Stella Goldschlag. The blonde Jew who turned her in to the Nazis
Despite the power of the German state apparatus, the Gestapo’s attempts to find and deport all German Jews were in vain. From time to time, they were identified by accident, but the bosses wanted a 100% result. For this reason, the old servant Heinrich Müller adopted tactics that always brought success.
He began to use recruited agents and provocateurs. It is believed that there were at least a thousand such people in all of Germany at the end of the war. Before the storming of Berlin, the chief of the Third Reich’s secret police burned their personal files. As a result, the Jewish Avengers Organization Nokmim was unable to find these people immediately after the war. And the Israeli intelligence service Mossad failed such a task later.
So it turned out that only one traitor was discovered and became widely known – but what a traitor! In 1945, Stella Goldschlag found herself in the Soviet zone of occupation, where no one knew about the scale of her “feats”. But this lady had the stupidity to tell the woman from whom she rented an apartment that SMERSH was no better than the Gestapo. The hostess was a communist and reported this to the Soviet Chekists. And they knew how to work and unwound all the threads to the end.
It was like this.
Stella was born in Berlin in 1922. Her parents were heavily Germanized Jews and belonged to the capital’s bohemians. His father was a famous composer, and his mother became a sought-after pop singer. In her youth, the girl wanted to follow in her footsteps, but preferred jazz. Her career seemed to be just around the corner: the young Jewish woman was stunningly beautiful, with long blonde hair and blue eyes.
After the Nazis came to power, the situation of German Jews deteriorated dramatically. The Goldschlag family lost their jobs, and Stella herself, like all Jewish children, was forced to drop out of public school and go to an institution exclusively for the children of Zion. There she made the acquaintance of fellow tribesmen, whom she had not noticed at point-blank range before. The young beauty was known for her sociability and easy disposition, and therefore made a lot of acquaintances there.
The Goldschlags tried unsuccessfully to get a chance to leave Germany. But it was in vain – they had to make a large financial contribution to the government, which they could not afford to pay. Soon they were forced to work in one of the arms factories. When the first major deportation started after the outbreak of the war, Stella went underground, but due to her inexperience, she was quickly caught.
The Gestapo offered her a stick, a threat to send her parents to a camp, and a carrot of three hundred Reichsmarks for each tribesman she betrayed. Stella’s legend was simple: because of her Aryan appearance, no one suspected her as a Jew – this allowed her to move openly around military Berlin, because of her Jewish connections, it was easy for her to rub into the trust of her own people.
Using her knowledge of the habits and places where the children of Zion might have taken refuge, she found and handed over between 600 and 3,000 people to the authorities. Sometimes she herself apprehended them, for which the Gestapo gave her a pistol. Goldschlag’s peculiar feature was the identification of those representatives of her people who lost their German relatives in the war, which means that they lost the right to protection from the state.
Even when the parents and husband of our today’s heroine were sent to the camp, she still did not stop cooperating. Either because of its obvious benefit, or because of the principle. Without waiting for the assault on Berlin, the secret agent left for the city of Löwenwalde, not far from the capital. In December 1945, the Soviet Chekists took her under the arms of the Soviet Chekists because her tongue was too long.
Stella was sentenced to ten years for collaborationism, and her only daughter was given up for adoption to a Jewish family. After serving her sentence, a Jew by birth, she converted to Christianity and married a man named Schellenberg (not related to the head of German intelligence).
When Goldschlag went to West Germany to pick up her daughter, she refused all contact and went on to Israel. The former Gestapo accomplice led a quiet and peaceful life, and shortly before graduation she gave an interview to her classmate at the same Jewish school.
There she justified herself and pointed out the shortcomings of the German Jews. In 2006, a film was made about her in Hollywood, which received a very snide title “The Good German”. The main role was played by George Clooney, and Stella’s character was portrayed by a really wonderful actress and natural blonde Cate Blanchett.