A Jewish Refugee Escaped Nazi Germany to Return as an American GI

Frank Cohn was born into an upper-middle class family in Breslau, Germany, in 1925. The family and their sporting goods store prospered for much of young Frank's life, but in 1933, everything for the Cohns took a turn for the worst.

That was the year Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. A wave of anti-semitism swept much of the country, including Breslau. When the anti-Jewish anger turned to violence and hostility, the Cohn family fled for the United States.

Not long after arriving, Frank turned 18 and was drafted into the U.S. Army, an event that would forever change his life. He would return to Germany on a road that took him through France and Belgium, at the end of which he met the Soviet soldiers who had unseated Hitler from the east.

Becoming an American, Cohn said, was one of the greatest highlights of his life.

When the Nazi Gestapo came knocking on the Cohns' door in 1938, Frank had already been ostracized from his public school classmates and enrolled in a private Jewish-only school. The Gestapo had come looking for his father, but luckily, Martin Cohn was with relatives in the United States on a visitor's visa.

The Cohns had already been forced to sell their store and now Martin was forced to stay in the U.S. for his own safety. Ruth, Frank's mother, applied for visitor's visas for herself and her son, so they could join him in the United States.

"It was lucky that there were no computers because had they known that my father was already in the United States, she wouldn't have gotten visitor visas because that would indicate we were refugees," Cohn said in an October 2021 interview during a visit to the Pentagon.

The rest of the Cohn family left for the U.S. via Holland with first-class tickets. This allowed them to avoid being processed through immigration on Ellis Island and thus avoid being deported back to Germany.

Later that same year, an anti-Jewish wave of violence struck throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. It was Kristallnacht. For two days, angry mobs burned synagogues, destroyed Jewish businesses and homes, and killed Jewish members of their communities. Government officials did nothing to stop them as 30,000 Jews were sent to concentration camps.

Back in the United States, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order that extended the visas of German immigrants in the U.S. to stay indefinitely. Frank Cohn learned English and was enrolled in the New York public school system. In 1943, with the U.S. fighting his former homeland, he turned 18 and tried to enlist in the Army.

"Technically, I was an enemy alien, so I was not allowed to enlist," he said.

Within a month, Cohn was drafted by the Army anyway, because the ban on enemy aliens serving in the military was lifted in 1943. During basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, he became an American citizen and was sent to the 87th Infantry Division. He was finally on his way back to Germany, but this time he was on a U.S. Navy Landing Ship, Tank, or LST.

He landed at Normandy just a few months after D-Day in 1944 and was sent to an intelligence school because of his fluency in the German language. He was then sent to the Twelfth U.S. Army Group intelligence unit.

"Our mission was to go into the big cities in Germany as they were captured, and we would have intel dossiers on 'building' targets and 'personality' targets," he said.

His job was to assess buildings that were used by the Nazis and might contain vital records related to the crimes committed by Nazi organizations in the area. He was also on the lookout for prominent Nazis who might be on the run, so they could be arrested and tried for their crimes.

While in Belgium, he and his intelligence unit were caught up in the 1944 Battle of the Bulge, the last German offensive on the Western Front of World War II. The Nazis were using English-speaking infiltrators to disrupt the Allied response. His unit's job switched to outing those infiltrators.

In the early days of 1945, Cohn found himself in Cologne, Germany, where enemy artillery targeted his jeep. He barely survived the encounter. By April, he was in Magdeburg, greeting soldiers of the Soviet Red Army who had fought their way to the town from the East, trading American cigarettes for Russian vodka.

After the war's end, he was assigned to guarding the same Nazi war criminals he'd pursued when he first arrived in Europe, guarding other prisoners of war and securing German documents as evidence in future tribunals. He also decided he would remain in the Army as long as he could.

Cohn would go on to serve in both the Korean War and in Vietnam. He retired as a colonel in 1978 after his last assignment, chief of staff for the Military District of Washington. The Russian government invited him to Moscow to commemorate the 60th, 65th and 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, invitations he always accepted.

-- Blake Stilwell can be reached at blake.stilwell@military.com. He can also be found on Twitter @blakestilwell or on Facebook.

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