Marthe Cohn, a wartime Jewish nurse who spied for the French, dies at 105

She then slipped past two German sentries, identifying herself to them with an audacious 'Heil Hitler' salute. Then she headed deeper into Germany, pretending to be the only child of parents killed in an Allied raid and saying she was searching for her missing fiance, 'Hans.' The ruse worked.
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She soon encountered a wounded Nazi storm trooper, who bragged that 'he could smell a Jew a mile away.' When the soldier collapsed in mid-conversation, Ms. Cohn ministered to him. He invited her to visit the front lines to continue the quest for her missing boyfriend.
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As a result, she was able to glean two strategic military secrets about Wehrmacht maneuvers, a feat that would win her medals from France and also from postwar Germany -- for saving lives by helping to hasten the end of World War II even by a few weeks. The war in Europe ended May 8.
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Marthe Cohn died May 20 at her home in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., in Los Angeles County, where she had settled with her American husband, a doctor, long after her wartime exploits, her family said. She was 105.
Her odyssey from German-speaking Alsace Lorraine as the granddaughter of a rabbi to her recruitment as a French spy and then to her life in America -- moving from New York to the Midwest and finally to California -- became grist for a 2002 book, 'Behind Enemy Lines: The True Story of a Jewish Spy in Nazi Germany' (written with Wendy Holden). It was also the subject of a documentary film, 'Chichinette: The Accidental Spy' (2019).
Asked in the film for a life lesson she could impart to viewers, Ms. Cohn replied, 'Be engaged, and don't accept any order that your conscience could not approve.'
Marthe Hoffnung, the fifth of eight children, was born April 13, 1920, in Metz shortly after the Lorraine region reverted from German to French rule after World War I. Her parents, Fischel and Regine (Bleitrach) Hoffnung, were Orthodox Jews who owned a framing and photofinishing business.
While the family had Roman Catholic friends, they were also subject to antisemitism. Ms. Cohn wrote that she had been emboldened to become a spy by an indelible childhood experience: When teenagers stoned the Hoffnungs as they left services at a synagogue, her father bravely chased them, wielding only his belt.
As classmates disparaged Leon Blum, the French prime minister in the 1930s, for being Jewish, she recalled, she and a sister 'had fistfights with the girls in school about that because then they showed openly their antisemitism and we did not accept it.'
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She left school at 17 to work at an older sister's hat store. After war broke out in 1939, the family transplanted themselves to Poitiers, in western France, where they operated a wholesale clothing business. Marthe studied nursing there.
Her parents had sheltered German Jews fleeing Nazi pogroms, and Ms. Cohn soon joined the cause. She and another sister, Stephanie, a medical student, helped Jewish refugees escape south to unoccupied France, which was administered by the collaborationist Vichy government. Several members of her family escaped south with false papers provided by a non-Jewish colleague with whom Ms. Cohn had worked as a translator at the Poitiers City Hall.
'When I asked him how much it would cost, he started crying, and he said, 'I do not want to be paid, I do this to save you,'' she told The Southern New England Jewish Ledger in 2015. As she led her mother and maternal grandmother to safety, she said, she feared that local peasants would renounce them to authorities for a reward. One old man in work clothes stared at the three women.
'Without saying a word, he suddenly dropped onto one knee and, hand on his chest, lowered his head in prayer,' she wrote. 'Next to him, his wife knelt on both knees in the dirt and made the sign of the cross.'
'I could hardly believe my eyes,' she added. 'It was so beautiful, the humanity of it. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I nodded my head in silent thanks.'
Stephanie Hoffnung was arrested by the Gestapo in 1942 for helping an escapee; she was later murdered at Auschwitz. Marthe's actual fiance, Jacques Delaunay, a medical student and non-Jew who was active in the resistance, was executed in 1943.
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Ms. Cohn studied nursing in Marseille, and then joined another sister in Paris for a year until the city was liberated in August 1944. She tried to join the Free French army but was rebuffed by an officer, who told her that she should have been killing German soldiers instead of saving refugees.
'As much as I hated the Germans at that time, I was unable to do that,' she told The Southern New England Jewish Ledger in 2015. 'I told him, 'I'm a nurse, I take care of patients, I don't kill people.''
She was recruited by a French intelligence officer after he learned she was bilingual; German-speaking women were in demand as espionage agents.
She interrogated German prisoners of war in France before being smuggled into Germany, where she befriended the wounded storm trooper.
'He was talking about, you know, all the things the SS do -- how much they do and how they hate the Jews and how they hate the Poles and how they hate the Russians and what they do to these people,' she said in a videotaped interview with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1995. 'Then suddenly he fainted.'
'So I was a good German nurse,' she added. 'I took care of him.'
By the end of the war, she estimated that she had lost more than two dozen relatives in the Holocaust.
In 1953, after serving as a nurse in Indochina, she was in Geneva and met a medical student, Major L. Cohn, from Brooklyn. They moved to the United States in 1956, married, and conducted research in anesthesiology. Her husband practiced medicine in New York City; Newark; Pittsburgh; Minneapolis; and St. Louis before settling in Southern California.
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Marthe Cohn was named a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor in 2004 and awarded the Order of Merit of Germany in 2014.
She leaves her husband; their sons, Stephan and Remi Cohn; and a granddaughter.
Until she wrote her book, Cohn didn't advertise her wartime adventures. Her husband learned about her secret assignments only after they married; her children were unaware for years.
'I just thought nobody would believe me,' she told the Los Angeles Times in 2005. 'Spies are usually tall and good-looking. I am a very unlikely spy.'
This article originally appeared in

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