EARLY YEARS
Oskar Cohn was born in Guttentag, Silesia (now Dobrodzień, Poland) in the Kingdom of Prussia on October 15, 1869… the eleventh child of Bernhard and Charlotte Cohn (née Dresdner). His grandfather was an honorary citizen of Guttentag.
Cohn attended school in Brieg (Brzeg) and started to study medicine at the University of Berlin. After two semesters, he turned to law and continued his education at the University of Greifswald in Munich… and again in Berlin. As a student, the young Cohn came in contact with Otto Landsberg and Wilhelm Liebknecht.
LAW, POLITICS, AND WAR
In 1892, Cohn obtained his doctorate degree and served in the German Army for two years. In 1897, he started to practice as a lawyer in Berlin and joined the law office of Karl and Theodor Liebknecht two years later. He also co-operated with Wolfgang Heine.
In 1909, Cohn became a member of Berlin’s city council for the Tiergarten district as a member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Three years later, he was elected to the Reichstag representing Nordhausen.
During the First World War, Cohn served as a guard in prisoner of war camps in Alsace, Guben, Lithuania, and Courland (from April 1915 to June 1917). He was also regularly exempted from military service to take part in Reichstag sessions. When news about the Tel Aviv and Jaffa deportation reached Berlin in the spring of 1917, Cohn brought up the issue in the Reichstag. On May 14th, he applied a parliamentary interpellation to intervene in the policy of Djemal Pasha in Palestine… and the deportations were finally halted by Erich von Falkenhayn.
Cohn then joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) and was a member of the party’s delegation at the Stockholm Peace Conference of June 1917. Along with Hugo Haase, Karl Kautsky, and Luise Zietz, Cohn met Angelica Balabanoff and the Russian delegation in early July. In addition, he also came in contact with Ber Borochov and the Poale Zion movement.
A FINANCIER OF REVOLT?
After the restoration of diplomatic relations between Germany and Russia, Cohn became legal advisor of the Russian delegation in Berlin. But in the autumn of 1918, the delegation was expelled on charges of preparing a Communist uprising in Germany.
On the night of November 5th and 6th, Adolf Joffe, the Russian ambassador in Berlin, rendered him about one million marks and a ten and a half million Russian ruble mandate for a bank account at Mendelssohn & Co. After the delegation returned to Russia, Joffe claimed to have paid the monies to the USPD to support the revolutionary activities and to purchase weapons.
But while the leading USPD politicians Hugo Haase and Emil Barth denied the payment, Cohn admitted the receipt and regretted that he was not able yet to spend the complete sum to spread the idea of revolution. He explicitly denied receiving the money to acquire weapons; instead Cohn had used most of the cash to support embassy employees and Russian nationals in Germany. Because he could not use the bank account for formal reasons (the Mendelssohn bank refused the mandate), only 50,000 marks were used to support a socialist uprising in Germany.
Cohn also justified the receipt because the SPD had similarly provided money to socialists in the 1905 Russian Revolution. However, he was criticized by socialist newspapers (namely Die Freiheit and Vorwärts), because his actions stood in contrast to a USPD party resolution, which ruled out the acceptance of foreign money for revolutionary purposes. These payments led to the demise of the minister of foreign affairs Wilhelm Solf (who refused further cooperation with the USPD). Later on they were regularly used to publicly discredit Cohn. For instance, the nationalist politician Karl Helfferich refused to answer any question asked by Cohn in a Reichstag investigatory committee.
FIGHTER FOR HUMANITY
After the November Revolution, Cohn became undersecretary in the Reich Ministry of Justice. In January 1919, he was elected as a member of the Weimar National Assembly. His motions to replace the term “Reich” with “Republic” and to address German Jews as a national minority in the Weimar Constitution were denied by the Assembly.
In November 1919, Cohn became a member of the so-called “Schücking Commission” (named after its chairman Walther Schücking). This group was to investigate Allied allegations of illegal treatment of prisoners of war in Germany,. In the case of Charles Fryatt, who had been executed by German authorities in 1916, Cohn and Eduard Bernstein dissented from the commission’s verdict and publicly declared that they regarded the execution as a severe infringement of international law and “inexcusable judicial murder”.
From 1920 on, Cohn represented Poale Zion in the Jewish community of Berlin, advocating for the equal status of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. In 1922, Cohn re-joined the SPD… but two years later, he left politics and focused on religious affairs in Berlin. He continued to work as a lawyer in Berlin and became a member of the German League for Human Rights.
FINAL YEARS
Cohn managed to escape from Berlin the day after the Nazis set fire to the Reichstag (February 28, 1933). He moved to Paris where he worked for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HICEM). In August 1934, Cohn took part in a conference of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva.
But while he was in Switzerland, Cohn was diagnosed with lung cancer. On October 31, 1934, Oskar Cohn died in Geneva at the age of sixty-five. He was buried in Degania Alef, a kibbutz in northern Israel. The funeral orations were given by Zionists Nahum Goldmann and Yosef Sprinzak.
Today, the Oskar-Cohn-Straße in Nordhausen is named in his honor.