RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events France

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Originally posted by britneyspearsatemyshorts:
I guess in a few days, everything will be settled anyways. We will either know he had the weapons or didn't.

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Originally posted by harleykwin:
Ooh! I just remembered something else - minor, but it just came back to me. I was studying abroad a few years back and living in London at the time. My roommate and I went to see a movie - Before Sunrise I think it was called. Anyway, its about an American (Ethan Hawke) who meets a pretty French girl on a train. He tries to chat her up and she speaks to him in French. Embarrassed, he admits that he only speaks English. She looks at him with a little bit of disdain and says,"Oh, then clearly you must be an American." I cannot begin to describe the laughter that errupted in the theatre - apparently, the image of Americans being arrogant enough to expect others to automatically speak English is a joke to Europeans.

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Originally posted by whomod:

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Originally posted by Nowhereman:

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Originally posted by whomod:

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You really are a gay little prick aincha!

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Originally posted by whomod:

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Originally posted by whomod:

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Originally posted by Nowhereman:

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Originally posted by whomod:

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You really are a gay little prick aincha!

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You know, you really don't have to go out of your way to prove that final graphic true. :lol:

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JQ said:
I was watching a show about Hitler that day, and as it turns out, the French actually did the Nazi salute during the 1936 (38?) Munich olympics.

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JQ said:
I was watching a show about Hitler that day, and as it turns out, the French actually did the Nazi salute during the 1936 (38?) Munich olympics.

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Darknight613 said:
That's nothing. Go here to read about how the Vichy government actively collaborated with the Nazis during the occupation of France, and even fought against the Allies during World War II.

It's too long to post here, and I don't like posting only bits and pieces of articles and essays, so just go to the link.

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And they wonder why they get referred to as "cheese eating surrender monkeys"...

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the G-man said:
And they wonder why they get referred to as "cheese eating surrender monkeys"...

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Darknight613 said:What about our fellow Americans whose livelihood depends on cheese production, like Wisconsin? Muah ha ha ha...this is one "argument" you're not gonna win!

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Wisconsin voted for the French-loving, French looking, French speaking, descended from the French, John Kerry in 2004.

That makes them honorary Frenchmen in my book.

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January 10, 2005

One spy's new mission
En route to her native France to be honored, a Southland woman recalls WWII perils.

By Johanna Neuman, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — Marthe Hoffnung Cohn is 84 years old now and hard of hearing. Her white hair and petite frame — all 4 feet 7 1/2 inches of her — suggest an innocent demeanor. But behind the twinkling eyes is a penchant for observation that marked her past occupation.

She misses nothing. The lady was a spy.


click for another article on Marthe Hoffnung Cohn

During World War II, Marthe Hoffnung was a French espionage agent in Nazi Germany, posing as Martha Ulrich, a 25-year-old Fräulein whose cover story was that she needed to find her fiancé at the German front. That she was French made the journey dangerous. That she was Jewish heightened the peril. But she was blond and blue-eyed and fluent in German. And she was good at the assignment — getting Nazi soldiers to tell her where their frontline soldiers were and then getting word to French First Army Intelligence through Swiss conduits.

On Thursday, nearly 60 years after she first crossed the border into Germany clutching "a small suitcase and nothing else — no radio, no maps, no compass, nothing but my wits," France will bestow on her one of its highest honors, the Legion d'Honneur, created by Napoleon Bonaparte to reward gallantry in military action or distinguished service in military or civilian life that enhances the reputation of France.

En route to Paris, the Rancho Palos Verdes resident stopped in Washington, D.C., to appear at the International Spy Museum, where she signed copies of her 2002 book, "Behind Enemy Lines: The True Story of a French Jewish Spy in Nazi Germany." Amid an unprecedented crowd — museum officials said the turnout of 100 was six times the usual audience for book signings there — she was asked why it took her so long to tell her story.

"It's not modesty," she said in an accent that still, after a half-century of living in the United States, sounds European. "I just thought nobody would believe me. Spies are usually tall and good-looking. I am a very unlikely spy."

The story of this unlikely spy began in Metz, France, part of the region of Alsace-Lorraine so close to the German border that her parents spoke only German. She learned French at school. Hoffnung Cohn grew up amid a tight-knit Jewish family of seven children. Her father, Fischel, ran a photofinishing and enlarging business. Her mother, Regine, was, like her, small, blond and pretty. During the war, Cohn's younger sister, Stephanie, was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Auschwitz, where the family believes she died.

The others were spared by the decision to abandon their home for the south of France and by a neighbor who made them identification papers that did not bear the dreaded notation that they were Jewish. Living in France under German occupation, they survived, aided by her older brother Fred's work in the Resistance. "He made all the right decisions, which kept them alive," she said. Cohn's older sister, Cecile, who now lives in Geneva, will also attend the Legion d'Honneur ceremony this week.

Cohn did not take up spying until late in the war, after the Germans left France, when she joined the army as a nurse. When the commander of the 151st Regiment, to which she was assigned, learned she spoke fluent German, he asked her to join the Army Intelligence Service. It seemed to suit her.

There were, she relates in her book, close calls, like the woman in Singer, Germany, who became suspicious and asked her point-blank if she was a spy. Cohn said she laughed and said, "Do I look like a spy?" to which the woman could only laugh in return. Another time, awakened quickly by German hosts, she started prattling on in French. Their looks of horror told her she had to escape, and she did.

There were moments of near comedy. Terrified of her first mission on German soil, she watched the border with a tall, slim intelligence officer. Crouching near the border, the officer suggested that since "you may well die tonight, why not have a good time first?" She declined.

There were intelligence coups — a German officer gave her the exact location of the remnants of the German army in the Black Forest in 1945 — and near calamities, as when she knocked on the door of the German guard shack instead of the Swiss one while trying to relay the information.

And there were moments of enormous pain, as she learned that her real fiancé, Jacques Delauney, had been executed by the Germans for his work in the French Resistance. And later, after the war, when she served as a nurse in Vietnam, as she was forced to part company with a 7-year-old orphan, Serge Lenay. For more than a year, Serge had regarded her as his mother and she had lavished him with affection. But his grandmother in France demanded his return. He and his family will also attend the ceremony this week.

After Vietnam, she returned to the family business in Poitiers, France, but soon found herself restless. A friend suggested she go to Geneva and enroll in classes to become a registered nurse in Switzerland. There, she met an American named Major Cohn. She did not like him at first, but after a courtship — and a $4.50 ring that she wore until she broke her wrist two years ago — they married, and had two children. On their trip to Washington last week, Major Cohn accompanied Marthe, serving as her interpreter for questions she could not hear.

Asked at the Spy Museum when her children learned the story of her espionage exploits, she replied that they had not known the whole story until her book was published, "although I'm not sure my oldest son ever read it."

Through it all, she evidenced an optimism. "I do not wish for another life," she said before her museum appearance. "You seldom live history the way we did." Asked about her upbeat perspective, she offered this: "Why wouldn't I be an optimist when so many people risked their lives to save me? It changed my outlook on life."

To some, Marthe Hoffnung Cohn's story is a reminder that Americans were not the only heroes of the World War II generation. Tom Brokaw, the former NBC anchor who wrote a book about what he dubbed "The Greatest Generation," said via e-mail that "I could write an entirely new book based on the contributions of Resistance fighters and other ordinary Europeans and Pacific Islanders who performed heroically and yet received almost no attention." Noting the remarkable stories of personal courage, Brokaw added, "And they just keep on emerging 60 years after the fact."

To Sheldon Rutter, an industrial designer who served as a navigator on a B-24 bomber during the war and who came to hear Cohn last week, her story was inspiring. "I was shot down over occupied France," he told her. "As difficult as my experience was, it was a cakewalk compared with what you did. I am in absolute awe of you."

The hard-of-hearing Marthe Cohn smiled when she realized she'd been complimented. "Thank you," she said, smiling with pride in her eyes. The audience applauded.

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Pariah said:
You love the French, but you hate America. Somehow I'm not surprised.

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Darknight613 said:
Are you going to condemn the entire state because of half of the voters who decided to show up at the polls went with Kerry?

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(And I doubt anybody voted for Kerry on account of his Frenchness.)

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Don't try to fool me. Liberals looove the French. They were positively swoooning when Ketchup boy proposed a "global test" before military action and to this day the "blue" voters still bemoan what they perceive as a loss of French goodwill over the war in Iraq.

That being said, I will make one cheese exception (two, if you count Velveeta, but I'm not sure that's actually a cheese): since England was a good ally during the war, people can eat Cheddar. Just not Wisconsin cheddar.

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the G-man said:

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Darknight613 said:
Are you going to condemn the entire state because of half of the voters who decided to show up at the polls went with Kerry?

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Yes. When you add up the voters who actually voted for Kerry and the ones who stayed home and failed to vote for Bush and, therefore, stop the others, you have a big chunk of cheeseheads who deserve a smackdown.

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That still leaves you punishing another big chunk who voted for Bush.

Again, I refer to the scene in the Bible about Sodom and Gommorah, where Abraham asks G-d "will you wipe away the innocent with the guilty," saying that it would be a blasphemy to do so. He asks G-d (politely) "would you spare the city if there were fifty good men?" G-d replies "yes." Abraham keeps pressing the argument, each time lowering the number, until finally G-d says that if ten innocent men could be found in the city, he would spare it. (But there weren't. The only people in the cities worthy to be spared punishment was Lot's family, and G-d sent two angels to get them out of the line of fire.)

G-d would have spared the cities of Sodom and Gommorah on account of only ten men. A lot more than ten people in Wisconsin voted for Bush. Will you be less merciful than G-d and deprive over 1 million Bush supporters of a cheese dependant livelihood?

Conservatives and Republicans pride themselves on their belief in moral values and Biblical values, right? Not condemning the innocent with the guilty is a Biblical value.

To condemn an entire state because of the actions of some, even a majority, of the population is not only unfair to your fellow Bush supporters in Wisconsin, but it counters what we read in the Bible about sparing the innocent and only punishing the guilty.

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you have a big chunk of cheeseheads who deserve a smackdown.

If they aint part of the solution, they're part of the problem.

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I've Got A Dick In My Ass said:
I don't know what hurts more........the dick in my ass......or listening to a flaming liberal like you spew shit out of their mouths day in and day out

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Darknight613 said:
Conservatives and Republicans pride themselves on their belief in moral values and Biblical values, right? Not condemning the innocent with the guilty is a Biblical value.

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Pariah said:

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Darknight613 said:
Conservatives and Republicans pride themselves on their belief in moral values and Biblical values, right? Not condemning the innocent with the guilty is a Biblical value.

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You're stereotyping.

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It's a habit I learned from the rest of you.

But seriosuly folks - again, this comment was not intended to be serious, just as my debate with G-man isn't meant to be serious. If you took it that way, I apologize.