Traitress: Jews, Gender, and the Trials of Stella Goldschlag in Postwar Germany

• In Event: Jews on Trial after the Holocaust

Abstract

This lecture analyzes the history of three controversial court cases against a young German Jewish woman by the name of Stella Goldschlag (1922-1994) who suffered Nazi persecution but survived the Second World War because she became a Gestapo informer and allegedly betrayed Jews in hiding in Berlin to Nazi authorities, leading to their deportation and death. After the war, through the active involvement of Holocaust survivors, courts in East and West Germany found Goldschlag guilty of “crimes against humanity” and “accessory to murder.”
Focusing on the function of these trials in the complex processes of rehabilitation and post-traumatic normalization of Jewish survivors in Germany, the lecture explores gendered notions of betrayal and collaboration and of the distinct immorality and evilness of women branded traitors in times of war. It also sheds new light on the postwar German public discourse on guilt and accountability for the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Moreover, it demonstrates the inability of the Allied and German judiciaries to arrive at a nuanced understanding of how the Nazi regime had forced its victims of racial persecution to aid in their own communities’ destruction.

Author

• Laura Katharina Jockusch, Brandeis University