Marthe Cohn, former spy and Holocaust survivor.
WILMETTE – Spies are notorious for keeping secrets — but for how long? Holocaust survivor and former French spy Marthe Cohn kept her story quiet for more than 50 years.
She was 24 when she joined the French army during World War II. After Allied forces liberated France in 1944, she was recruited to work in intelligence when a colonel discovered she spoke German fluently. She kept her story a secret until the mid 1990s — even Cohn’s own children knew very little about her experiences — mainly out of fear that others wouldn’t believe the remarkable story she had to tell.
Cohn spoke to a packed audience about her inspiring story at Chabad Wilmette on September 18. Now 96, she traveled from her home in California to share her experience as a member of the intelligence service of the French First Army.
She began her talk humbly, recounting a story about her sister, who died at Auschwitz. “I like to honor my sister before I tell my own story,” Cohn said.
Cohn grew up in Metz, France, just across the German border, speaking French and German. During the Nazi occupation, the family worked with the resistance helping other Jews escape from occupied France to unoccupied areas in southern France. Cohn’s sister was arrested by the SiPo (German security police) for her activities and later sent to Auschwitz on Yom Kippur in September 1942, while the rest of the family fled to the south of France in an area controlled by the Vichy government. Cohn said her sister refused the family’s offer to escape imprisonment.
While in southern France, Cohn earned a nursing degree and then moved to Paris using false identification papers in 1943. When the Allied forces liberated France in 1944, she decided to join the army with thousands of other people. She described waiting in line for days, only to be questioned whether she had collaborated with the Germans, when they noticed her false identification papers. “How do you prove something you haven’t done?” Cohn asked.
Despite the odds, Cohn was soon admitted to the army and headed to the front in a rickety bus that kept breaking down and running out of gas. When she finally arrived, her petite build — she stood only 4-four feet, 11 inches tall — and blonde hair and blue eyes, led her superiors to say she wasn’t fit for the army. Cohn wouldn’t take no for an answer and was assigned the role of social worker, even though she had no experience in the field.
But it was those very features that allowed Cohn to infiltrate Nazi Germany, assuming the identity of a nurse working for a German doctor.
Cohn described one failed attempt to cross the border, on a cold, snowy night in February. She had no map, flashlight, compass or radio, and nobody had told her there was a canal in the field she was crossing. Cohn described falling into the cold water and struggling to get out. That trip was one of 13 failed attempts to cross the border.
Through perseverance, Cohn successfully crossed the border into Germany through Switzerland and was able to ascertain important information about the Nazis. She described hiding in the bushes, watching Nazi soldiers walk back and forth, waiting for her opportunity to slip by. As she lay in hiding, she understood the danger of her mission. “I realized the immensity of what I was about to undertake,” she said. And Cohn began to feel nervous that she was ill-prepared. “Lying there I became aware of what was wrong in my preparation,” she said.
Cohn somehow mustered the courage to creep out of the bushes into Germany.
By gaining the trust of the Germans she encountered, she was able to report back that northwest of Freiburg, the Siegried Line was evacuated and where the Germany Army laid in ambush in the Black Forest.
While Cohn’s own experience is a testament to her bravery, she stressed that so many people in France risked their lives to help the Jews. Noting that 75% of Jews in France survived the war, she attributed that number to the bravery of others. “Most of them survived because of help by non-Jews who risked their lives to save other people,” she said.
Cohn has received many medals for her service, including the Croix de Guerre, France’s highest military honor.