(JTA) — Marthe Cohn, a Holocaust survivor and nurse who went behind German enemy lines on behalf of French intelligence and helped undermine the Nazi military in the waning days of World War II, died May 20 in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. She was 105.
Born Marthe Hoffnung in Metz, France, on April 13, 1920, Cohn was arrested in June 1942 and sent to the Route de Limoges camp for “foreign” Jews in occupied France. While a sister was eventually deported to and killed at Auschwitz, Marthe and her family escaped occupied France, eventually arriving in Marseille, where she finished her nursing studies.
In November 1944, she joined the French Army as a nurse, but was soon transferred to the army’s intelligence service. She eventually crossed into German territory as the war was winding down. In her most storied piece of derring-do, she was able to report that the Siegfried Line, a German stronghold northwest of Freiburg, had been evacuated, and pinpoint the location of German troops lying in ambush in the Black Forest.
In 1945, the French Army awarded her the Croix de Guerre. Germany later honored her with The Cross of the Order of Merit, its highest civilian award.
“I had no idea what I was getting myself into,” Cohn told the Los Angeles Times in 2000. “I’m not a liar or an actor, but when your survival depends upon it… I did it for what Germans had done to us.”
In December 1953, while enrolled in nursing school in Geneva, she met Major Lloyd Cohn, an American medical student. After spending New Year’s Eve together, she later recalled, “I felt truly happy for the first time in years.” In June 1956, the couple sailed to the United States. They married in a civil ceremony in St. Louis on Jan. 30, 1958, and followed with a Jewish ceremony at his parents’ home in Brooklyn that February.
Settling first in St. Louis, Cohn lived in the U.S. from 1956 onward and worked as a nurse anesthetist at Magee-Womens Hospital at the University of Pittsburgh. Only in 1999 did her children and grandchildren learn about her wartime exploits. In 2002, she published a memoir with Wendy Holden, Behind Enemy Lines, and was awarded the title of Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur, France’s highest order for military and civil merit.
Her story was also told in the documentary The Accidental Spy.
Cohn later worked as a research assistant in her husband’s neuroscience lab at UCLA/Drew Medical Center. Her husband practiced medicine in New York City, Newark, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis — and again, notably, in St. Louis.
In 2020, at the start of the COVID pandemic, she celebrated her 100th birthday in the driveway of her Los Angeles home, as a parade of well-wishers drove by in cars. A letter of congratulations from Israeli President Reuven Rivlin was read over a bullhorn, and she later received a phone call from both Rivlin and the president of Germany, as well as hundreds of emails.
She is survived by her husband of 67 years, Dr. Major Cohn, and their sons, Stephan and Remi.
