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One of the most intrepid of the grabbers was a woman named Stella Kübler (neé Goldschlag), the subject of a searing portrait by journalist/historian Peter Wyden, who interviewed her after the war. A beautiful blond who did not “look Jewish,” or, for that matter, feel Jewish, Stella deeply resented being subjected to the restrictions imposed on the Jewish community. Like Inge Deutschkron, but much more brazenly, she flaunted the Nazis’ regulations, virtually never wearing her yellow star and regularly frequenting popular bars and cafés until the wee hours of the morning. She could not, however, evade being put to work in a Siemens arms factory, which she hated. In spring 1943 she decided to become a “submarine,” albeit hardly a deep-diver. Unable to stay away from her beloved Nachtlokale, she was spotted by an old friend from her Jewish school, who turned out to be a grabber on the prowl. Stella was arrested and taken to Burgstrasse 26, the Gestapo headquarters for Berlin’s central district. According to her later testimony, the authorities tortured her, then offered her the choice between deportation to the East and becoming a grabber herself. The Nazis were especially keen to enlist her because she seemed perfect for the role—a “blond, blue-eyed Jewess who could wiggle her way into any male confidence, who knew the habits, contacts, hiding places, and psychology of the U-boats, who could spot these tenacious resisters on the streets and in the cafés, and who was herself so desperate, so greedy to survive, and tough enough to recover from torture with no visible damage.”

So Stella went to work trolling for U-boats, focusing on places like the Swiss embassy and a string of West End cafés where she knew her prey liked to submerge themselves in the crowds. She stayed on the hunt even after her parents were sent to Theresienstadt. Her only drawback as a grabber was that she was well known among the U-boats, who called her “Lorelei,” after the legendary Rhine siren who lured river sailors to their deaths on the rocks where she perched. Despite her notoriety, she managed to bag her share of victims and stay in the good graces of her keepers. She pursued this work until the autumn of 1944, when, guessing that the Nazis were likely to lose the war, she began to pull back, pleading that there were no more Jews left to grab. She managed to hold out for the remainder of the war, only to be grabbed herself by Berlin’s new rulers after the city fell to the Russians. She was tried and sentenced to ten years in Soviet prisons, which led her to see herself as a “victim of the Jews,” on whom she blamed her fate.

Inmates at Sachsenhausen concentration camp, 1943

Fortunately, types like Stella were an exception in Berlin’s Jewish community, and there was always the counterexample of those who sought actively to sabotage the Nazi system. In Berlin a small coterie of Jewish resisters clustered around a charismatic communist named Herbert Baum. All were working-class and passionately leftist in orientation. Intriguingly, a number of them worked at the same Siemens plant that employed Stella Kübler. At first the members of the Baum Group restricted themselves to distributing anti-Nazi propaganda and helping other Jews and leftists escape from the Reich. On May 18, 1942, however, they took the bold step of bombing an anti-Soviet exhibition in the Lustgarten, which resulted in the capture of some members of the organization. Baum himself was arrested and subjected to severe torture, to which he eventually succumbed. Other members of the group were sentenced to death by the People’s Court and executed at Plötzensee Prison on the west side of Berlin. As added retribution, the Gestapo shot 250 Jews at the Lichtenfeld Cadet School and dispatched another 250 to Sachsenhausen and other camps.