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Yahoo
29-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
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 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. 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Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Case 137' Review: Dominik Moll's Riveting Police Procedural Places Good Cop and Bad Cop on Opposite Sides
'Why does everyone hate the police?' It's a fair and earnest question, lobbed halfway through 'Case 137' by 12-year-old Victor (Solan Machado Graner) at his mother Stéphanie (Léa Drucker) — who has a hard time coming up with a satisfactory answer, not least because she's in the police herself. 'It's not a likable job,' she eventually admits. 'Enforcing the law doesn't make you friends.' He doesn't know the half of it. Stéphanie is no standard cop, but an investigator in the French IGPN (internal affairs) department, making professional enemies left and right as she investigates various cases of police brutality and misconduct — while outside the force, she finds herself tarred by the same ACAB brush as those she's bringing to account. Not that Dominik Moll's clear-eyed, fuss-free and entirely gripping procedural drama asks viewers to shed any tears for her: Personal integrity ultimately counts for little in service of a crooked institution. After a few years off the French auteur A-list, Moll enjoyed a surge in acclaim (and swept last year's César Awards) with his 2023 film 'The Night of the 12th' — an ostensibly straightforward true-crime policier that revealed more intricately ambiguous moral layers as it unfolded. It was a more sober and stringent genre exercise than the playful Hitchcock homages with which he made his name in the early 2000s, and the change evidently agreed with him. 'Case 137,' premiering as Moll's first Cannes competition entry since 2005's 'Lemming,' ventures even more tautly into pure procedural territory, probing one fictional (but compositely fact-inspired) case involving corrupt Search and Investigation Brigade (or BRI) officers to the very bitter end, with little in the way of sensationalism or sentimentality, but a surprisingly pointed sidebar on cat videos. More from Variety São Paulo's Film Cash Rebate Delivers Early Wins, Sets Stage for 2025 Edition Brazil's Trailblazing Film-TV Org Spcine Turns 10 'Left-Handed Girl' Review: Sean Baker Collaborator Shih-Ching Tsou's Solo Debut Pulses Like Taipei After Dark The result should play at least as well with local and international audiences as 'The Night of the 12th' did, given the universal resonance and topicality of its skeptical stance regarding the police — and thanks in no small part to an anchoring performance of substantial complexity and bone-weary humanity by the reliably compelling Léa Drucker. Her character is introduced briskly questioning one officer accused of undue violence while performing crowd control at the populist yellow-vest protests that erupted throughout France in late 2018. He snapped after 15 years of clean and dutiful service, he admits, before begging Stéphanie not to strip him of his job. 'Policing is all I can do,' he pleads. The question of whether he really can do that hangs in the air. Either way, he's one of many such cases, with the IGPN overwhelmed by the steady influx of complaints stemming from the protests: Laurent Rouan's sharp, disciplined editing files multiple interviews and lines of inquiry into a combined, mounting sense of institutional crisis. If Stéphanie tends toward sympathy with her accused colleagues as she investigates them, her next assignment tests that impulse, as distraught mother and nursing auxiliary Joëlle (Sandra Colombo) claims her 20-year-old son Guillaume was shot in the head, wholly unprovoked, by unidentified BRI officers on a day trip to Paris, leaving him with life-changing injuries. The victim's family and friends are unconvinced that Stéphanie can do much to bring the perpetrators to justice — 'Like you'll believe my word against theirs,' mumbles pal and witness Remi (Valentin Campagne) — and Moll's cool overview of the systemic workings of 'the police's police' rather justifies their caginess. But the accusation nags at Stéphanie more than most that come across her desk, perhaps in part because she shares a hometown with the family, but more because the extreme evasiveness and defensiveness of the BRI brass she interviews in her preliminary investigation give her every reason to suspect very foul play. Working against her is the relatively high public regard for the BRI in the wake of their response to the 2015 Bataclan attack — even officers accused of vicious brutality get a round of hero's applause when brought out of custody — and an us-against-them approach to her department by seemingly all other police factions. Her ex-husband and his new girlfriend, both cops, treat her with disdain: 'Your half-assed enquiries smear the whole force,' fumes the latter. Damning video evidence of the officers' identity and their guilt eventually surfaces courtesy of a chance eyewitness ('Saint Omer' star Guslagie Malanda, in a brief, blistering turn) who's initially wary of coming forward — caustically pointing out to Stéphanie that many Black and Arab victims of police violence don't get as much due process as the white victim in this instance. Even with the video secured, however, the case is far from open-and-shut legally: The thin blue line gets awfully blurred as Stéphanie runs into infuriating technicalities and roadblocks from higher-ups. Drucker, initially a crisp, headstrong presence, turns increasingly brittle and recessive as the wheels of injustice turn, seemingly internalizing another, more ruthless question she gets asked in the course of her investigation: 'You do your job well, but what use is your job?' Humor and texture come via glimpses of her home life as a single mother, with Machado Graner (brother of 'Anatomy of a Fall' breakout Milo) excellent as the testy, vulnerable Victor, an early adolescent just beginning to see his parents and their profession through more jaded eyes. An adorable stray kitten introduces an unexpected note of cuteness, leading Stéphanie into the joys of online cat videos, though her father cautions against such distractions in life: 'When everyone's brainwashed and democracy's dead, you'll regret watching so many kitties.' Intelligent, drily seething and duly enraging in turn, 'Case 137' keeps its mind strictly on the job. Best of Variety The Best Albums of the Decade
