Sigmund A. Cohn papers

Sigmund A. Cohn (1898-1997) was born in Breslau, Germany, where he earned a law degree before working for the Department of Justice in Berlin and then being appointed a judge. He lost his position when Hitler came to power in 1933 and emigrated to Genoa, Italy, with his wife Suzanne Lewy Cohn and their daughters Eva and Marianne. In 1939 they immigrated to the United States and settled in Athens, Georgia, where Cohn had secured a position at the University of Georgia, first teaching German, Italian, and Spanish, and then as a full-time member of the law faculty. The Cohn family was joined by Suzanne Cohn's mother, Regina Sternberg Lewy. The Sigmund A. Cohn papers primarily comprise correspondence between Cohn and his wife and children and Cohn’s parents, Georg and Sophie Cohn in Breslau and date from the Sigmund Cohn family’s arrival in America in 1939 until the United States declared war on Germany at the end of 1941. The correspondence describes family life in Athens and in Breslau and focuses on unsuccessful attempt to secure visas for Georg and Sophie Cohn to immigrate to the United States. Occasional correspondence with the American Friends Service Committee, the US Department of State, the National Council of Jewish Women, and the National Refugee Service further documents those efforts. The collection includes a few letters among additional Cohn family members in Germany, Switzerland, and Sweden, culminating in the revelations that Georg and Sophie Cohn were deported to Theresienstadt in 1942, that they are believed to have been killed immediately, that additional family members also perished there, and that other family members committed suicide in order to avoid deportation. The collection also contains biographical materials including printed items from the Italian steamship, the “Rex,” which carried the Cohn family from Italy to America, a typed script for Regina Lewy’s 60th birthday, a photocopy of Sigmund Cohn’s family tree, and blank American Red Cross civilian message forms and Registered Reichsmarks remittance forms.