Marthe Cohn, a French-Jewish spy who operated behind enemy lines in Nazi Germany during World War II, passed away late last month in California at the age of 105.
Cohn kept her intelligence activities secret for five decades, even from her own family. It was only in the late 1990s that she revealed she had served as a covert agent whose efforts behind German lines helped hasten the end of the war in Europe.
Born Marthe Hoffnung on April 13, 1920, in the French town of Metz, she was the fourth of seven children in an Orthodox Jewish family. The household spoke German, a skill that later proved vital to her intelligence work.
In 1939, with the onset of the war, her family relocated to Poitiers. There, she and her sister Stephanie began assisting German Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. In 1942, Stephanie was arrested and murdered at Auschwitz, while the rest of the family escaped using forged documents. Marthe left behind her fiancé, Jacques Delaunay, a resistance fighter who was executed by the Nazis.
Cohn trained as a nurse in Marseille, where her fluency in German caught the attention of a French colonel who recruited her into the intelligence services. In January 1945, she began training in an abandoned hospital in the French Alps. As Allied forces advanced, she began entering Germany to report on retreating Nazi troop movements and assess civilian morale.
“I made no fewer than 13 attempts to cross enemy lines—most of them at night, always in the snow,” she recalled in her 2002 memoir *Behind Enemy Lines*. Disguised as a nurse searching for her missing German soldier fiancé, she exploited German sentimentality to gather critical intelligence. “The Germans are so sentimental about these things. It worked beautifully,” she recounted.
When asked what gave her the strength for her dangerous missions, she said: “Survival is a very strong instinct. That’s one thing. And revenge is another very strong instinct. I really wanted revenge.”