware of where Rogoff was, the Gestapo tried to break her, hoping she would reveal her friend’s whereabouts. Stella endured horrific abuse—her shins were beaten to the breaking point, her spine repeatedly struck, and she bled from her mouth, ears, and nose. The interrogators put a pistol to her temple several times, threatening her life.
Completely shattered, Stella lost consciousness from the relentless torture. Even when she lay helplessly on the floor, the Gestapo men continued to kick her. On 10 July 1943, Stella briefly escaped during a visit to the dentist but was quickly rearrested after seeking refuge at her parents' home, which was under Gestapo surveillance.
After her recapture, she was brutally tortured once again. On 24 August 1943, the prison where Stella was detained was hit during a massive British bombing raid, causing widespread panic among the prisoners. While many women perished in the flames, Stella managed to escape.
Instead of fleeing, Stella voluntarily turned herself in at the transit camp where her parents were being held, awaiting deportation to Auschwitz. She acted out of love for her parents, as she had depended on them heavily since her youth, and was prepared to die with them. This desperate act of love and loyalty marked the beginning of a harrowing chapter in Stella’s life.
Faced with the grim reality of her family’s situation, she made a fateful decision in an attempt to protect her parents and herself from certain death. In order to avoid the deportation of herself and her parents, she agreed to become a "catcher," with her first task being to track down Günter Rogoff. However, since she had no actual information, she was accused of faking and sent back to jail.
An SS deputy, Felix Lachmuth, however, noticed Stella’s Aryan-like appearance and intelligence and recruited her as a "catcher" on a permanent basis, offering her certain benefits and guaranteeing her parents' safety. Stella was then trained by the Gestapo to hunt down Jews and became a part of a unit consisting of about 20 young men and women. Their headquarters were initially located in the transit camp at Grosse Hamburgerstrasse and later moved to the pathology wing of the Jewish hospital.
The bounty hunters were housed in separate rooms and had access to plenty of food. They were rewarded with 300 Reichsmarks—an equivalent to about $2,200 today—for every Jew in hiding they helped arrest. Carrying a gun and papers identifying them as Gestapo agents, they were allowed to move freely around the city without wearing the Star of David.
Using her knowledge of many Jewish families and former schoolmates from her years at the Goldschmidt School, Stella was highly effective at locating and betraying them to the Gestapo, all while maintaining the appearance of being in hiding herself. Whenever she handed someone over to the Gestapo, she would immediately search the victim’s purse for an address book with addresses of additional hidden Jews, which frequently resulted in even more arrests. The Nazis referred to her as "the blonde poison.
" Stella’s striking appearance and sharp memory for names made her an effective catcher. One of her male victims, who survived the war after escaping from a train to Auschwitz, recalled how Stella had approached him one day, asking for help. Life in hiding appeared to have taken a toll on her, and she claimed to be hungry.
The man agreed to help her and took her to a pub, where he was led into a trap and arrested by Gestapo agents. Stella's hunting grounds also included cemeteries. After Jewish men or women buried their non-Jewish spouses, Stella would report them to the Gestapo, as they were no longer protected by their marriages.
The exact number of Jews captured with Stella’s help remains unclear, with estimates ranging from 600 to 3,000. Stella was widely feared within the community of those in hiding. According to Holocaust survivor Inge Deutschkron, she had the reputation of being able to smell out hidden Jews and defectors.
In the final years of the war, Stella was universally despised within Jewish communities and even received death threats. In the end, the Nazis broke their promise of sparing the lives of Stella's parents, and in February 1944, they were deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto, which was located in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Stella pleaded with her superiors to spare her parents, but to no avail.
However, she was promised honorary Aryan status after the war. Her parents were later transported to Auschwitz and murdered. In October 1944, Stella married her second husband Rolf Isaaksohn, a fellow Jewish catcher but it was not a happy marriage, and both of them soon entered extramarital relationships.
During this time, Stella was not as active as a catcher due to the fact that she was too well-known to be of effective. In addition, there were few Jews left in Berlin due to the Nazi purges and the zealousness of Goldschlag and her compatriots. In February 1945, Stella became pregnant, likely by her fellow Nazi collaborator Heino Meisl and while she expected him to acknowledge paternity and support her and their unborn child, Meisl instead vanished, leaving Stella to fend for herself.
By this point, Stella had lost the support of her lovers and her Nazi superiors, who were preoccupied with the advancing Allies. In the early stages of the Battle of Berlin in April 1945, Stella went into hiding. That same month, she gave birth to her daughter, Yvonne, in Liebenwalde, a village north of Berlin.
Berlin fell to the Russians on 2 May 1945, and the Second World War in Europe ended 6 days later. While in 1933, the Jewish population of Berlin was estimated at 160,000, at the end of the war there were only between 1,400-1,700 Jews still left in the city. They survived because they were too well hidden.
Stella was arrested by the local police, and her child was taken away from her and later placed with foster parents. Following her arrest, Stella initially managed to convince the police that she was a victim of the Nazis. However, when she was transferred to the Jewish Community in Berlin for identification, her cover was blown.
To the Jewish survivors in Berlin, Stella was the embodiment of evil. After members of the Jewish Community almost beat her up, called her names and shaved her head, she was transferred to the police station at Alexanderplatz, controlled by Soviet authorities. Following interrogation, she was brought before a Soviet tribunal.
The three judges took only minutes to sentence her to 10 years of hard labor. Following the completion of her sentence, Stella moved to West Berlin to find her daughter, who had been living there with a Jewish family but due to her dark past Yvonne wanted to have nothing to do with her mother. Moreover, a year after her release from Soviet imprisonment, Stella was indicted again—this time by the West German authorities in Berlin.
The second trial against Stella began on 20 June 1957 in West Berlin, and the press paid significant attention to her wartime activities, calling her "the blonde witch" or "the blonde venom. " She was charged with complicity in the murder of an unknown number of people, likely a few hundred. The trial lasted four days, and the public prosecutor called witnesses who depicted Stella as a ruthless criminal.
Before the trial, a psychiatrist had diagnosed her as a schizophrenic psychopath. Stella tried to evoke pity by pointing to her poor health and sorrow over the loss of her child. She denied all charges, claiming to be a victim of the times.
She argued that the trial was part of a Jewish conspiracy against her, alleging that Jews had always been jealous of her beauty. The court acknowledged that Stella’s collaboration with the Nazis may have initially been motivated by an attempt to save her parents from deportation. However, it condemned the extent and enthusiasm of her activities, which she had continued even after her parents were deported.
Although the prosecution demanded 15 years of imprisonment, Stella was sentenced to 10. As she had already served 10 years in Soviet prisons, she did not have to return to jail. After the war, Stella converted to Christianity, married three more times, and became an open anti-Semite.
As she became older, her mental and physical faculties deteriorated and after the death of her last husband, she led a lonely and isolated existence. When on 26 October 1994 Stella Goldschlag committed suicide by drowning in the Moosweiher pond in Freiburg, she was 72 years old. Thanks for watching the World History Channel be sure to like And subscribe and click the Bell notification icon so you don't miss our next episodes we thank you and we'll see you next time on the channel.
