Hilde Meisel

Much of what is known about Meisel's life in England came from her husband, whose recollections were embellished. In 1946, she was identified as the mastermind behind the 1939 Bürgerbräukeller assassination attempt on Hitler's life, though convincing evidence of this is unverifiable.

On 17 April 1945, while trying to cross the border illegally from German-occupied Austria into Liechtenstein, Meisel was shot when she made a dash for the frontier at Tisis near Feldkirch. Shot in the thigh, she bled to death while still on the border.

In summer 1944, Meisel was recruited for the "Faust Project" of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), who were looking for some 200 agents to obtain military and political news from Germany. The OSS held several training programs for the participants in a small private house outside London. The teachers were members of the U.S. Army, including several immigrants. The participants were briefed on practical aspects of everyday life in Nazi Germany, such as ration cards, how to acquire an apartment and other bureaucratic requirements they'd need to navigate in order to find work. At the end of the course, they were trained in parachuting. Because the pending trips were secret, they were forbidden to talk to their friends about their plans.

In September 1944, Meisel and German: Anna Beyer flew to France. The original plan was for them to be dropped near Lyon, but there were skirmishes in the area, so they were landed by light aircraft in Thonon-les-Bains, near Lake Geneva, in a meadow used as a landing field by the British Special Operations Executive.

Shortly thereafter, Meisel and Beyer traveled to the Ticino Alps near Intragna, Switzerland. The Bertholets maintained a weekend home there, called "Al Forno", which was used by emigrants as a residence. In autumn 1944, Zwangsarbeiter (forced laborers) began trying to escape Germany by swimming their way to Switzerland, so the Germans, attempting to stanch the escape route, sealed off the border to Switzerland.

Both books were published in 1943. The "Sozialistische Mitteilungen: News for German Socialists in England" wrote,

The booklet, Help Germany to Revolt! was published in 1942. It is the last book she wrote with Fritz Eberhard. About this project, Eberhard wrote, "On behalf of the Fabian Society, I wrote a small booklet with Hilda Monte, Help Germany to Revolt. It was written as a letter to the members of the Labour Party and proceeded from the idea that not all Germans were Nazis."

In 1942, Meisel worked with Fritz Borinski [de], Werner Milch (germanist) [de], Minna Specht, Walter Auerbach, Werner Burmeister [de], Fritz Eberhard and Otto Kahn-Freund to establish the German Educational Reconstruction Committee [de], a project of the "Union of German Socialist Organisations in Great Britain" launched to plan and prepare a reorganization of the system of education and upbringing in postwar Germany.

One surviving radio manuscript, written in mid-December 1942, deals with the murder of European Jews.

After the Gillies Committee was dissolved in 1941, she continued working till 1943 with the trade unionist Walter Auerbach [de], the lawyer Otto Kahn-Freund and Eberhard to form a discussion group that would work in the fight against National Socialism in Germany.

The Ministry of Economic Warfare also contained the Special Operations Executive, which was responsible for secret operations in Europe. Meisel's experience and skills from her underground work led to her being dispatched to Lisbon for a period in 1941, where she acted as a courier of international telegrams using the codes of both SOE and Auerbach's International Transport Workers' Federation.

Founded in spring 1941 at the request of the British Labour Party, the Union was a consortium of German Socialist refugees from several German political parties, Sopade, the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany, Neu Beginnen and the ISK. They set themselves to work on the downfall of the Hitlerian system and to work with the Allies to defeat Hitler. They also discussed the conditions and work of a future united socialist party in Germany, exchanging ideas on a common objective so as not to repeat the mistakes of the Weimar Republic in a democratic, postwar Germany.

In early 1940, Meisel and Eberhard were appointed to be advisors with the Gillies Committee [de], under the direction of William Gillies (politician) [de]. They were to develop concrete plans to set up a "black propaganda" radio station. Called the Sender der europäischen Revolution ("European Revolution Broadcasting Station"), it first went on the air 7 October 1940.

In autumn 1939, feeling that the ISK was not being militant enough against the Nazis, Meisel left the ISK along with Fritz Eberhard and Hans Lehnert [de] (1899–1942). Even during the war, Meisel kept trying to go to Germany.

As the situation with Litten deteriorated when he went to Dachau concentration camp in October 1937, Meisel began to work intensively to secure his release. She corresponded with other supporters and arranged to publish an article in the Manchester Guardian on 26 January 1938, "In Dachau Camp. The Tragic Case of Hans Litten". These efforts were without success; Litten committed suicide just days later on 5 February 1938.

To avoid being deported, Meisel entered into a marriage of convenience with the British-German caricaturist and cartoonist John Olday in 1938. In so doing, she became a "British subject by marriage", allowing her to carry out her work in England more easily and Meisel developed a busy career as a journalist, writing articles for The Vanguard, Sozialistische Warte, Left News and Tribune. In addition she was a lecturer for the Workers' Educational Association. During this period she lived in Sleights in the North Riding of Yorkshire with Austrian artist Hannes Hammerschmidt and his wife Tess. Also at this time, she approached George Strauss, left-wing Labour MP and one of the financiers and founders of Tribune, for money to fund an assassination attempt on Hitler: according to him, he arranged for her to meet financial journalist Werner Knop, who agreed to provide support, although the attack did not materialise.

Meisel became active with the ISK established friendships with political contacts in different countries. She lived in Paris for a time, from where she made regular trips back to Germany to aid underground trade union groups, before relocating back to the UK in 1936. Writing under the pseudonym "Hilda Monte", she brought like-minded comrades in Germany information. She also acted as a courier and smuggled literature into Germany and helped those under threat by the Gestapo to escape from Germany. Meisel also wrote for, and served as a member of the editorial board of, Sozialistische Warte [de], an exile publication of the ISK, writing primarily about problems with the economy.

In 1933, the Nazis seized power, suppressing Der Funke shortly afterwards, and Meisel began getting active with the German Resistance, briefly moving to Cologne to help smuggle individuals associated with the labour movement and money out of Germany and into safety in the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland, as well as smuggling banned literature into the country. She then returned to Berlin, where she established underground socialist propaganda networks and organised efforts to oppose the 1934 referendum on elevating Hitler from Chancellor to Fuhrer. In 1934, she interrupted her art studies and began taking courses in national economy at the London School of Economics. She also began publishing numerous articles on economics.

Meisel attended the Berlin Lyceum from 1924 to 1929. She then went to England, where her uncle, the conductor and composer Edmund Meisel, was then living and working in London. That same year, she undertook her first activities with the Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund (ISK), a socialist group that split from the SPD during the Weimar Republic and was active in the fight against Nazism. The ISK established its own press, Der Funke in 1932 and Meisel contributed a number of articles, writing about the economic problems in France, England and Spain. In 1932, Meisel also began studying art in London.

Meisel was born to Rosa and Ernst Meisel, the younger of two daughters in a middle-class, German Jewish family in Vienna. With hostilities breaking out that resulted in the start of World War I, the family moved back to Berlin in 1915. They had previously lived there and her older sister had been born there in 1912. Meisel's father exported and imported household goods for a living.

According to the Berlin address book, her parents lived in Berlin from 1915 until 1936. Meisel suffered with a physical problem until puberty, necessitating frequent trips with her mother to Switzerland. In 1924, Meisel and her sister, Margot joined a German-Jewish youth group with socialist revolutionary ideas, called the Schwarze Haufen, which was part of the liberal German-Jewish Wanderbund-Kameraden. Margot became friendly with the leader of the group, Max Fürst and Hans Litten, his childhood friend and the ideological head of the group. Margot later became Fürst's wife and Litten's secretary. After Litten's arrest by the Gestapo, as his secretary, she was able to maintain contact with him for a time; she worked tirelessly to secure his freedom.

Hilde Meisel (31 July 1914 – 17 April 1945) was a Jewish German socialist and journalist who published articles against the Nazi regime in Germany. While in exile in England, she wrote under the pseudonym Hilda Monte, calling for German resistance to Nazism in magazines, books and in radio broadcasts. She acted as a courier and repeatedly undertook secret operations in Germany, Austria, France and Portugal, although as a social democrat and Jew, it was extremely dangerous for her to do so. Other code names she used in exile were Hilde Olday, Selma Trier, Helen Harriman, Eva Schneider, H. Monte, Hilda Monte and Hilde Monte.