The Invisibles

I just finished watching the film “The Invisibles” („Die Unsichtbaren – Wir wollen leben” in German.) It is the true story of 4 German Jews (Cioma Schönhaus, Hanni Lévy, Ruth Arndt-Gumpel and Eugen Friede) and how they hid in a Berlin that the Nazi’s declared „Judenfrei“  (“Jew-Free”) in 1943. At the beginning of World War 2 in 1939 there were around 15,000 Jews living in Berlin with fake identities. At the end of the War in May 1945 there were around 1,500 left. The rest were hunted down by the Gestapo and their Jewish collaborators and sent to the Concentration and Death Camps. 

One such Jewish collaborator (also in this film) is Stella Goldschlag, born in 1922, (seen in this picture taken in Berlin during World War 2 with two other Jewish collaborators.) Stella (known by the Nazis as the “Blonde Poison”) married Jewish musician, Manfred Kübler in 1941. They had met when both were working as forced-laborers in a war plant in Berlin. In 1942, when the large deportation of Berlin Jews to the Death Camps began, she disappeared underground, using forged papers to pass as a non-Jew (an Aryan.)

In the spring of 1943, she and her Parents were arrested by the Nazis, but to avoid deportation for herself and her Parents, agreed to become a "catcher" for the Gestapo, hunting down Jews hiding as non-Jews (referred to as "U-Boats"). Stella was very successful at finding her former schoolmates and handing their information over to the Gestapo, while pretending to be a U-Boat herself – and receiving 300 Reichsmark for each Jew that she betrayed. 

The exact number of Jews she betrayed is unknown, but it is between 600 to 3,000 people. Despite her collaboration, the Nazis eventually deported her Parents to the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp, where they were killed. Her husband was deported in 1943 to Auschwitz, along with his family and killed. This did not prevent Stella from continuing her work as a Catcher for the Gestapo. She continued this work until March 1945. During this time, she met and married Rolf Isaaksohn, also a  Jewish collaborator for the Gestapo.

At the end of the war she went into hiding, but was found and arrested by the Soviets in October 1945 and sentenced to ten years' camp detention. Afterwards she moved to West Berlin. There she was again tried and convicted, and sentenced to ten years' imprisonment. However, she did not have to serve that sentence because of the time already served in the Soviet prison. 

In 1992, Peter Wyden, a Berlin schoolmate whose family had been able to get 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 her called “Stella.”

Stella was married 5 times (to two Jews during the War and to three non-Jews after the War.) She committed suicide in 1994 by throwing herself out the window of her apartment in Freiburg, Germany. Stella had one daughter, Yvonne Meissl, who was taken from her and became a nurse in Israel.