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Interviews with news makers and discussion of topics important to Southwest Michigan. Subscribe to the podcast through Apple itunes and Google. Segments of interview are heard in WestSouthwest Brief during Morning Edition and All Things Considered

WSW: A Jewish Spy in World War II Germany

Sehvilla Mann
/
WMUK

A French Jewish woman who gathered critical intelligence in Germany in the last months of World War II will speak about her experiences at Western Michigan University Thursday.

Marthe Cohn was 24 when she became a spy for the French army at the end of 1944. Her family found ways to fight the German occupation from the beginning. One of her sisters and Cohn’s fiancé paid for their resistance with their lives.

Cohn, who will turn 96 next month, will give a presentation at 7:30 pm Thursday at WMU’s Fetzer Center.

She spoke with WMUK’s WestSouthwest about what life was like for her family during the war, why her attempts to join the official French Resistance during the German occupation were rebuffed, and how she pieced together important military information behind the German front.

marthe-cohn-web-full.mp3
WMUK's full interview with Marthe Cohn

Sehvilla Mann: Marthe Cohn, welcome to WestSouthwest.

Marthe Cohn: Thank you very much.

SM: You grew up very close to the German border in northern France in the city of Metz, and you were born in 1920. When did the war begin to change your life?

MC: In August 1939 before the war started. The prefecture, which is a replacement of the government in the region of Metz asked that all people who could move away from Metz, they all should do it because we were so close to the German border. And we left. My parents, my grandmother, because she lived with us since my grandfather had deceased in April 1939. So my grandmother was with us and we were five girls.

And we had with us a little boy from Germany, a Jew, a little Jewish – a cousin – that my oldest brother and my older sister took out of Germany in 1938 after the night of Kristallnacht. And he lived with us during the whole war, and he survived. He’s now in Israel and he’s fine. So we were a large family, an extended family and we left.

My two brothers were in the army. They were not with us, they were both in the army, in the French army. And we went to Poitiers because there was a program established many years before in case of war – each city and village of the northeast close to Germany had a city assigned way back near the Atlantic Ocean. Very close to the Atlantic Ocean. And Metz was assigned to Poitiers, P-O-I-T-I-E-R-S. And that’s where we went in 1939.

SM: And what happened after you got to Poitiers?

There was nothing much occurred until 1940. In May 1940 the Germans started the blitzkrieg. And in June they entered France through Holland and Belgium. And they were victorious, and France was separated in two parts. Three-quarters of France were under German occupation and one-quarter was under the government of Maréchal Pétain, supposedly a hero of World War One in Verdun. But in reality I never believed that he was a big hero. And I didn’t follow him at all, never.

SM: How is it that your family was able to stay in France during the war years without being deported?

MC: There was nowhere else to go. Nobody accepted us. The Swiss – you couldn’t get in Switzerland, they didn’t let you in. It was extremely difficult. England you had to cross the ocean. That was awfully difficult. And a huge family like ours, who had already been displaced once, it was very difficult to think to go to England in the very beginning, before the Germans became victorious. We didn’t expect it. We thought our army would defend us – and be victorious. So we had nowhere else to go and it was normal to stay in our country.

There was nowhere else to go. But we escaped from Poitiers after my sister was arrested, in 1942.

SM: And why did you have to leave Poitiers at that point?

MC: So that she can escape too. But she was never able to. She was in a camp – she was arrested for resistance acts, not as a Jew. But because she refused to give up any information to the SiPo [Sicherheitspolizei, the German security police]. It was the SiPo which arrested her in June 17, 1942. In my book I wrote it was the Gestapo because the Gestapo was the best police unit known which served the army and the government of Germany.

And when they come to your house to arrest somebody they don’t tell you to what unit they belong. So in reality, years later, I discovered that it was the SiPo who arrested my sister. And she refused to give any information, they came back to the house, that late evening and arrested my father, to put pressure on her. But even in the presence of my father, she refused to give any information. Which was denouncing a farmer who helped in the region, in Dienné, D-I-E-N-N-E with an accent, and he had helped thousands of people to escape from occupied France to non-occupied France.

And he helped us because we sent him a lot of people. We were doing that, my sister and I. But she was caught. Because she wrote a letter and she signed it her own name, which we never understood. But that’s what happened. So she was caught and she was put in prison for one month, after she refused – my father was released – because they had not yet started to arrest French Jews. They had arrested only foreign Jews. Until that in Poitiers. We had no computer then; it was not centralized.

So they were doing what they wanted. So my sister was one month in prison, she would celebrate her 21st anniversary in prison on July 10, 1942 and then [her 21st birthday] 21st birthday, yeah – oh, I say anniversary, that’s French – birthday on July 10 1942. And then after months she was transferred to the camp where the foreign Jews were.

And they were there – entire families, even with the newborns, all children. And they had no medical care at all. So my sister started to give them medical care. And she – when we organized in the beginning, before the Germans were constantly controlling the camp, they were only controlling from far away. But there were only French people.

And we had organized that she can escape. And she refused to escape then. Because she felt that what she was doing for the children was too important. And – but – I went to see her and I reminded her that her mother needed her as much as the children. And she answered me, if I am arrested, - if I escape, you will be all arrested. And I understood she was right. I had never thought about that, that we could be arrested if she escapes. So that’s when I decided we would all escape.

And I knew we could do it, because I had met several weeks earlier, a Mr. Charpentier, with whom I had worked in city hall of – French city hall of Poitiers as a translator of French and German – to German and German to French. And I lost my job because the German got us out of there because we were Jewish. But anyway, Mr. Charpentier had stopped me in the main street of Poitiers and offered me to provide us with identity cards without the stamp “Jew” and that was lifesaving.

But I told him you cannot do that. Because if you do that, you will be arrested and your wife and little boy will be arrested too because they arrested the whole family if you helped the people that you shouldn’t help. So he answered me that he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t help us. And he made the cards for us, and I hid them. I didn’t tell anybody because I knew already that less you talk about things, safer it is.

So I knew we could escape because we had cards without the stamp. So I organized our escape. And we escaped in August 1942 from occupied to non-occupied France. But we couldn’t go back to Dienné to M. Noël Degout because he now he was under constant surveillance and he couldn’t do it so we went somewhere else. And we were enormously helped, by a lot of people. And 75 percent of Jews in France survived and if they survived it’s because non-Jews helped them.

It’s a risk of their lives and that of every member of their family. So you have to understand the help was immense and life-saving. So we were able to escape.

But my sister never escaped and she was later transferred to Drancy near Paris which was an atrocious camp, then to Pithiviers and she was deported on September 21st, 1942 to an unknown destination. But in her last letter – she couldn’t write to us, there was no correspondence – we were already non-occupied France, so there was no correspondence between the two parts of France at that time.

So she wrote to a boyfriend, in Poitiers, who was a classmate of medical school and in the post-scriptum she wrote, “we are going to Metz, to work so no need to dramatize.” These are the last words she ever wrote. Years later I discovered she had been sent Auschwitz. So that’s the story of my sister.

SM: You never saw her again.

MC: No. Never. The last time I saw her is the day when I reminded her that her mother needed her as much as the children, that’s the last day I saw her.

SM: The rest of your family did survive the war?

MC: Yes, they all survived. All my brothers and sisters were extremely active in the resistance. She was too and I was too, but I was never accepted by a group of Resistance after – in Marseille or in Paris.

SM: The official Resistance – why not?

MC: Because, they interviewed me, I was taller than I am now, I was 4’ 11’’ but I shrunk a lot. I was 4 11, I was very thin, very blonde, with blue eyes and very light skin. They took me for a bimbo.
They never trusted me. So they never accepted me. They told me, all of them, several, when I was interviewed in Marseille and Paris, cause I tried several times to join them and I gave up after, they told me, ‘go back to your mother, little girl.’ They didn’t take me seriously. That doesn’t matter.

SM: In 1944 after Paris was liberated, you were able to join the French army. Were you chosen to be a spy right away?

MC: No, not at all. I was first – at the front in Alsace – the front was in Alsace in November. I was able to join the army only in November ’44. Not in August ’44. When Paris was liberated because they discovered immediately that my identity card was a forged card. So they wouldn’t accept it. And my hometown of Metz was not yet liberated, I couldn’t get a birth certificate. They wanted a birth certificate.

And you had to prove that you were – that you had not collaborated with the Germans. How do you prove that? So I was able to join in November, because the mother of my – I was engaged at the time to a medical student, to a classmate of my sister who I met through her. And he had been arrested in, I think it was in July or August 1943. That’s true – the year is true. The month I don’t remember exactly. But it must have been June or July.

And he was first condemned to forced labor for 20 years by the French tribunal. But then the French gave them to the Germans. Because there were French people who were bad too. Do you know, in every country you’ll find bad elements. And they were five students from Poitiers and he and his brother were two of the five and four of them were executed and my fiancé was one of the four, were executed on October 6, 1943 at Mont-Valérien in Paris.

So their mother was in Poitiers and after the liberation of Poitiers I went to Poitiers and I took her to Paris because she was in very bad shape physically. She had lost her two boys, her only children. And her husband was in the concentration camp of Buchenwald in Germany. So she was all alone and she was in a terrible state physically. So I took her to Paris and she lived with us and she – the army accepted that she vouched for me. And that’s how I was finally accepted.

So in October [November?] 1944 I went to the front and when I arrived, the captain of intelligence – in every regiment you have at least one officer of intelligence – I have to give you some background – and he immediately disliked me at the first sight. I don’t know why I made such poor impression on these people.

And he too wanted to send me back home. And I told [him] no, I had enough trouble coming and headquarters in Paris sent me, I’m going to stay. So, furious, he told me – as a registered nurse, I was a registered nurse, ‘You should be an officer. But because you were such a coward I make you a sergeant.’

And I just shrugged my shoulders because I couldn’t care less. Then more furious he said, I don’t need any nurses, I have enough nurses, you are going to be a social worker. So – and nobody gave me any directives, how, what I should do as a social worker. So for three weeks I was a social worker. So I was a social worker and I went every day – because nobody gave me any directives I didn’t know what to do.

So I went every day to the front and asked our kids – because they were very young, most of them, in the foxholes what they needed. And I brought them from the village as much as I could. The villages were extremely generous for our troops. So that’s what I did for several weeks. And then one day walking in the square of the village I met the colonel of the regiment. He had – it was Pierre Fabien, and he had killed the first German in France. It’s the metro – station Metro Barbès Rochechouart in Paris.

There is now a metro station in Paris bearing his [Colonel Fabien’s] name. If you go to Paris you can see it or you can see it on Google. And he stopped me, and asked me to answer his phone during his lunch break. Do you see how your life can change from one moment to the other?

And he, in the office after showing me he was leaving and he was very courteous and he said to me, I’m sorry, I have nothing for you to read. There are only German books here. And I answered that I read German fluently. That was fine. And then very interested he walked back to me, towards me and asked me if I spoke German. And I told him yes, as well as French.

And he then asked me again if I was willing to be transferred to the intelligence service of the First French Army to which we belonged. That was the army we belonged to. And I accepted and that’s when I became a spy.

SM: What was your cover – who did you pretend to be?

MC: I was asked to do my own alibi. Because that sticks much better than somebody - so I kept my first name but in German, Martha instead of Marthe, with an A. And my last name was – Ulrich. U-L-R-I-C-H and I was a German nurse. And I worked supposedly for a doctor in Konstanz. That doctor existed and he had been in Konstanz. And he had been in Konstanz, he had worked in Konstanz but he had escaped.

He was an Alsatian and he had escaped back to Alsace as soon as he was able to. When Alsace was liberated he escaped and went back to Alsace. And I never met him but I got all, a lot of information, from him, you know, about him. I was supposed to be his nurse. But they never told me the name of the clinic he had in Konstanz.

And they never gave me enough information because I had never been in Konstanz. I didn’t know anything about it. So I got in trouble because of that once. Because I didn’t even know the name of the clinic.

SM: Were you almost found out because of that?

Yes, because I was living with a woman who had been a patient. He gave me two addresses. With that – I never met him but that’s all the information I got. I got one address in Schengen and one in Freiburg. And in Freiburg that lady with whom I was living, they both accepted me immediately. When I said the he was sending me. Because they thought he was still in Konstanz.

So the one in Freiburg had a friend coming for tea in the afternoon. That woman asked me the name of the clinic and I told her, I forget it. I forget the name, I told her – [but she gave a made-up name.] And she said that sounds more like a hotel, which was the name of a hotel. And I said that’s true, madame, you absolutely right. It was a hotel before the war. But now it’s a clinic. And she was suspicious but the lady with whom I lived didn’t like that she questioned me like that.

SM: That’s good –

MC: If she hadn’t done that, the other one would have pushed me. And I didn’t know anything about Konstanz.

SM: That sounds frightening, honestly!

MC: But that’s the problem when you go, because there were two reasons I was sent into Germany. For military information as much as I could get, of course. But also, to give them information about the civilians. They had very little information – they didn’t know what was going on in Germany. That’s when – another reason I was sent, they wanted to know the reaction of these people to the war, and how they behaved.

So that’s why there were such holes in my story.

But I had the story – the alibi isn’t finished – I had a fiancé. And that fiancé existed. When I told them that I want a military German guy as a fiancé – because I know how romantic the Germans were – they immediately said no problem.

So they went to a prisoner of war camp and chose a young man they found was right for me. His name was Hans. I remember his name. And they made Hans write me love letters to me, to Marthe Ulrich, and sign pictures to his dearest Marthe Ulrich – do you know, things like that. So these letters and these pictures helped me a great deal.

Because in Germany there were hundreds of thousands of Germans who had disappeared at that time. It was such a chaotic time. Or they were prisoners of war and they had not yet written because that takes time organize, or they were wounded and in the hospital, they couldn’t write, or they were dead and the family didn’t know yet.

So there were hundreds of thousands of families were without news from their loved ones in the army. And I knew that. And that’s why I wanted a fiancé, a German fiancé. So I was looking for him. And everybody was extremely sensible to that and helped me and was very willing to help me. And not to question me too much. And to – I was protected too, because I have that fiancé so I was off for all the other men. So it has many reasons.

SM: You traveled a lot and you must have talked to so many people!

MC: Yeah – I had a huge sector, from the Swiss border to Freiburg. You can look on the map, it’s a huge sector. And I walked enormous amount in Germany. An enormous amount. I took one train from Schengen to Freiburg. But I never took another train. Because every few minutes the military, the German military police, they were huge guys with a big metal plaque on the front of the chest -

Attached with chains – we called them in France, the dogs in leash.

SM: What is the term?

The dogs in leash – because they had a metal chain around the neck.

SM: Ah, like a dog on a leash.

MC: We always found terms to describe them.

SM: Not always nice ones probably.

MC: Not very nice, no.

SM: That must have taken so much work!

MC: No. Intelligence is discovered by – mostly by chance. The first time – I discovered three things important things. First I interrogated prisoners of war when I was with the commanders of Africa. To know the plan of retreat of the Germans from Alsace to Germany. That’s what the colonel of the commanders asked me to find out. And I found out and it’s written in one of my citations of the Croix de Guerre.

[Indicating suitcase nearby] That suitcase is all my medals – so one of my metals is the Croix de Guerre. And the citation says that I provided Colonel Bouvet with very important information about the retreat, the plan of retreat of the Germans from Alsace to Germany. So that was the first thing I achieved.

And the second thing I achieved was to find that the Siegfried line had been completely evacuated. And that was – yes it was work if you want, but I didn’t even consider –

But when I came back to Freiburg, several weeks later - but first I have to tell you, the first time I had very little information, I told you, of what was going on in Germany. So I was watching what they were doing. And I noticed that when they were going from A to B, in daytime, they walked. Because there was no transportation in daytime, because of the American and English bombardiers, do you know, were constantly bombarding Germany all over.

And they walked and they walked in groups. So I joined a group. And in that group was a noncommissioned officer who came back from the Russian front where he had been wounded. And he told us all his life, and he told us all the atrocities they were committing on the Russian front. That was the first time I knew what was going on. Because we were not at all aware of what was going on on the Eastern front. We knew only what was going on the Western front.

And the government of England and America kept us in the dark. And that’s why we didn’t know anything about the camps of concentration. We thought they were sent to work. It was strange, we didn’t believe everything. But we didn’t know what was going on. We only understood after the war. But before the war we didn’t know anything, what was going on. And in my sector there were no camps, so I never saw a camp before the liberation – before the armistice. I saw only after the armistice, I saw survivors - not before - people from the camps.

So we were walking with that noncommissioned officer and he suddenly fainted. Do you see how I lucky I was? I was a nurse, I took care of him. And when he regained consciousness he was so grateful that he invited me to come and visit him at the Siegfried Line and he gave me his phone number. So three weeks later I came back to Freiburg. I had been at the Swiss border and coming back, and doing a lot of things. But when I came back and I heard that, then I decided to go and see him.

And I walked. It was 10 kilometers to the Siegfried Line. And when I arrived I discovered it the Siegfried line was completely evacuated. They had long gone. The last stragglers were leaving and they told me, they’re all gone. And several of them told me the same thing, so I knew it was true.

So I walked back to Freiburg and the city was completely empty because the people were so terrified that the foreign army was going to invade them. Because I had heard on the radio that our armies, our allied armies were very close to Freiburg and were coming in. And that’s why I walked to the Siegfried Line. And when I came back it was completely empty. So I waited, and the first tank arrived. So I went in the middle of the street.

I cannot raise my right hand because my shoulder – I have a lot of trouble with my shoulder. I made the V sign – of Winston Churchill, the victory sign, that was my only way to show them who – that I was – a friend and not an enemy. But I didn’t know how they would react. But the tanks stopped. I’m extremely lucky it didn’t kill me. It could have but it didn’t. And I asked for the officer to come down and talk to me, and he came down, and I told him that I have extremely important information and I wanted to go to be taken to headquarters immediately.

So he took me to headquarters, where I met Commander Petit, PETIT from the Second Zouave which is another regiment from North Africa. They all came from North Africa. And commander Petit immediately told me, who tells me that the truce is maybe a trap. So I just wrote to him a phone number, because we had the same technology as the Americans, we depended on the six and third American army, we were with them.

Commander Petit called and they reassured him that he could trust me and they were happy to know I was still alive because they had no news, I had no radio. I had no compass, I had no arms, I had no maps, I had nothing written, everything was in my memory. So Commander Petit sent a patrol to the Siegfried Line, they came back and said, yes it’s true, the Siegfried Line is completely evacuated. So I was I very important VIP that night. I was invited for dinner, I was given a room, and the next morning at breakfast Commander Petit asked me if I wanted to go back to my service, intelligence service.

I told him no. My mission terminates with armistice, not before. I have to cross the border today, the front today and go south in Germany. But I asked him for a bicycle because I was tired of walking. So he gave me a bicycle and riding down from a huge – very large mountains in the south of Germany, I saw stopped on the road, along the road a group of German military ambulances. So I stopped and started talking to them.

Now I was even a better German patriot. I was a perfect German patriot. Because I told him I had escaped from Freiburg. I told them I came from Freiburg, that I had escaped from Freiburg because I was afraid of the French army, which had Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian and black soldiers. Which was the truth, that we had these soldiers. But if you understand how racist the Germans were you can understand the effect that had on this colonel and his entourage.

So now I was a marvelous German patriot. And I was complaining too that our German army was not defending us anymore as much as they should. And the colonel after a while he said to me, don’t worry. The war is not ended. And he told me exactly where the remnant of the German army was hidden in ambush, in the Black Forest. And that information, I got by going myself into Switzerland and giving a non-coded letter, I didn’t take time to code it, that takes too long.

It was too important to go fast. And to give to my letter to a – Swiss custom man to give that letter back to the Swiss – chief of the intelligence service of the Swiss – customs in Basel, in Switzerland. Who had helped me cross from Switzerland into Germany.

Because I entered Germany through Switzerland. And he had told me before I left, if ever you are in trouble, go into Switzerland and tell the custom-man that you are a Swiss agent, not French. That’s what I did and that letter was transferred to him on time and he read it because he wanted to know what was going on. It was not coded. And then he gave it to my service. That’s it.

SM: And so, were you still spying in May of 1945 when the war ended?

MC: Yeah, sure. I was spying until the last minute of the war.

SM: And then?

MC: And then I was at the front, military government in Lindau in Bavaria until January 1946 when I left for Vietnam, but as a nurse – the intelligence service was over forever. I never went back. I had offers but I never went back.

SM: You had offers, though?

MC: Yeah but – I never went back. I didn’t want to.

SM: Were you frightened while you were spying?

MC: At times, when it was necessary to be afraid. But not all the time. There were times when I had a lot of fun. Do you want me to tell you the fun?

SM: Sure, tell me something that was fun.

MC: When I was in Freiburg the same lady who changed the conversation with that woman, she invited me to go to a movie. So here I am, in the war, sitting in a movie house. And I was looking around myself and saying, if they knew who I am. And I thought that was extremely funny. I had a lot of fun doing that.

SM: You’ll be 96 next month, in April. What is it like traveling the country and the world talking about your experiences?

MC: It’s very stimulating. And it’s very important. It’s very tiring too but I still do it. Because I feel – I am not of a nature to sit in a chair and wait to die. That’s not at all my – I want to die active.

SM: Marthe Cohn, thank you so much for your time.

MC: You’re welcome.

 

Sehvilla Mann joined WMUK’s news team in 2014 as a reporter on the local government and education beats. She covered those topics and more in eight years of reporting for the Station, before becoming news director in 2022.
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