Hilda Monte, the Assassinated Federalist

Robert Belot
Historian and academic, Jean Monnet EUROPA chair, University of Saint-Etienne, Member of the Scientific Council of UEF France

Hilda Monte
The Unity of Europe, (Andreas Wilkens Ed.)
With an introduction by H.N. Brailefoid
In the coll. “Federalism,” vol. 15, Peter Lang, Brussels, 2023

1943. In the middle of the war, a very important but today forgotten book was published in London by the famous publishing house Victor Gollancz: The Unity of Europe. Fortunately, it has just been republished in the “Federalism” collection of the Peter Lang Editions, directed by the Centro Studi sul Federalismo (CSF) in Turin, whose inspiration is Professor Lucio Levi. In Paris I met the historian who is at the origin of this resurrection, and presents this book excellently: Professor Andreas Wilkens. He told me that he is preparing a biography of Hilda Monte, a young woman whose intelligence is matched only by her courage, a promise who was assassinated by the barbarians. Because this figure of federalism is largely unknown today.

The author of The Unity of Europe is an extraordinary woman: Hilda Monte. A brief, intense, tragic life. Born in 1914 in Vienna, she grew up in Berlin from 1915. Her father has Austro-Hungarian roots, her mother Prussian roots. On April 17, 1945, while on a secret mission in Switzerland to establish a link with the Austrian resistance, she was shot dead by a border guard near Feldkirch [i]. She was about to be 31 years old. Hilda Monte was a resistance fighter against the Nazi order. In words and deeds. Her commitment is not linked to the fact that she was Jewish: she was pacifist, socialist and pro-European.

A precocious girl, it was at the age of 15 that she joined a group of young people of the ISK (Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund /International Socialists Militant League). It was the left wing of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. At 18, she became a journalist. It is the deciphering of international news that interests her. She wrote 75 articles in 1932 and 1933 for the short-lived ISK daily, Der Funke (The Spark). The most diverse subjects are covered: strikes in France, the crisis in the raw materials market, British customs policy, the “problems of capitalism in Japan” or the policies of Mussolini. As a witness to the growing power of Nazism, she sometimes evokes the violence which took over the streets of Berlin. We understand why the newspaper was banned in February 1933.

She went to Paris in 1934, then to London in mid-1936, to continue the battle. A battle of ideas. Her weapon: her typewriter. She was needed for the production and distribution of political publications, which her network illegally introduces into Germany. It was at this moment that she decided to call herself “Hilda Monte”, so as not to make it easier for the Gestapo trackers to threaten her family. Her birth name is Meisel. Her parents remained in Berlin until 1939.

In London, in 1938, she entered into a “white marriage” with the cartoonist and anarchist John Olday, who had dual German and British nationality. This was to prevent her possible expulsion from the United Kingdom. In October 1940, she participated in the creation of the radio station called “European Revolution”. She also appears on the BBC's German-language program. To alert British opinion to the dramatic evolution of the German Reich, she gave lectures to educational associations, the British army, and the Labor Party. She was active in the community of German exiles in London. She was close to the Union of German Socialist Organizations in Great Britain, for whom the aim of the war was the creation of a “federation of all European countries”.

War comes, alas, as predictable.

With her friends, after London, she makes calls for the Resistance against Nazi domination on the continent. She reveals crucial information, which the general public ignores. Thus, in December 1942, in a BBC broadcast, she denounced the organized genocide of the Jews which had begun in the East. In 1942, she distributed a combat pamphlet: Help Germany to Revolt!. It is an appeal addressed to the British public opinion to support the government, the only one in Europe to confront the Reich. But this book also tries to explore what Germany shall become after the war, which is new. Because Hilda's friends believe in a democratic transformation of Germany after the war. This is the first time the subject is discussed. And it is also a way to start thinking about a reorganization on a European scale.

In London, she published two books in English. The first, in 1940: How to Conquer Hitler. It was co-written with Helmut von Rauschenplat, an economist who had led the ISK and who had to flee the Reich. The work examines the possibilities of waging an economic and propaganda war against Nazi Germany to bring it to repentance and back to sanity. Defeat Hitler for what? To prepare, according to her, the advent of “socialist federalism” in Germany, and accomplish a “political and social revolution”, namely: the destruction of the Nazi power apparatus, disarmament, purification of the administration, nationalization of the big banks, expropriation of “war industrial trusts and large landowners”, and organization of free elections.

But Hilda Monte sees further than Germany. She thinks that the federalist solution is the very condition for a lasting peace in Europe. But making peace means making Europe. And making Europe requires a commitment to limiting the absolute sovereignty of European states and imagining a European federation.

What is surprising is that at the same time, in London, Henri Frenay, the founder of the Combat Resistance movement, developed the same discourse to convince General De Gaulle, exiled in England. [ii]

It is precisely her own European project that Hilda Monte reveals in her second book, published in October 1943. The Unity of Europe is a plea in favor of the construction of a politically and economically united Europe.

She begins her demonstration with statistics. Whether in the agricultural, industrial, commercial, technical or demographic fields, there are considerable differences in living standards between European countries. A divide separates two spaces: on one side, the “Inner Europe”, the industrialized space (Great Britain, France, Germany, Norway, Italy, Czechoslovakia); on the other side, the “Outer Europe”, a predominantly agricultural, poor Europe: the Balkan countries, Spain, Portugal, Finland. According to her, the only way to remedy this imbalance (one chapter is entitled: “Restoring the Balance by Creating One Europe”) is to build a common market in order to limit the influence of capitalism on the introduction of the social dimension. The “only real solution” to the European problem is the creation of a “socialist commonwealth of Europe”.

But this common market cannot happen as long as Europe is not truly Europe, that is to say as long as the European countries do not equip themselves with common institutions from which a political Europe will be born. She speaks of a “European community of destiny” which must put an end to the belligerent co-presence of “two Europes”. No progress can be hoped for, if people are content with a simple return to the “old game of sovereignty”. Especially since, for her, sovereignty is largely an illusion, given the links of interdependence created by economic exchanges.

Note that creating Europe and making peace, for Hilda, does not mean denying the reality of nations. It means trying to overcome national rivalries. How? By allowing transfers of competences to European common organizations.

She proposes the creation of a Central European Authority, which would exercise its action in a certain number of essential areas: the economy, trade relations, financial and investment policy, transport, security, monetary policy. But, as a socialist, she is keen to include also social policy and labor market regulation. Hilda Monte contemplates the possibility of introducing a single European currency, or, at least, of fixing an irrevocable exchange rate between the different national currencies. To bring economic policies closer together, she suggests that the central authority be assisted by two other institutions: a European Investment Board and a Central Reserve Bank. To remedy the inequality of development in Europe, she thinks it will be necessary to draw inspiration from the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), an institution created in 1933 as part of the New Deal by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in order to support the economic development of disaster-stricken regions. She therefore suggests the establishment of a “democratic planning”.

She does not forget education and culture (she also mentions the need to create international universities). The step-by-step development of a European citizenship could also be considered. The question is how to involve civil society in this process, without which democratic institutions cannot prosper. The question is also whether Europeans will be able to overcome the “legacy of hatred” that Hitler will leave in peoples' memories. Although Europeans must not forget the past, they must also consider that European unity responds to a higher interest, and that there is no alternative. The last question is finally to know whether the future winners (she calls them the “Big Three”: the United States, the USSR and Great Britain) will impose spheres of influence to the detriment of the “unity” of Europe. A premonitory vision of the Cold War.

Hilda Monte shows indeed a great lucidity, while remaining resolutely optimistic. She knows that “European unity […] cannot solve all problems alone; it nevertheless constitutes a necessary condition for their solution.”

Isn't what she was proposing precisely what will become (in part) the European Union? The “European Revolution” that she called for may not yet be accomplished, but it is well underway.

As Andreas Wilkens rightly remarks, “rare are the women who succeed in publishing, in the difficult conditions of a war, a 200-page book containing a political project, and what is more with a large circulation of around 15,000 copies”. Let us add that the book is written solely in her personal name, without any reference to a party or to any institution or group.

Idealist and visionary, but also realistic and courageous, such was Hilda Monte. This woman with a tragic destiny deserves a special place in European collective memory. It is precisely what the historian Andreas Wilkens is working on with empathy and competence; he is preparing the biography that was missing in the history of European federalism and in the history of the women engaged in that fight. We must never forget that the European project was initiated by European men and women engaged in the fight against the worst Europe ever, that of Nazi-fascism.

^[i] Hilda Monte is recruited by the OSS (the American Secret Service) as part of the Operation “Faust”, a secret project aimed at infiltrating the Reich with the prospect of German capitulation. She underwent adequate training in Great Britain (parachuting, coding methods, etc.). On her arrival in France (in October 1944), she was smuggled into Switzerland via France thanks to the Swiss socialist and anti-Nazi René Bertholet, very close to the ISK of which her wife was a member; Hanna Fortmuller is a friend of Hilda Monte. She will also participate in the activities of pro-European federalists in Switzerland. Operation “Faust” will not succeed. In 1945, representatives of the Austrian resistance in Switzerland asked her to carry out a liaison mission in the Vorarlberg region. On her return to Switzerland, Hilda Monte was shot dead by a border guard on April 17, 1945, on the border between Austria and Liechtenstein.

^[ii]  Letter from Henri Frenay to General de Gaulle, London, November 8, 1942. See: Henri Frenay to General de Gaulle. Letters and report on the Resistance and Europe (1942-1953) (in French), Lyon, Presse Fédéraliste éditions, 2023, p. 93-110