In 1941, she married a Jewish musician, Manfred Kübler. They had met when both were working as Jewish forced-labourers in a war plant in Berlin. In about 1942, when the large deportation programme of Berlin Jews into extermination camps began, she disappeared underground, using forged papers to pass as a non-Jew — owing to her blonde-haired, blue-eyed 'Aryan' appearance. In the spring of 1943, she and her parents were arrested by the Nazis. Stella Kübler was subjected to torture. In order to avoid deportation of herself and her parents, she agreed to become a "catcher" for the Gestapo, hunting down Jews hiding as non-Jews. She was promised a salary of 300 Reichsmark for each Jew that she betrayed. She proceeded to comb Berlin for such Jews and, as she was familiar with a large number of Jewish people from her years at her segregated Jewish school, Kübler was very successful at locating her former schoolmates and handing their information over to the Gestapo, while posing as a submerged herself. Some of Kübler's efforts to apprehend Jews in hiding included promising them food and accommodation, meanwhile turning them over to the Nazi authorities; she would also follow clues provided to her by the Gestapo. The data concerning the number of her victims varies, depending on different sources of information, from between 600 and 3,000 Jews. Stella Kübler's charisma and striking good looks were a great advantage in her pursuit of underground Jews. The Nazis called her "blonde poison". She is mentioned in The Forger, Cioma Schonhaus's 2004 account of living as an underground Jew in Berlin, and in Berlin at War by Roger Moorhouse. The Nazis would break their promise of sparing the lives of Kübler's parents. They were deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where they were killed. Kübler's husband, Manfred, was deported in 1943 to Auschwitz, along with his family. Kübler still continued her work for the Gestapo until March 1945. During that time, she met and married her second husband, Rolf Isaaksohn, on 29 October 1944. Isaksohn, a fellow Jewish collaborator with the Nazis known also as a Greifer.
At the end of World War II, Kübler went into hiding. She was found and arrested by the Soviets in October 1945 and sentenced to ten years' camp detention. Following the completion of her sentence, she moved to West Berlin. There she was again tried and convicted, and sentenced to ten years' imprisonment. She did not have to serve the second sentence because of the time already served in the Soviet prison. Stella's only child, Yvonne Meissl, was taken from her and became a nurse in Israel. After the war, Kübler, according to Irving Abrahamson, "convert to Christianity and bec an open anti-Semite". Kübler committed suicide in 1994 by throwing herself out of the window of her apartment in Freiburg.
Personal life
Stella Kübler was married five times: Following the deportation of her first husband, Manfred Kübler, she married fellow Jewish collaborator and Greifer Rolf Isaaksohn on 29 October 1944. After the war, she was married to three non-Jews, starting with Friedheim Schellenberg. Her last husband died in 1984.
In biographies and fiction
In 1992, Peter Wyden, a Berlin schoolmate whose family had been able to obtain visas for the US in 1937 and who later learned about Stella's role as a "catcher" while he was working for the U.S. Army, wrote a biography of Kübler. In 2019, the German journalist Takis Würger published a novel based on Kübler's life, , which was published by Carl Hanser Verlag. It received largely negative reviews. Critics described the work as "Holocaust kitsch", but it sold well. Kübler appears in Chris Petit's novel The Butchers of Berlin. Here, her actions as a "catcher" are in the background of the main story.
