Life
Born into a mixed Jewish-Catholic family in London, Cohn was educated at Gresham's School and Christ Church, Oxford. He was a scholar and research student at Christ Church between 1933 and 1939, taking a first-class degree in Modern Languages in 1936. He served for six years in the British Army, being commissioned into the Queen's Royal Regiment in 1939 and transferring to the Intelligence Corps in 1944, where his knowledge of modern languages found employment. In 1941 he married Vera Broido, with whom he had a son, the writer Nik Cohn. In the immediate post-war period, he was stationed in Vienna, ostensibly to interrogate Nazis, but he also encountered many refugees from Stalinism, and the similarities in persecutorial obsessions evinced both by Nazism and Stalinism fueled his interest in the historical background for these ideologically opposed, yet functionally similar movements. After his discharge, he taught successively in universities in Scotland, Ireland, England, the United States and Canada.
In 1966 he was appointed a Professorial Fellow at the University of Sussex and became the director of a research project on the preconditions for persecutions and genocides. From 1973 to 1980, Cohn was Astor-Wolfson Professor at Sussex.
Norman Cohn died on 31 July 2007, in Cambridge, England, at age 92, of degenerative heart condition.
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