The Survivor | WW2 ] Spy Sisters
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Welcome to True Spies. Week by week, mission by mission, you'll hear the true stories behind the world's greatest espionage operations. You'll meet the people who navigate this secret world. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position?

This is True Spies. I had no compass, no radio, no map, nothing in writing. Everything I was supposed to do was in my memory. This is True Spies. Episode 13, The Survivor. In this episode, I'm going to introduce you to an incredible woman.

She's 4 foot 11, French, a nurse and an intrepid spy. I prefer to die than to be called a coward. So I talked to the Sentinel, asked for my identity card. I presented it to him. It was Marta Ulrich.

But her name wasn't really Mart Ulrich, it was Mart Cohn, a Jewish name, just to add to the danger. Before we start Mart's story, I'll let her introduce herself properly.

My name is Marthe Cohen, C-O-H-N. I am 100 years old. I was a French spy during World War II who infiltrated Germany by pretending I was a German nurse.

My job was to collect information on top-secret Nazi movements to relay to the French intelligence service. Thank you very much. So many classic movies have been made about the spies of World War II. It's surprising really that there hasn't been a film about our spy. Because Marte Cohn is the real deal. Her greatest endeavor during the war was a mission at the Siegfried Line,

the German Western defensive wall on the French-German border. It involved befriending a cruel and arrogant SS officer, who totally underestimated her. As we walked, he suddenly fainted. Before he fainted, he told us, "He smells a Jew a mile away." And I was walking next to him.

And he never smelled me. So, to show how stupid that was. She slipped in right under his nose to steal his secrets. Intrigued? Me too. We'll come back to this later. But for now, what you need to know is that what Mark discovered enabled the Allies to finally advance into Germany after six years of fighting and bring an end to the war in Europe.

It's no surprise then that Marte has a case of medals that recognize the risks she took and the lives she saved, including the Legion of Honor, France's highest award. But Marte never planned to be a spy. In fact, it all sort of happened by accident. You know, if it had not been offered to me, I wouldn't have done it. But it was offered and I did it. And I'm very happy and proud that I did it.

She was born in the French province of Lorraine, near the border between France and Germany, in 1920. In those days, German influence was still strong in the region after the Franco-Prussian War of the 1870s, when Germany took over Lorraine. Even decades later, when Marthe was born, German was still the main language alongside French.

And I was raised with my parents speaking only German. But with my older brothers and sisters who were already in school, I learned French. So I spoke both languages at the same time.

And then I had seven years of German in high school. So I knew how to write and read and speak German as well as French. They were a big family, five sisters and two brothers. They were Orthodox Jewish. They followed their religion closely. But even from an early age, Marthe knew her own mind.

She loved her religion, but she didn't love being told how to practice it. At the age of 12, I revolted because I asked my mother to learn Hebrew because I knew how to read Hebrew since the age of four. But I didn't understand it. So I didn't know what I was saying when I was praying.

So I wanted to learn Hebrew from the Torah and understand the Torah. And my mother answered me. She always understood where we stood, and she always helped us reach our goal. But that day, she lost it. She told me that's only for the boys. And from that day on, I refused to pray in Hebrew. I prayed in French.

So as you can tell, even as a young girl, Marthe stood by what she believed in. Then when she was 19, the war arrived at their door. It was 1939 and the family fled their home in the city of Metz. The French government asked that all the people who could do it on their own should move from near, we were only 35 miles from the German border.

And we were assigned to a city which is called Poitiers, it's southwest of Paris, on the line from Paris to Bordeaux. And we left.

My two brothers were in the army, but my four sisters and I, we left with my parents and my grandmother. So we were now in Poitiers, and we had nothing to do. We had no house. We had only suitcases, which was absolutely necessary to survive. But we had nothing more.

We had no furniture, we had nothing. We left everything in match because the government told us to just leave with the

Absolute necessary things. And my mother made the decision that we should start a store to make a living because my parents did not want that government has to pay for our upkeep. So my older sister and I, we started a store in Poitiers. The relief was short-lived.

In 1940, the Nazis swept across the French border. They occupied three quarters of France and Poitiers was in the occupied region. So now we were under the occupations of the Germans.

And they started very fast to make rules for the Jews. The father of the family had to go to city hall and declare all the children, everybody in the family. So the Germans had a perfect list of all the Jews in occupied France.

That was the first thing. So the Germans almost daily had new rules to make us pariahs. From free people we became pariahs overnight and we had no more rights whatsoever. And things only got worse. The rules against the Jews became almost daily and very soon our store was closed.

We had no right to work anymore, so we lost our store. We were restricted from many, many things. We had no right to be in any public space. We couldn't go to a train station, we couldn't go to a post office, we couldn't go to any store.

Even the stores which sold food. And the Germans had made a rule that the Jews could only go to the store which sells food from 4.30 to 5.30. We had a window of only one hour to do our shopping.

And at that time, there were no supermarkets. There were small mom and pop stores. And each store sold only one or two or three items maximum. So you had to go from store to store to buy your food. Imagine you fled your home, left everything behind, and now they're trying to take your humanity as well.

Against this backdrop of fear, a friend showed Marte an act of extraordinary kindness, one that could save her life and risk his. So Mr. Charpentier, who met me in the main street of Prentice, and he stopped me. He took me to a very quiet place and told me, I am now in Mersa.

to make identity cards for you without the stem shoe because all our identity cards had the stem shoe.

He offered to forge identity cards that would enable them to pass as non-Jews. A serious offence. And I told him, Mr. Charpentier, you cannot do that. You risk your life and that of your wife and little boy. And he answered me, if I didn't help you, if I didn't save you, I could not live with myself. And I asked him how much it would cost.

to make the identity papers for seven people. And he started crying. I was 21 years old. I had never met a man cry yet. So I was very embarrassed. And he said to me, I do not want any money. I want to save you.

Watching people taking these risks to help them, despite knowing what the consequences could be, started to stir something revolutionary in Marthe. If others could do it, maybe she could too. It was 1942. France was divided. Remember, two-thirds, including Paris, was Nazi-occupied, whilst the rest was free under French government.

The town of Poitiers, where Marthe lived, was in Nazi-occupied territory. But only just. It lay excruciatingly close to the Free Territory Line. This presented an opportunity. So my sister and I, we helped people cross from occupied to non-occupied France. And we did it by sending them.

to a French farmer who was now Jewish of France and who had a farm partially in occupied France and partially in non-occupied France. Because the line of demarcation between occupied and unoccupied France was not a straight line, it was a zigzag line.

And it passed through his property. So once on his property, it was very easy to go from occupied to non-occupied France. And then Farmer Noel de Gou helped thousands of people. He saved thousands of people, among them American and English immigrants.

pilots who had been shut down of occupied France and couldn't stay in occupied France because they didn't speak a word of French and would have been immediately noticed by the German army who was everywhere. So Mr. de Gaulle helped them. He helped all the Jews who came to his property that we sent him and he helped them

So many other people, all the people that the Germans considered as pariah, as bad people, subhumans, that was really what they considered them. Picture it, having one foot in occupied France and the other on free land. It must have been extraordinary. For many weeks, the operation worked perfectly. But then, a mistake. Something so tiny, but it changed everything.

One day, Mart's sister Stephanie wrote a letter to the farmer, but made a huge error. My sister wrote that letter, but she signed her real name, which we never did. Why she did it, we never knew. It was too late, we never asked her. Because the letter was intercepted by the German secret police, who identified her and her address.

That night, on June 17, 1942, they came to the house and arrested my sister. Stephanie took her to the office and questioned her, and she refused to talk. So two hours later, they came back to the house and arrested my father to put pressure on my sister to give them the information they wanted.

But even in the presence of my father, she refused to talk. So she was kept. My father was released. So my sister got one month in prison. She celebrated her 21st birthday on July 10, 1942 in prison. And after that month, she was released.

During this time, Mart tried to help her sister escape from the camp, but her sister refused. She told Mart that she was providing medical care for the children imprisoned in the camp, and she was the only nurse around to help. She chose to stay. Then, the unthinkable happened.

She was deported to an unknown destination on September 21, 1942. And she disappeared. Years later, Mart learned that her sister had been sent to Auschwitz, the Nazi extermination camp in Poland. In staying to help the others, Stephanie had sealed her fate. It's now very clear what the consequences for helping are.

It's the dilemma that almost everyone during war faces at one time or another. Do you keep your head down and keep your own safe? Or do you forget yourself and stick it above the parapet? Like her courageous sister, Marthe chose the latter. She trained as a nurse and joined the French Resistance. In November 1944, she arrived on the French front line in Alsace, ready to do her bit. And when we arrived at the front,

I was immediately interviewed by an officer of intelligence. So that officer asked me what I had done during the resistance in France. And I told him what I had done with my sister, Stephanie, who had been deported, that I helped people cross from occupied. With Stephanie, we helped them.

We did all that. But the intelligence officer didn't think much of the operation she had run back in Poitiers with her sister. And he said, that's a lot of hogwash. You should have gone in the streets and killed a German. And I told him, I'm a nurse. I take care of people. I don't kill anybody, not even Germans I hate. So he said, you see, you are not fit to be in the army. I want you to go back to your mother.

And I said, oh no, I'm going to stay. Like most of the men Mart would encounter during her time as a spy, he quickly dismissed her. I was 4'11". I was very thin. I was very...

Eventually, she was given a job. You're going to be a social worker.

I had no conception at all what it meant to be a social worker. I had no training for that. I was a nurse. But in the army, if they tell you you're a social worker, that's what you are. So I left and I went to the small city where the regiment was headquartered and everybody was not...

on the front had a room in the little city. So I got the room and I slept all night and the next morning I got up and put on the uniform I was given. That uniform was much, much too big for me.

I looked like a clown, but it was warm and that was very important because the winter 1944-1945 was unusually cold and we were near the Vosges mountains where it was even colder.

I put on that uniform and wondered what I should do because I was not given any order, any indication of what was expected of me as a social worker. So she took things into her own hands.

Nobody told me what to do, so I decided I was going to visit our troops. For the next three weeks, Mart took supplies to and from the troops in the forest close to the town. She took them socks, food, anything she could get her hands on. Then, a chance encounter with a French resistance colonel who was looking for a secretary. And he asked me to answer his phone during his lunch break.

because he needed to go to lunch and he had nobody to answer his phone. And I just went by and he stopped me. So I went with him to his office. He showed me around and leaving, he said to me, I'm sorry, I have nothing for you to read here. They are only German books. Remember that all that was completely annexed

and they were all only speaking German. They didn't speak French, so they had German books. And I answered, that's quite all right. I speak and write German fluently. He quickly realized that maybe Marthe's German fluency and her propensity for being underestimated by men

could actually prove quite useful for spy work. That's how life plays tricks on you.

explained to me that in Germany all the males from the age of 12 to old age were in uniform in the army. So any man in civilian clothes in the streets of Germany would be immediately noticed and arrested.

That's why they needed women. And he asked me if I accepted to be transferred to the intelligence service. And I accepted. Wait a moment. 22 years old, 4 foot 11, Jewish, and you've just agreed to go behind enemy lines in Nazi Germany.

What are you thinking? I sat on a chair and wondered in what predicament I had put myself. But it was too late. So in January 1945, Marthe's life as a spy began. Her mission would be to collect intelligence on enemy movements in Germany.

I was asked to create my own alibi because that would be sticking much better than an alibi given to me. And so I created my alibi. My two parents were killed in an Allied bombardment and I kept that I was born in Metz.

But not my name. I was now Marta. I kept my first name, but Germanised it to Marta with an A. Ulrich, that was my new name. And my parents had been killed in a bombardment. I had no sibling. Hmm. What else shall I add to embellish my story? A sibling? Oh, I know. A fiancé.

I had love letters from him, several love letters. And my alibi was that I was looking everywhere for him because I knew one thing. We knew very little of what was going on in Germany. But I knew one thing, that...

So many had disappeared. Hundreds of thousands of them, if not more, had disappeared the last months of the war.

or on the Russian front or on the Western front, or they were prisoners of war, or they were dead, or they were in hospitals and they couldn't write because everything was so chaotic you couldn't communicate. So I knew that families were without information about their loved ones in the army.

So I used that and that made me very sympathetic to the Germans who were looking for their own people. It would explain why she was asking so many questions. As a concerned girlfriend, she wouldn't raise any eyebrows. After all, the idea of a woman being a spy was surely preposterous. If you're wondering what being a spy in World War II involved, here's a little idea.

I trained to recognize anything for the whole army, German army. As soon as I looked at a soldier by his button, by his little insignias, I could recognize what kind of regiment he belonged to. And I had to learn coding to decode or to write it in code.

I had to learn how to read a map. From that time on, I was able to navigate my husband when he was driving. And I still navigate him because I know how to read maps, military maps. And I had to learn how to use every arm. She's talking about guns. Even the very heavy ones, I had to know how to use them.

But I never had an arm. I had no compass. I had no map. I had no radio. Because you have to be two to have a radio. And I was all alone. You're on your own, with no one watching your back in case something goes wrong. What skills do you have up your sleeve to compensate for this lack of support? You have to have excellent memory, fast thinking, rapid responses to danger.

Getting along all kinds of people. That's very, very important. Do you agree with my list? Well, do you? You should know by now if you'd be up for the job. Hello, True Spies listener. This episode is made possible with the support of June's Journey, a riveting little caper of a game which you can play right now on your phone. Since you're listening to this show, it's safe to assume you love a good mystery, some compelling detective work,

and a larger-than-life character or two. You can find all of those things in abundance in June's Journey. In the game, you'll play as June Parker, a plucky amateur detective trying to get to the bottom of her sister's murder. It's all set during the roaring 1920s,

And I absolutely love all the little period details packed into this world. I don't want to give too much away because the real fun of June's journey is seeing where this adventure will take you. But I've just reached a part of the story that's set in Paris.

And I'm so excited to get back to it. Like I said, if you love a salacious little mystery, then give it a go. Discover your inner detective when you download June's Journey for free today on iOS and Android. Hello, listeners. This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast, What Should I Read Next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I take all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read.

They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years, and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment, whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a frothy page-turner to help them escape the stresses of work, or a book that they've been reading for years.

school, everything. You'll learn something about yourself as a reader, and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for What Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and visit our website, whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more. Once fully trained, Mart was told she had to cross the front line in France to see what information she could collect from the German occupied zones.

But even with all the training in the world, in a war zone, things easily go wrong. Thirteen times I tried to cross the front and it never worked because during the war everything's very fluid. Everything changes very fast. Then I was sent to a certain place telling me what I would find there. And when I arrived, I didn't find it, so I couldn't proceed.

That's one of the reasons. There were other reasons. We had French military guides who explained to me exactly what I will find on the ground from A to B, where I was going, and how to proceed on that ground. But they make mistakes, they are humans. One night, those mistakes nearly cost Marta life.

One night I was taken by two officers. It was a very cold and dark night in February 1945. And I was taken to a field.

And they told me I had only a little suitcase with a change of clothes and I had no compass, no arm, no radio, no map, nothing in writing. Everything I was supposed to do was in my memory. So my memory was very charged at the time. That's why there are things I remember and some I don't.

They took me to the field and told me that I had to cross the field and go to a certain region and find a small town by crossing the field. And there I would find a group of Germans. A job? To mix with them and go with them and send back as much information I had.

Out in the pitch black, in the icy wind and the falling snow, there's not another human around. So I left and I started walking on that field. The military guide had explained to me what I would find on that field and how to go.

without compass to that little town. So I walked in that direction, I thought, and suddenly I heard a huge crack. And here I was, submerged in the ice-cold water of the canal. The military guide had forgotten to tell me there was a canal on the field. For those of you who don't know, falling into freezing water can kill you in seconds.

If you survive the first 10 minutes, you can expect your limbs to become incapacitated, making it difficult or even impossible to climb out. After about an hour, hypothermia sets in. Weighed down by sodden heavy clothing and completely alone in the dark, our spy didn't have good odds. The canal was not very wide. It's man-made. And it was not too deep. But it was still deeper than my height. But I popped up.

And I tried to grasp the side and I couldn't grasp it because everything was so frozen that I couldn't grasp sufficiently. And I was now much heavier because I was drenched in that ice cold water from head to toe because I couldn't call for help. That was impossible. I had no right to do that. I knew that.

She thought she was going to die, and yet she felt like she had no right to trouble someone for help. So Mart didn't give up, and finally, in a feat of superhuman strength, she hauled herself out. Soaked, freezing, and exhausted, do you head back to base to get warm and find the gentleman who helpfully forgot to tell you about the canal? Or do you keep going? You have a mission.

Mart kept going. But then, another blow. And I walked all night trying to find that small town. And I didn't find it. And in the morning, at daybreak, I saw that my footprints on the snow, my footprint on the snow showed that I'd walked in circles all night. That's why I never found it.

Thankfully, it wouldn't be long before she got another chance to prove her mettle. As spring blossomed across Europe in 1945, the Allied forces advanced closer to Germany. Once the Rhineland was occupied, the war would more or less be won. But they needed to know what they were walking into. Cue our spy. We didn't know what was going on in Germany. That's why I was sent to Germany for two purposes.

for military intelligence, of course, but also intelligence how the civilians were behaving and reacting to the war, which was very important for the Allied armies which were going to invade Germany. The plan was for Maht to crawl undetected through the bushes down a road that crossed from Switzerland into Germany.

It was the easiest access point as Switzerland was a neutral country. She would then walk two kilometers to the town of Zingen, where she would assume her cover as a nurse looking for her fiancé as she traveled deeper into Germany gathering intelligence to send back. Ahead of the mission, she was introduced to another intelligence officer who we will call Agent Lemaire, who drove her to the border. When the time came for her to make the crossing, he gave her a rather unhelpful pep talk.

when Mr. Le Maire said to me, "You know, you may die tonight. Why don't we have a good time now?" And he was married and he told me about his wife and children. So I told him I was absolutely not interested. I felt that was horrible. I was mostly mad that he told me, "You may die tonight."

I didn't want to hear that. Charming. Later in the afternoon, he told me, now is the time. So I took my little suitcase and I crawled along the field and hid behind the bushes near the road. But the road was manned by guards. The road was under the surveillance of two German sentinels, heavily armed.

which came, one from the western edge, from the eastern, that side, the eastern edge of the field, and he walked towards the centre near the bushes where I was hidden, and the other soldier came from the west

and met him, they talked two, three seconds, turned them back and walked back to the edge of the field on both sides. And they were doing that constantly without stopping. And Mr. Lemaire had told me when you crawl and you hide behind the bushes and when they arrive

You watch them and they leave and come back and separate again. That's when you go on the road and walk towards the east, towards Singen. And so when Mr. Lemaire told me now is the moment, I took my suitcase and crawled and arrived behind the bushes. Until then, everything was perfect.

But then, an unexpected obstacle. I was completely paralysed by fear. I was so paralysed I could absolutely not move. And I was very sorry for myself. I felt that nobody had the right to ask me to do that. And I couldn't even think of doing it. Of course, a moment of hesitation. Don't you deserve to question the whole endeavour?

You've already gone above and beyond. Almost as soon as those thoughts entered Mart's mind, they were replaced by memories of the men who expected her to fail. The intelligence officer who'd called her a coward the first time she arrived at the front line. She remembered the commanding officers who had told her she'd failed her missions when she fell in the canal. Anger and defiance rose up inside her.

That made me get up and walk. I prefer to die than to be called a coward. So I talked to that sentinel, asked for my identity card. I presented it to him. It was Martha Ulrich. And I wondered if he too would discover that it was a false card. But he gave it back to me. I was now in Germany. Success.

When she made it to Zingen, she got on a train to another town called Freiburg, 100 kilometers away, situated close to Germany's Western defensive line on the French-German border. This line of defense was called the Siegfried Line, and it was there she hoped to gather information from anti-Nazi contacts given to her by her commanders. Despite making it safely to the country, Marthe still spent the train journey sweating.

And in the train, the same type of military police were checking our papers constantly, every few minutes during the ride. That's the only time I ever took a train because it was too dangerous. Every time they looked at my papers, I wondered if they would find out it was forged. So I never took another train.

After a few days in the German town of Freiburg, she noticed something unusual. All the Germans who went to go from A to B had to walk. And they always walked in a group. They'd never like to walk alone. She thought this could be an excellent opportunity for some reconnaissance. This turned out to be a very smart move. So I joined the group and we walked.

and I was walking next to an SS who came back from the Russian front. The SS were Hitler's personal bodyguards and the elite core of the Nazi party, notorious for their brutality, cruelty and fanaticism. He had been wounded on the Russian front and now he was recovering and he was assigned to the Siegfried Line.

which was northwest of Freiburg. So we're walking in that direction, and he was telling us all to...

atrocities that the SS had committed on the Russian front, which was much, much, much worse than whatever was on the Western front. And the Germans were pushing him to talk more about it. And they were clapping their eyes. They loved to do that. And they'd "Armensch," which is like "Oh boy" in English. He told us,

Stop and consider the situation. Mart is a nurse. She knows how to give medical aid to someone who has just passed out. She could help this man.

But this man isn't just any German civilian or even a soldier. He is a Nazi in the purest sense. He wholeheartedly believes that Mart and her family are vermin who should be exterminated. If he knew she was a Jew, he'd shoot her right there on the spot. Mart knows this. She knows what the SS did to Jews and to others they called "subhuman" in ghettos and concentration camps.

Remember, her sister was taken away by men like him. If you were Mart, what would you do? Leave him to come round on his own and watch him suffer a little? Or help? So I was a nurse and took care of him. Difficult as it must have been, from an espionage point of view, it was ingenious. When he regained consciousness, he was so grateful that he invited me to come and visit him at the Siegfried Line.

Three weeks later, she decided to take him up on the offer to visit him with the German soldiers on the defense line to get some intel. But when she got there, she discovered there were barely any soldiers there.

She expected to find battalions of men with weapons and tanks and fortifications. Perplexed, she asked around. So I asked several independent working stragglers and they all told me they're all gone. We are the last ones to leave. The line had been evacuated. I heard on the German radio that the Allies were very close and were going to invade Freiburg.

She knew she had to get back to Freiburg to deliver a message to her commanding officers in France, that the Germans knew the Allies were coming and were preparing for the invasion. But when she got there, she discovered that the Allies had already advanced on the town.

I arrived in Freiburg and all the people in Freiburg were running to their home because they all had heard on the German radio that the Allies were going to invade that day. So I waited. I was all alone on the main boulevard and I waited. And the first tank arrived and rode towards me.

But dressed as a German nurse, she now faced another problem. How was I going to tell the people on that tank that I was a friend and not an enemy? I had no papers, nothing, nothing to prove who I was. Close your eyes and picture it. You're standing in the middle of an empty town. No one around you.

Nothing moving besides the wind blowing leaves and bits of paper around the cobbled street. You're on your own in an abandoned town as an entire army rumbles toward you. Soldiers high on adrenaline and the taste of promised victory armed to the hilt. You look like the enemy, the only one standing in their way. They can't hear you from that far away and even close up the rumbling of the tanks are too loud.

You have roughly 10 seconds to come up with a way to show them who you really are. How are you going to do that? What are you going to do? Three, two, one. I raise my two fingers. The V sign of Winston Churchill. The victory sign.

Because we all knew at that time that Winston Churchill during the war was very seldom photographed not doing the victory sign, the V sign. So I raised my arm as high as I could. The tank rumbles closer. And I stayed in the middle of the avenue. I'm extremely lucky. The tank did not kill me, but stopped.

So I asked the officer in charge to come down and talk to me, and he came.

I was very assertive. And he came and he talked to me and I told him he has to take me to the headquarters of Freiburg. Another stroke of luck. The officer was French. It was the French army. If an English-speaking army had invaded Freiburg, I don't know how I could have communicated with them.

But with the French army, there was no problem. But Marthe wasn't out of the woods just yet. She had to prove to the intelligence officers at HQ she wasn't lying about who she said she was.

They had no idea that the Siegfried Line had been evacuated and the commander at French HQ feared she was an enemy trying to get them to walk into an ambush. I told Commander Petit that I had just came back from there at the Siegfried Line and it's completely evacuated. And he looked at me. He had been in intelligence. So he said to me, who tells me the truth? It may be a trap.

So I took a piece of paper and a pen on his desk and wrote a phone number.

because we could call any service on the field. So he talked to the people in my service who were very happy to hear that I was still alive. They had no news, I had no radio, I couldn't communicate often. The last time I communicated was when I was at the Swiss border in the farm. Commander Petit sent a patrol

to the Siegfried Line and they came back hours later saying that's true, the Siegfried Line is completely empty. The news the line was clear meant the Allies could advance more quickly and safely into Germany in stronger numbers. Finally, Marthe was given some of the recognition she deserved. So I was a very important VIP that night at the French headquarters in Freiburg.

I was invited for dinner. I was given a room and the next morning at breakfast, Commander Petit asked me if I wanted to go and rejoin my service. I told him no. My mission terminates the day of the armistice. I have today to cross again the border. Mart knew she still had work to do.

As the German front line receded further and further back, she needed to get more intelligence to help the Allies advance deeper into Germany. And it was just as well she didn't go back to France, because while still in Germany, she had another chance encounter: on a road with another man who underestimated her. It led to the most valuable information she collected during the war.

I stopped along the road a group of German military ambulances. And the colonel, who was a physician, I saw by his uniform immediately that he was a physician, was standing there with all his entourage near the ambulances.

So I stopped to inquire what was going on. When you see something unusual, you have to stop and know what's going on. So Colonel told me that they would, that night...

a drive into Switzerland, which was very close, and from there to Austria to prevent to become prisoners of war. They knew that Freiburg was occupied already by Allied armies. They didn't know which one, but I knew. But they didn't. He asked me from where I was coming.

And I told him that I had just escaped from Freiburg because I was terrorised by the French army. She played along. I complained too, that the German army was not defending us anymore as much as they should. And after a while, the colonel said to me, don't be so desperate. The war is not ended. Then, a gift.

The kind of intelligence only a spy on the ground, behind enemy lines, could get. The colonel said to me, "Don't be so desperate. The war is not ended." And he told me exactly where the remnant of the German army was hidden in ambush in the Black Forest. The lives of Allied soldiers advancing on the Black Forest were in Marthe's hands.

She wrote it in a letter and ran as fast as she could to the nearest customs office so the message could be delivered to her commanding officer. It arrived on time and Colonel Reinhardt read it because it was not coded so he could read it. It was in French. I didn't take the time to code it. I had no time for that. Intelligence received. The Allied leaders were warned.

In those last days of the war, no Allied troops died in a Black Forest ambush thanks to Mart. She had saved countless lives. And that's why I got all these medals. The war ended and Mart went back to working as a nurse. She met her husband, who was an American medical student, and together they settled in the United States in 1956. They now live a very peaceful life overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Southern California.

In 2002, she wrote a book about her life as a spy called Behind Enemy Lines. And soon after, she was given France's highest award. And it was a very, very incredible time for me. I was very, very honored by that. You know, I never, when I did all that work, I never thought that I would be honored for it.

I just did it because I felt that I had to do it. What is so important, and I want to tell you that, that so many French people who were not Jewish risked their lives to save ours. So it was absolutely normal.

that all of us, we were fighting and helping get rid of the Germans in France. The fear of being called a coward had plagued Marte her entire life. But now I don't think anyone could ever call Marte Cohn a coward. And this is what she's come to understand about courage after a long and incredible life.

You know, courage is not a thing that you have all the time. You are brave one minute and you can be a coward two minutes later. It's the same person. You have to understand that courage is something that comes and goes. It's not always there. But when you lose the courage...

And almost eight decades later, at heart, Mutt is still the same Jewish woman who survived the decimation of her people, who interrogated war criminals,

and crawled across enemy lines during the deadliest conflict in human history. I still cannot refuse challenges even now. That makes my life interesting, and I love it. I'm Hayley Atwell. Join us next week for another debrief with True Spies.

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