Marthe Cohn, a French Jewish Spy in Nazi Germany, Dies at 105
Marthe Cohn, who died May 20 in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., at 105, would keep those details secret for half a century, even from her family. Only in the late 1990s did she reveal she’d been a spy—an unlikely but audacious, 4-foot-11 secret agent whose work behind enemy lines for French intelligence would be credited with helping to hasten the end of the war in Europe...
Cohn studied nursing in Marseille and, after the liberation of Paris, tried to join the army but was initially diverted into social services, visiting soldiers on the front. In a 2002 memoir written with Wendy Holden, “Behind Enemy Lines,” she describes one colonel asking her to sit by his phone while he went to lunch and apologizing for only having German books in his office for her to read. Cohn explained it wasn’t a problem; she spoke German fluently. He sized her up—blond hair, blue eyes—and recruited her for the intelligence service on the spot. “It’s as simple as that, how your life can change,” she told the Los Angeles Times...
Her most significant feat came after she charmed an SS officer—a vile little man, she said, who claimed to be able to smell a Jew from miles away—and was invited to visit him on the Siegfried Line, the Germans’ western bulwark. Cohn soon reported that Nazis in and around Freiburg were abandoning those defenses and, feigning anguish and disappointment in “our German army” to one officer she encountered, was told not to worry: An entire division was hiding in the Black Forest, he explained, ready to ambush the Allies when they arrived. Cohn set off immediately for the Swiss border on her bicycle to relay that intelligence, helping Allied troops safely breach that portion of the Siegfried Line. In her book, she quotes a citation from the French government noting her “exceptional courage…facilitated in large measure the success of the last operations of the French Army.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/society-culture-and-history/history/marthe-cohn-a-french-jewish-spy-in-nazi-germany-dies-at-105/ar-AA1GdHoT
Marthe Cohn, a Jewish spy in Nazi Germany, dies at 105
Ms. Cohn, a French Jew, had managed to survive the Nazi occupation with help from false identity papers provided by a friend. She was also aided by her blond-haired, blue-eyed appearance and her fluency in German, which she learned as a child in Metz, a French city not far from the border. After joining military intelligence, she was able to cross enemy lines and spend a month in Germany, where she passed as a German nurse while making small talk with SS officers and Nazi soldiers, gathering information about troop movements...
“At first,” she recalled, “they looked at my size and said, ‘Little girl, go back to your mother. You don’t belong in the army.’”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/society-culture-and-history/history/marthe-cohn-a-jewish-spy-in-nazi-germany-dies-at-105/ar-AA1FjEu4
Slipping ‘Behind Enemy Lines,’ petite Jewish spy got key intelligence on Nazi maneuvers
https://azjewishpost.com/2017/slipping-behind-enemy-lines-petite-jewish-spy-got-key-intelligence-on-nazi-maneuvers/