Hilde Meisel grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in Berlin and joined the International Socialist Combat League (ISK) at the age of 15. In 1932/33, she worked as an editor for the ISK's daily newspaper Der Funke. After two years in Paris (1934-1936), where she adopted the name Hilda Monte, she went into exile in London in 1936. There, she began writing for a broad range of media, including numerous articles, books, lectures, and radio shows for the BBC. She traveled to Germany several times up to 1939 to maintain contact with resistance activists. In her 1943 book The Unity of Europe, she developed early ideas on the organization of a federal European community after the war. At the end of 1944, Hilda Monte made contact from Switzerland with Austrian socialist resistance groups in the Vorarlberg region. On her return from a liaison mission, she was shot dead by a border guard on the Austrian-Liechtenstein border near Feldkirch in April 1945.