The Jewish Socialist Who Tried to Kill Hitler
From spreading anti-fascist writings to acting as an undercover agent in Nazi Germany, Jewish socialist Hilda Monte became one of the most formidable operatives of the resistance. She even participated in an abortive plot to kill Hitler himself.
Jewish socialist Hilde Meisel. (Wikimedia Commons)
On April 17, 1945, Hilda Monte’s luck ran out. In unclear circumstances on the frontier between Nazi Germany and neutral Liechtenstein, the lifelong socialist and resistance fighter was mortally wounded in the final few weeks of war in Europe.
Yet despite her apparent aptitude for hiding details about her life in order to remain an anonymous militant in the anti-fascist struggle, Monte wove a fascinating thirty-one years of life, which today highlights the forgotten stories of the many unknown Germans who went as far as to physically fight the Nazi regime — but also of a largely unknown effort by a founder of Tribune, her onetime publisher, to fund an attempt on Hitler’s life.
Young Resistance
Born Hilde Meisel in 1914 to a Jewish family in Vienna, Monte’s parents relocated to Berlin, where they had previously lived, in 1915. It was in the combustible environment of 1920s Berlin that she became politicized, joining her sister Margot in the Schwarze Haufen (Black Company), a Jewish socialist ramblers youth movement which took its name from a rebel group in the sixteenth-century German peasant revolts.
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