Cohn, Marthe, 1920-

Marthe Cohn was born 13 April 1920 in Metz, France to a Jewish family. After the arrest of her sister Stéphanie by the Gestapo on the 17th of June 1942, Marthe organized her family’s escape to the free zone. There, she survived thanks to false papers, put together before she left.

In November 1944, after the liberation of Paris, Cohn enlisted and became a member of the Intelligence Service of the French 1st Army. She crossed the border into Germany and assumed the identity of a German nurse. She would then crawl back across the Swiss border to relay the information back to the French intelligence. She was able to report to her service two major pieces of information: that northwest of Freiburg, the Siegfried Line had been evacuated and where the remnant of the German Army lay in ambush in the Black Forest.

After the war Marthe returned to France and married an American medical student, Major L. Cohn before moving to the United States. In 2002, she wrote a book about her experiences entitled, Behind Enemy Lines: the True Story of a French Jewish Spy in Nazi Germany.