Oskar Cohn was a German lawyer, Zionist and socialist politician.
19 Facts About Oskar Cohn
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Oskar Cohn's family were religious but largely assimilated German Jews, his grandfather was an honorary citizen of Guttentag.
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Oskar Cohn attended school in Brieg and started to study medicine at the University of Berlin.
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In 1897 he started to practise as a lawyer in Berlin and joined the law-office of Karl and Theodor Liebknecht in 1899; as a lawyer working in Berlin, Oskar Cohn co-operated with Wolfgang Heine.
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In 1912 Oskar Cohn was elected a member of the German Reichstag representing Nordhausen.
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In World War I Oskar Cohn served as a guard in prisoner of war camps in Alsace, Guben, Lithuania, and Courland from April 1915 to June 1917; during this time he had his first significant contact with Eastern European Jewry.
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Oskar Cohn was regularly exempted from military service to take part in Reichstag sessions.
8.
When news about the Tel Aviv and Jaffa deportation reached Berlin, Oskar Cohn brought up the issue in the Reichstag on 7 May 1917.
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Oskar Cohn joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1917 and was a member of the USPD delegation at the Stockholm Peace Conference of June 1917.
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Oskar Cohn explicitly denied receiving the money to acquire weapons; instead he had used most of the cash money to support employees of the embassy and Russian nationals in Germany.
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Oskar Cohn justified the receipt because the SPD had provided money to Russian socialists in the 1905 Russian Revolution in a similar way.
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Oskar Cohn was however criticised, by socialist newspapers like Die Freiheit and Vorwarts, because his actions stood in contrast to a USPD party resolution, which ruled out the acceptance of foreign money for revolutionary purposes.
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In January 1919, Oskar Cohn was elected a member of the Weimar National Assembly.
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In November 1919, Oskar Cohn became a member of the so-called "Schucking Commission", an official commission to investigate Allied allegations of illegal treatment of prisoners of war in Germany, named after its chairman Walther Schucking.
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In 1922 Oskar Cohn re-joined the SPD; he left politics in 1924 and focused on religious affairs in Berlin.
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Oskar Cohn continued to work as a lawyer in Berlin and became a member of the German League for Human Rights.
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Oskar Cohn managed to escape from Berlin the day after the Reichstag fire of February 1933.
18.
Oskar Cohn moved to Paris where he worked for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.
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Oskar Cohn died in Geneva and was buried in Degania Alef, a kibbutz in northern Israel.