Hadassah-Brandeis Institute

Brandeis Professor of Holocaust Studies, Laura Jockusch, is in the middle of a book project exploring the tragic story of Stella Goldschlag (1922-1994). Goldschlag, a German Jewish Holocaust survivor, worked as a Gestapo informer in Berlin from 1943-1945, allegedly turning in dozens of Jews who had gone into hiding in the German capital. This project analyzes Goldschlag’s story through three court cases against her - a Soviet military trial in 1946, and two criminal trials at German courts in 1957 and 1972. Three times Goldschlag was guilty of “crimes against humanity” and “accessory to murder”. However, Goldschlag for her part saw herself merely as a victim: first of the Nazi regime that had driven her into desperately trying to save herself and her family from deportation; then of a Stalinist justice system that rigorously passed disproportionate sentences on those deemed “Nazi collaborators” irrespective of whether they had actually been victims themselves; and finally of an allegedly vengeful Jewish community seeking to come to terms with its own destruction and vulnerability by cleansing its own ranks from those believed to have assisted the Nazis in their persecution of the Jews.

Professor Jockusch aims to complete a monograph that seeks to carry out a reappraisal of Goldschlag. It will pay particular attention to gender, both in terms of Goldschlag’s wartime choices as well as her postwar trials and later public defamation. The intern’s work will entail creating an extensive bibliography through internet research (25%) and library research (25%), transcription of oral testimonies from the Fortunoff Archive and the Shoah Visual History Archive (25%), creating a database, and summarizing, as well as possibly translating, primary sources written in German.