Marthe Cohn | |
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| Born | Marthe Hoffnung 13 April 1920 Metz, France |
| Occupation(s) | Nurse, author |
| Awards |  Legion of Honour – Knight (2002) |
Marthe Hoffnung Cohn (born 13 April 1920) is a French author, [1] [2] nurse, former spy and Holocaust survivor. She wrote about her experiences as a spy during the Holocaust in the book Behind Enemy Lines .
On 13 April 1920, Marthe Cohn was born as Marthe Hoffnung in Metz, France. She was born into an Orthodox Jewish family as one of seven children. Her family lived near the German border in France when Hitler rose to power. As the Nazi occupation escalated, her sister was sent to Auschwitz while her family fled to the south of France just after the reannexation of Alsace-Lorraine by France in 1918. Metz had been a German possession from 1871 to 1918, acquired as part of Alsace-Lorraine in the Franco-Prussian war and relinquished after World War I. [3] She witnessed antisemitism near home with the defacement of the Synagogue of Metz. [4]
In September 1939, according to the order of civil evacuation, she hid, like many mosellans, at Poitiers in the department of Vienne. After the French Occupation in June 1940, and the annexation of the Moselle by the Third Reich in July 1940, she decided to stay in Vienne.
After the arrest of her sister Stéphanie by the Gestapo on the 17th of June 1942, Marthe organized her family's escape, from Poitiers to the free zone. There, she survived thanks to false papers, put together before she left. Her fiancé, Jacques Delaunay, a student she had met at Poitiers, who was actively engaged in the French resistance, was shot on the 6th of October 1943 at the fortress of Mont-Valérian, at Suresnes. In November 1943, Marthe Cohn finished her studies, which she had begun in October 1941 in Poitiers, at the nursing school of the French Red Cross, in Marseille. She then tried, in vain, to join the Resistance.
In November 1944, after the liberation of Paris, Marthe Hoffnung enlisted and became a member of the Intelligence Service of the French 1st Army, commanded by Marshal of France Jean de Lattre de Tassigny. After 14 unsuccessful attempts to cross the front in Alsace, she crossed the border into Germany near Schaffhausen in Switzerland. As a nurse fluent in German, she assumed the identity of a German nurse and claimed she was searching for her missing fiancée. She would then crawl back across the Swiss border to relay the information back to the French intelligence. [1] She was able to report to her service two major pieces of information: that northwest of Freiburg, the Siegfried Line had been evacuated and where the remnant of the German Army lay in ambush in the Black Forest. [5]
After the war Marthe returned to France to pursue a career as a nurse, but in 1956, while studying in Geneva, she met an American medical student, Major L. Cohn, who was the roommate of a friend. Within three years, they were married and living in the United States. Now both retired, they had worked together for years, he as an anesthesiologist and she as a nurse anesthetist. [1] Cohn lives in Palos Verdes, California. [6]
Cohn was decorated with the Croix de Guerre in 1945 with two citations (Decisions Number 134 signed by Le Lieutenant-Colonel Bouvet on August 9, 1945 & Number 1322 signed by Marechal Juin on November 10, 1945). In 1999, the French government awarded her the Médaille militaire, Decree Number 3465 MR 1999. [7] She was awarded the title of Knight of France's Legion of Honour (Decree Number 2702, MR 2004) by André Bord, the national veterans minister in 2002. In 2006, she was again honored by the Government of France with the Medaille of the Reconnaissance de la Nation.
In 2002, she co-authored with Wendy Holden a book about her experiences entitled, Behind Enemy Lines: the True Story of a French Jewish Spy in Nazi Germany and was published by Harmony Books. The book was translated into French by Helene Prouteau and published by Plon as well as Selection du Reader's Digest and The Editions Tallandier, a prestigious publishing house in Paris.
A 2019 film, Chichinette: The Accidental Spy, is about Marthe Cohn's life and was made by writer-director Nicola Alice Hens and produced by Amos Geva. [2] [9] [10]
Natzweiler-Struthof was a Nazi concentration camp located in the Vosges Mountains close to the villages of Natzweiler and Struthof in the Gau Baden-Alsace of Germany, on territory annexed from France on a de facto basis in 1940. It operated from 21 May 1941 to September 1944, and was the only concentration camp established by the Germans in the territory of pre-war France. The camp was located in a heavily forested and isolated area at an elevation of 800 metres (2,600 ft).
Herta Bothe was a German concentration camp guard during World War II. She was imprisoned for war crimes after the defeat of Nazi Germany, and was subsequently released early from prison on 22 December 1951.
Judenfrei and judenrein are terms of Nazi origin to designate an area that has been "cleansed" of Jews during The Holocaust. While judenfrei refers merely to "freeing" an area of all of its Jewish inhabitants, the term judenrein has the even stronger connotation that any trace of Jewish blood had been removed as an alleged impurity in the minds of the criminal perpetrators. These terms of racial discrimination and racial abuse are intrinsic to Nazi anti-Semitism and were used by the Nazis in Germany before World War II and in occupied countries such as Poland in 1939. Judenfrei describes the local Jewish population having been removed from a town, region, or country by forced evacuation during the Holocaust, though many Jews were hidden by local people. Removal methods included forced re-housing in Nazi ghettos especially in eastern Europe, and forced removal or Resettlement to the East by German troops, often to their deaths. Most Jews were identified from late 1941 by the yellow badge as a result of pressure from Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler.
Behind Enemy Lines is a 2002 autobiographical book co-written by Holocaust survivor Marthe Cohn and Wendy Holden. It details Cohn's exploits as a French Jew during the Holocaust and World War II when, working as a nurse, she traveled into German territory to collect intelligence for the French Army, as the Allied forces started making advances on Germany, pushing the German forces back during World War II
Numerous internment camps and concentration camps were located in France before, during and after World War II. Beside the camps created during World War I to intern German, Austrian and Ottoman civilian prisoners, the Third Republic (1871–1940) opened various internment camps for the Spanish refugees fleeing the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Following the prohibition of the French Communist Party (PCF) by the government of Édouard Daladier, they were used to detain communist political prisoners. The Third Republic also interned German anti-Nazis.
Laure Diebold, sometimes written Laure Diebolt was a high-profile female member of the French Resistance during World War II. She was also the private secretary of Jean Moulin before being arrested then deported from 1943 to 1945 to the Nazi camp of Auschwitz, Ravensbrück and finally Buchenwald. Moreover, she is one of only six female resistants to be awarded the title Compagnon de la Libération.
Rose Warfman was a French survivor of Auschwitz and member of the French Resistance.
Hélène Berr was a French woman of Jewish ancestry and faith, who documented her life in a diary during the time of Nazi occupation of France. In France she is considered to be a "French Anne Frank". She died from typhus during an epidemic of the disease in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp that also killed Anne Frank and her sister Margot.
The history of the Jews in Alsace is one of the oldest in Europe. It was first attested to in 1165 by Benjamin of Tudela, who wrote about a "large number of learned men" in "Astransbourg"; and it is assumed that it dates back to around the year 1000. Although Jewish life in Alsace was often disrupted by outbreaks of pogroms, at least during the Middle Ages, and reined in by harsh restrictions on business and movement, it has had a continuous existence ever since it was first recorded. At its peak, in 1870, the Jewish community of Alsace numbered 35,000 people.
Jeanne-Marie Matthey-Jonais was a French tennis player. She competed during the first two decades of the 20th century. Matthey won the French Open Women's Singles Championship four times in succession from 1909 to 1912, but lost the 1913 final to Marguerite Broquedis.
Germaine Ribière was a French Catholic, member of the Résistance, who saved numerous Jews during World War II, and was recognized as a Righteous Among the Nations.
Marianne Cohn, was a German-born French Resistance fighter.
Marthe Mathilde Cnockaert, later Marthe McKenna, was a Belgian nurse who became a spy for the United Kingdom and its allies during the First World War. She later became a novelist, and is credited with writing over a dozen spy novels in addition to her memoirs and short stories.
Luise Wilhelmine Elisabeth Abegg was a German educator and resistance fighter against Nazism. She provided shelter to around 80 Jews during the Holocaust and was consequently recognised as Righteous Among the Nations.
Alice Cohn (1914–2000) was a German-Jewish graphic artist and master forger for the Dutch resistance during World War II.
Anne-Lise Stern was a French psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor.
Paulette Weill Oppert Fink (1911–2005) was a French-Jewish nurse and resistance worker during the Second World War. She later emigrated to the United States where she helped to raise money in support of the new State of Israel. An executive member of the National Women's Division of the United Jewish Appeal, she was elected chair in December 1960.
Renee Bornstein is a French-born Holocaust survivor, living in Manchester, England. She was the wife of Ernst Israel Bornstein, a Polish-born Holocaust survivor and author of Die Lange Nacht, a memoir of his experiences during WWII, published in English as The Long Night.
Many priceless artworks by the Dutch Post-Impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh were looted by Nazis during 1933–1945, mostly from Jewish collectors forced into exile or murdered.
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