Marianne Cohn

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Marianne Cohn

Marianne Cohn (born September 17, 1922 in Mannheim , Free State of Baden ; died July 8, 1944 in Ville-la-Grand , Haute Savoie, France ), alias: Colin, was a child welfare worker and resistance fighter . She became a victim of the Nazi regime .

Life

Her father Alfred Cohn (1892–1954) and her mother Margarete, née Radt, (1891–1979) lived in Mannheim and had been married since March 22, 1921. Alfred was a very good friend of the writer Walter Benjamin and went to school with him.

Margarete studied economics in Munich and was engaged to Walter Benjamin from 1914 to 1916. Up until his death in 1940, he was in regular correspondence with both of them.

Marianne Cohn was born on September 17, 1922, her sister Lisa (died 1996) on April 19, 1924. In 1928 she moved to Berlin. In Berlin, the family lived together from 1929 in a four-room apartment at Chausseestrasse 35 (today Mariendorfer Damm 76) in Berlin-Mariendorf . From October 1932 until the family emigrated, she attended the lyceum and women's school in Tempelhofer Ringstrasse 103-106 (formerly Dag Hammarskjöld High School, today Johanna Eck School). She received her certificate of departure on March 28, 1934 and the apartment at Wulfila-Ufer 54, which was only inhabited as a subtenant, had to be given up on March 31, 1934, the remnants of the valuable furnishings were sold at ridiculous prices under the pressure of the urgent cash proceeds. In the spring of 1934 they emigrated to Paris and a few days later in April of the same year they continued their journey to Barcelona. In 1938 the family returned to France because of the Spanish Civil War .

Since 1943, Cohn worked as a child welfare worker in the Zionist youth organization " Mouvement de Jeunesse Sioniste " (MJS) and was also a member of the Jewish resistance movement Organization juive de combat (OJC), which was part of the Resistance . On May 31, 1944, she attempted to transport 32 Jewish children (between the ages of three and 19) from Lyon - at that time under German occupation - to safe Switzerland. In this way, the intended deportation of the children to a German concentration camp (for the purpose of killing them) was to be prevented. The escape failed shortly before the border. Cohn and the children were taken to prison. The mayor Jean Deffaugt of Annemasse offered her to help her escape on her own, which she refused in order to stay with the children. Eventually the children were rescued, but they themselves were found dead under a pile of corpses when the place was liberated on August 23, 1944. On July 8th, together with her, the resistance fighters Marthe-Louise Perrin, Felix-Francois Debore, Julien-Edmond Duparc, Henri-Francois Jaccaz and Paul-Léon Regard were murdered in a brutal and inhuman way under circumstances that were not fully understood . Her vandalized and completely disfigured body was taken to Grenoble , where her family lived, and there was buried in the Cimetière du Grand-Sablon cemetery.

The offender

After three photographs were published by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in 2004 as part of Operation Last Chance , the perpetrators were assigned to the "Police Regiment 19", later called "SS Police Regiment 19", based on their uniforms. As the " HSSPF Alpenland" their troops were commanded by Erwin Rösener as Higher SS and Police Leader and had initially committed numerous crimes against civilians in the Balkans, hence their name. In May 1944, Regiment 19 was transferred to France, where murders continued in various places. Eventually the regiment was moved to the Grenoble area, where his men committed the murder of Cohn. In 2004, Stefan Klemp reported the names of Alpenland members in France to the “Central Office in the State of North Rhine-Westphalia for the Processing of National Socialist Mass Crimes at the Dortmund Public Prosecutor”, but without consequences.

Honors

Stumbling block at the Wulfila Ufer 52 house in Berlin-Tempelhof

Marianne Cohn was honored posthumously on November 7, 1945, and was awarded the War Cross with a Silver Star by the Lyon Military Government. In 1956 a street was named after her in Ville-la-Grand and a memorial was erected (also for five other resistance fighters murdered on the same day). François Mitterrand opened a garden in her honor in 1982 at the Israeli Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem and in Annemasse a preschool and a primary school were named after her in 1984. The Marianne Cohn School , a special educational support center, bears her name on Oberlandstrasse in Berlin-Tempelhof . In December 2007, a memorial stone was laid at her last address, Wulfila-Ufer 52 in Tempelhof . Another stumbling block was laid in her native Mannheim at Meerfeldstrasse 4a. In 2014, the city council of Mannheim decided to name a street after Marianne Cohn.

See also

Author

  • Tomorrow I will betray a poem by MC, Nov. 1943, in: France of my heart. The Resistance in Poem and Essay Ed. Irene Selle, Leipzig 1987 ISBN 3-379-00090-6 p. 171; French and German versions see web links

literature

Web links

Commons : Marianne Cohn  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. MJS was initially a gathering movement to prepare for life in Israel in kibbutzim . It was founded in Montpellier in 1942 , initiated by Simon Lévitte (born 1912 in Russia), who came from the Jewish scout movement , EI, and Dika Jefroykin. Because of the deportation of Jews, the MJS went underground very quickly and shifted to rescuing Jews, especially of children and young people.
  2. Simon Wiesenthal Center leaflet
  3. probably coming from the legacy of an unknown German participant
  4. since February 24, 1943
  5. Monitor , June 8, 2004
  6. Ville-la-Grand on gedenkorte-europa.eu, the homepage of Gedenkorte Europa 1939–1945
  7. Ecole maternelle Marianne Cohn Annemasse
  8. Ecole Elémentaire Publique Marianne Cohn
  9. ^ Stumbling block for Marianne Cohn
  10. Stolpersteine ​​in Mannheim previous laying places
  11. Resolution on the naming of planned public traffic areas in the development plan No. 32.40 "Turley area"