Marthe Cohn was barely 25 on April 11, 1945, and Jewish, but, being blond and blue-eyed, she could pass for an Aryan. She was French, from northeastern Alsace, but spoke German fluently. She was a nurse and, at 4 feet 11, somewhat inconspicuous. She was so keen and inquisitive that her comrades nicknamed her Chichinette, translated loosely as a pain in the neck, reports The New York Times.
She was also a spy, working with the French resistance to Nazi occupiers in World War II.
On one mission, after 14 failed attempts, she managed to cross into Switzerland, crawl through scrubby underbrush and emerge onto a road that defined the border between the Swiss town of Schaffhausen and the Baden-Württemberg region of southern Germany.
She then slipped past two German sentries, identifying herself to them with an audacious “Heil Hitler” salute. Then she headed deeper into Germany, pretending to be the only child of parents killed in an Allied raid and saying she was searching for her missing fiancé, “Hans.” The ruse worked.
She soon encountered a wounded Nazi storm trooper, who bragged that “he could smell a Jew a mile away.” When the soldier collapsed in mid-conversation, Ms. Cohn ministered to him. He invited her to visit the front lines to continue the quest for her missing boyfriend.
As a result, she was able to glean two strategic military secrets about Wehrmacht maneuvers, a feat that would win her medals from France and also from postwar Germany — for saving lives by helping to hasten the end of World War II even by a few weeks. The war in Europe ended on May 8.
Marthe Cohn died on May 20 at her home in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., in Los Angeles County, where she had settled with her American husband, a doctor, long after her wartime exploits, her family said. She was 105.
Her odyssey from German-speaking Alsace Lorraine as the granddaughter of a rabbi to her recruitment as a French spy and then to her life in America — moving from New York to the Midwest and finally to California — became grist for a 2002 book, “Behind Enemy Lines: The True Story of a Jewish Spy in Nazi Germany” (written with Wendy Holden). It was also the subject of a documentary film, “Chichinette: The Accidental Spy” (2019).
Asked in the film for a life lesson she could impart to viewers, Ms. Cohn replied, “Be engaged, and don’t accept any order that your conscience could not approve.”
Read more of this article from The New York Times.