[6] The family fell on hard times when the 1933 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service was used to purge Jews from positions of influence and her father Gerhard lost his job with the newsreel company Gaumont.
Her parents attempted to leave Germany after Kristallnacht in 1938 to escape the Nazi regime, but were unable to gain visas for other countries.
[5] In about 1942, when the large deportation programme of Berlin Jews into extermination camps began, she disappeared underground, using forged papers to pass as a non-Jew – often avoiding ID checks altogether, owing to her blonde-haired, blue-eyed 'Aryan' appearance.
[2] After collaborating with Hellmann's arrest, Gestapo investigators found out that Goldschlag had also been in contact with a prominent passport forger named Samson Schönhaus who operated under the alias Günter Rogoff.
Rogoff was involved with an extensive Jewish-Catholic Polish resistance network and had provided at least 40 Jewish prisoners (in the camp in which Goldschlag was kept) with forged food ration cards, passports and various other identity documents.
Some of Goldschlag's efforts to apprehend Jews in hiding included promising them food and accommodation, meanwhile turning them over to the Nazi authorities; she would also follow clues provided to her by the Gestapo.
[12] She would also monitor funerals of ethnic Germans who were known or suspected to have married Jewish spouses and expose them to Nazi authorities, as pre-war marriages to an "Aryan" allowed some Jews to avoid detection.
[6][14] While Goldschlag continued to hunt down Jews, she and her fellow "catchers", numbering around 15 to 20 by this time in Berlin, were also the target for revenge from their potential victims.
An organization named Society for Peace and Reconstruction (Gemeinschaft für Frieden und Aufbau or GFA) were actively planning to kill Goldschlag (and Isaaksohn.)
[15][16] GFA instead sent Goldschlag a fake death sentence written on official court document paper and informed her that if she was seen on the streets [after the war] by one of their agents she would be killed instantly.
[2][14] Even if the threat was only for intimidation, it was seen as a valid one, and Goldschlag's superior pulled her and the other members of the Search Service from the streets for two weeks and later issued them with pistols for protection.
This was dangerous as it put both her and the other catchers at risk of deportation and Isaaksohn vehemently denied Goldschlag's claims and told his superiors that they were operating very successfully in tracking down Jews.
In an attempt to officiate this, in early 1946, she was accompanied to a Jewish Community office in Berlin to be registered, which would have made her eligible for additional food rations from aid services.
[18] Following the completion of her sentence, she moved to West Berlin to find her daughter, who had been living there with a Jewish family, to no success.
By 1984, Goldschlag lived in Berlin-Spandau with her fourth husband, but after his death the same year, following a suicide attempt, she moved to Freiburg.
[23] Goldschlag's only child, Yvonne Meissl, did not want to associate with her birth mother after hearing about her activities during the war, subsequently becoming a trained nurse and immigrating to Israel in 1967.
[24] In the 2001 novel The Good German,[25] the character Renate Naumann (named Lena Brandt in the 2006 film adaptation) is loosely based on Goldschlag.
[26][27] The book was adapted as the 2006 film titled The Good German directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring George Clooney, Cate Blanchett and Tobey Maguire.
Goldschlag is a minor character in the 2017 German docudrama, Die Unsichtbaren – Wir wollen leben (English title The Invisibles).