29-05-2025
Marthe Cohn, French Jewish secret agent who posed as a nurse in wartime Germany
Marthe Cohn, who has died aged 105, was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in France; she survived the Holocaust and after the liberation of Paris in 1944, joined the French First Army intelligence service and crossed over into southern Germany, posing as a German nurse looking for her fiancé.
The intelligence she sent back was instrumental in allowing the Allies to break through the Siegfried Line and enter German territory in 1945, leading to the end of the war.
In 2002, with Wendy Holden, she told her story in Behind Enemy Lines: The True Story of a French Jewish Spy in Nazi Germany.
One of seven children, she was born Marthe Hoffnung on April 13 1920 in the north-eastern French city of Metz, in the Lorraine region that had been part of the German Empire from 1871 to 1918. She grew up fluent in both French and German.
The Hoffnungs were aware of the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany under the Nazis, and Marthe recalled how, after Kristallnacht, November 9 1938, the family home was opened to Jews fleeing Germany. In August 1939, at the urging of the French government, Marthe and her family left Metz for Poitiers, south-west of Paris, which became part of the occupied zone of France after the German invasion of 1940.
There they were helped by French farmers and Marthe got a job as a municipal translator, and because she looked so Aryan, with fair hair and blue eyes, she became a favourite of the German commanding officer, who suggested she should make a career for herself in Berlin.
One of Marthe's sisters was living in Paris on false papers. Martha acquired false papers of her own, moved in with her sister and attended nursing school. Meanwhile, her family were involved in helping hundreds of Jews cross over from the Nazi-occupied zone into the 'free' zone of southern France, efforts which in 1942 were discovered by the Germans when they intercepted a letter written by Marthe's younger sister, Stéphanie.
Stéphanie was arrested by the Gestapo on June 17 and imprisoned, but she refused to tell her captors anything. In an effort to persuade her to talk, the Gestapo arrested her father. When that did not produce the desired result he was released. In September 1942 Stéphanie was deported to Auschwitz. She never returned.
Marthe, meanwhile, organised her family's escape from Poitiers to the Vichy zone of France, where, thanks to her false papers, she continued her studies at the nursing school of the French Red Cross in Marseille. However her fiancé, Jacques Delaunay, a student she had met in Poitiers, who had been involved in the Resistance, was shot in October 1943 at Suresnes.
She tried, without success, to join the Resistance, and after the Liberation of Paris, when, she joined the mad dash of people looking to enlist in the French army, she was unable to provide a birth certificate and could not join the service until November 1944.
She was originally assigned to work as a nurse until the colonel of her regiment discovered she was fluent in German and suggested she enter the intelligence service: 'He explained that in the German army, all men were in uniform. So any man in civilian clothes would be noticed and arrested. That's why they needed women.'
After training she was sent via Switzerland into Germany in early 1945 with false papers under the name Marthe Ulrich. Soon after crossing the border, she ran into a German soldier and, raising her right arm she said, 'Heil Hitler' before he asked for identification: 'I was very worried because I knew they were false papers, and I didn't know if he would notice it or not, but he gave it back to me with no problems. I was now in Germany.'
Her cover story, which she had invented herself, was that her parents had been killed in Allied bombing and she was an only child. All she had left was a photograph of the man she was supposed to marry together with a stack of his love letters 'They were very sympathetic toward me,' Marthe said of the Germans she encountered, and she admitted pangs of conscience at deceiving the families who showed her hospitality.
One day she came across a group of retreating German soldiers, including a non-commissioned SS officer who was bragging about his exploits on the Eastern Front: 'He was raving about the Poles and Jews and how many he killed.' He could 'smell a Jew', he told her.
Suddenly the man, who had been wounded, collapsed in front of her, 'so I was a good German nurse. I took care of him.' He ended up giving her valuable information about German troop movements, including the fact that the Siegfried Line had been evacuated, and where the Germany army was hidden in the Black Forest – key pieces of information for the Allies.
To deliver the information, she met up with Allied forces as they were about to enter Freiburg: 'The first tank arrived, and I went in the middle of the street and I made the 'V' sign for victory. It was the only way for me to show them I was a friend. The tanks stopped in front of me because I'm very lucky, and I asked to talk to the commander of the tanks. I was quite assertive, too.'
Marthe returned to France after the war, then in 1953, while undertaking further nursing training in Geneva, she met Major Lloyd Cohn, an American medical student. They married in 1956 and moved to the US, where Marthe worked as a nurse and, later, a nurse anaesthetist. The couple had two sons and eventually settled in California.
For decades she remained quiet about her wartime work, but in 1998 she returned to France and asked to see her war records. To her surprise, they agreed. Then, following the death in 2001 of her brother she decided the time was right: 'He knew I had been in Germany... He was the one who protected our whole family and paid for everything. After the war, he asked me to write a book. So when he died, I felt I owed it to him.'
Marthe Cohn was awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1945 and the Médaille militaire in 1999, and was appointed a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in 2004. In 2014 she was awarded the Verdienstkreuz, the Order of Merit of Germany, for saving German lives by helping to shorten the war.
Marthe Cohn, born April 13 1920, died May 21 2025
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