Marthe Cohn, a Jewish spy in Nazi Germany, dies at 105
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By then, Ms. Cohn had only just begun to discuss her brief career as a spy. Her husband, an American, had learned about her espionage exploits only after they were married. For years, even her children had no idea that Ms. Cohn — a petite but energetic woman who stood no more than 4-foot-11 — once crawled across the border on her hands and knees, hiding from German sentries while bringing intelligence back to the French.
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'I just thought nobody would believe me,' she told the Los Angeles Times in 2005, explaining her years of silence. 'Spies are usually tall and good-looking. I am a very unlikely spy.'
Ms. Cohn, who died May 20 at the age of 105, spent the past quarter-century sharing her story at schools and community centers across Europe and the United States, where she worked as a nurse after the war. In her final years, she served as a memory keeper for the Holocaust and the French resistance, sharing her story in a well-received 2002 memoir, 'Behind Enemy Lines: The True Story of a Jewish Spy in Nazi Germany,' and in a 2019 documentary, 'Chichinette: The Accidental Spy.'
'I will bear witness,' she often told audiences, 'until my last breath.'
The fourth of seven children, she was born Marthe Hoffnung in Metz on April 13, 1920. Her family was Orthodox — her maternal grandfather was a rabbi — and her parents ran a small business framing and enlarging photos.
As a teenager, Ms. Cohn occasionally got into fistfights at school, brawling with Catholic classmates who made antisemitic comments about Prime Minister Léon Blum, who was Jewish. She said she inherited some of her scrappiness from her father, who once removed his belt and went after teenagers who were throwing stones at the family as they left the local synagogue.
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After Kristallnacht, the Nazis' 1938 pogrom against Jews, Ms. Cohn's parents began taking in Jewish refugees from Germany, looking after penniless families that needed a place to stay for a few days as they sought a new home in France or elsewhere. Ms. Cohn recalled in her memoir that while she was horrified by the pogrom, 'never for one moment did I think that the same thing would happen to us. Not in France. … I believed in human nature. I still had confidence that good would prevail.'
When World War II broke out in 1939, the family moved across the country to Poitiers, far from the German border. They remained there during the 1940 invasion and subsequent occupation, living for a time under few restrictions. Ms. Cohn said that she even worked at city hall with German officials who, admiring her accent and skill with the language, invited her to move to Germany for work, not realizing she was Jewish.
Gradually, the situation deteriorated. Nazi leaders closed Jewish businesses and mandated that residents wear a yellow star in public. Ms. Cohn was approached on the street one day by one of her colleagues from city hall, who offered to provide her and her family with identity papers that were not stamped with the word 'Jew.' The documents would let them travel freely to unoccupied France.
'When I asked him how much it would cost, he started crying and he said, 'I do not want to be paid. I do this to save you,'' she recalled in an interview with the Jewish Ledger, a Connecticut newspaper. 'He gave me all the identity cards.'
Ms. Cohn's sister Stéphanie was arrested before the family could leave. But Ms. Cohn, her parents and several of her siblings were able to flee and survive, with help at times from one of Ms. Cohn's brothers who worked in the resistance. She spent part of the war in Marseille, studying to become a nurse, and enlisted in the French army in 1944 after the liberation of Paris.
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'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.''
Ms. Cohn proved persistent — 'I'm going to stay,' she said she told the officers — and was allowed to enlist as an aid worker, tasked with visiting soldiers near the front and asking what they needed. At one point, she was assigned to answer calls for a colonel who needed to step out for lunch. He apologized, telling Ms. Cohn that she would have nothing to read to pass the time, as he only had German-language books in his office.
'I said, 'That's OK, I can read German,'' she told the Los Angeles Times in 2000. 'It's as simple as that, how your life can change.'
The army was looking for German-language speakers who could work as spies. Ms. Cohn underwent a brief training — she was so inquisitive, she said, that her colleagues nicknamed her Chichinette, French for 'little pain in the neck' — and was sent to Switzerland, where she tried more than a dozen times to cross the border into Germany. She eventually succeeded, crossing a field without being spotted, carrying only a small suitcase and a picture of a German prisoner of war whom she claimed was her fiancé.
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Ms. Cohn used the photo to win the trust of German soldiers, asking whether they had seen her lover on the battlefield.
During one encounter, she claimed to be terrified about the prospect of an Allied invasion. 'They told me not to worry,' she said in the Times interview. 'And then they told me in precisely which section of the Black Forest the German army was waiting for the Allies.'
Ms. Cohn hurried back to the border to share her discovery with the French. She also revealed that German troops near Freiburg were withdrawing from the Siegfried Line, a long-fortified defensive position.
After the war ended, she served as an army nurse in Vietnam, then part of French Indochina. She also continued her nursing studies in Geneva, where she met Major L. Cohn, an American medical student who had served on a Navy minesweeper during World War II. They married in 1958, moved to the United States and later worked together in Los Angeles, her husband as an anesthesiologist and Ms. Cohn as a nurse.
Her husband, who survives her, said Ms. Cohn died at home in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. He did not cite a specific cause. Survivors also include their two sons, Stephan and Remi Cohn, and a granddaughter.
In her public appearances, Ms. Cohn sought to draw lessons from the Holocaust, urging audiences to have sympathy for migrants who — like many Europeans Jews in the 1930s and '40s — struggle to find refuge in the United States and other countries. Asked in the documentary what message she had for people today, she replied, 'Be engaged. And don't accept any order that your conscience could not approve.'
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Denaturalization had provoked a fierce debate on the Supreme Court between these two factions,' Weil summarizes. 'Although intensely divided, the Court progressively reduced the scope of the federal government's authority to revoke American citizenship. It did so, in part, by upholding free speech and procedural guarantees for foreign-born Americans.' The most significant ruling came in 1967 when Justice Hugo Black outlined in Afroyim v. Rusk, according to Weil, 'an interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment that secured for all—native-born and naturalized—the full set of privileges entailed in American citizenship. American citizenship was no longer a contingent benefit conferred by a sovereign state in exchange for its citizens' respect for the laws.' In the ruling, Black wrote: 'The very nature of our free government makes it completely incongruous to have a rule of law under which a group of citizens temporarily in office can deprive another group of citizens of their citizenship.' Although denaturalization was sharply restricted from that point onward, Weil notes that 'a nearly unanimous Court permitted—and still permits, in narrow circumstances—a naturalized citizen to lose her American citizenship.' The limited criteria for denaturalization There were around 22,000 denaturalizations in the U.S. before 1967, according to Weil. By the time his book was published in 2012, he said there had been only 150 since, though the Department of Justice would later tell news outlets that there were 305 cases between 1990 and 2017. 'Although its use has been substantially reduced,' Weil wrote, 'since 1967 denaturalization is still available on two basic grounds. The first of these grounds applies to individuals who have committed gross violations of human rights.' This primarily focused on naturalized Americans with undisclosed Nazi pasts. 'In contrast to judicial skepticism of expatriation in the 1960s and 1970s, courts have not challenged the authority of the government to denaturalize individuals responsible for committing human rights violations,' he adds. 'The second modern ground for denaturalization is for fraud or misrepresentation committed during the naturalization process,' Weil writes. A 2020 advisory by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center explains that 'a naturalized U.S. citizen can have that status taken away if the federal government proves by clear, convincing, and unequivocal evidence in a civil federal court proceeding, or satisfies the beyond a reasonable doubt standard in a comparable criminal case, that the citizen was not qualified for naturalization at the time it was mistakenly granted.' A naturalized citizen can also be denaturalized, the ILRC says, for 'refusing under specified circumstances to testify before a congressional committee on alleged subversive activities,' under a Cold War-era law that remains valid, or for failing to meet the requirements if they were naturalized under the wartime-military-service path to citizenship. While a criminal revocation of naturalization on the basis of naturalization fraud requires, like in all criminal cases, the government to meet a beyond-a-reasonable-doubt burden-of-proof conviction, civil denaturalization proceedings require the government simply to convince a federal court, in which the defendant may not even be provided with an attorney, that a naturalization was 'illegally procured' or 'procured by concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation.' Illegal procurement, according to the ILRC, refers to someone who was ineligible for naturalization but received it anyway and doesn't require proof of concealment or misrepresentation, though the organization notes that it is largely a distinction without a difference as 'procuring naturalization by concealment or willful misrepresentation is also procuring it illegally.' The eligibility conditions that one can be accused of violating include: a) lawful permanent resident status for five years (or three if married to a U.S. citizen); b) continuous residence in the U.S. for that five- or three-year period; c) physical presence in the U.S. for at least half of that five- or three-year period; d) good moral character; and e) that the person was ' 'attached to the principles of the Constitution of the United States, and well-disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States' during that five- or three-year period. The last two conditions are the most broad and open to interpretation. 'Many of the cases for denaturalization based on lack of good moral character involve individuals who have committed crimes prior to naturalization, but were not arrested or charged until sometime after naturalization, and they did not disclose the existence of these crimes during the naturalization application process,' the ILRC writes. Similarly, if within five years after naturalization, someone ' joins or becomes affiliated with an organization that would have precluded naturalization,' such as a terrorist group, they can be presumed to have been 'not attached to the principles of the Constitution' and 'not well disposed to the good order and happiness of the U.S. at the time of naturalization,' and thus denaturalized. Denaturalization under Trump Former President Barack Obama ramped up denaturalization efforts with a Department of Homeland Security program called Operation Janus, mined data, including fingerprint records, to identify people who obtained citizenship through false pretenses. But the first Operation Janus denaturalization didn't occur until January 2018, when Trump was in office. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services also announced plans around the same time to refer some 1,600 cases to the Justice Department to prosecute, and in its fiscal year 2019 budget, the Department of Homeland Security redirected funds from USCIS to ICE for investigations into naturalized citizens. Trump's first-term administration took denaturalization efforts 'to new levels,' Cassandra Burke Robertson, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University, wrote in 2019. 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In addition, these efforts will have a chilling effect on the number of legal permanent residents applying for U.S. citizenship and will further burden a system that is already delayed in adjudicating and granting immigration benefits.' In 2021, President Joe Biden issued an executive order directing agencies to review denaturalization and passport revocation practices, 'to ensure that these authorities are not used excessively or inappropriately.' But since taking office again, Trump has made denaturalization a priority again. A June 11 Justice Department memo published online issued guidance to the Civil Division, the largest litigating body of the department, on its priority initiatives, which included the revocation of citizenships. Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate, who leads the division, said in the guidance that the division 'shall prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence.' 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The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers criticized how the directive calls for denaturalization via civil proceedings, which the advocacy lamented carry 'a lower burden of proof' and 'do not require the government to provide the accused with an attorney.' It also criticized the memo's 'broad scope and vague language.' 'The Trump Administration's push to revoke citizenship is alarming, and raises serious Fourteenth Amendment concerns,' said NACDL President Christopher Wellborn. 'The use of civil litigation to evade Sixth Amendment obligations demonstrates contempt for the right to counsel. And although the memo purports to target concealment of earlier offenses, the language suggests that any offense, at any time, may be used to justify denaturalization.' When it comes to Musk and Mamdani, however, legal experts have said denaturalization proceedings are unlikely. 'Denaturalisation is limited to cases where the government can prove material fraud in their original applications,' Michael Kagan, a law professor at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, told Al Jazeera. Trump's talk of deporting the two, Kagan says, 'appears to be irresponsible rhetoric designed to intimidate political opponents.' Musk has previously denied accusations of working in the country illegally before he became a citizen. Mamdani has been accused by members of Congress of sympathizing with terrorists. But while former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who was recently appointed to a Homeland Security advisory council, expressed support for calls to denaturalize and deport him—'I think that is very responsible request and something the government should do given the nature of the things that he says,' Giuliani said last week, calling Mamdani a 'traitor'—he caveated: 'I don't know that we can come to the conclusion and convict him of it, but he raises a real legitimate concern that he is not a loyal American.' As Weil noted in his history of denaturalization, the Supreme Court has affirmed that being 'a loyal American' is no longer a condition for U.S. citizenship. But as the history of denaturalization has also shown, the Supreme Court can change its mind. And this Supreme Court has already been observed to show 'astounding' deference to Trump. 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