anti-Nazi convictions led her to write a series of articles and books,
under the name Hilda Monte, in conjunction with various socialists
based in Great Britain, including the neo-Kantian group headed by
philosopher Leonard Nelson. Beginning in 1942, Meisel also pre-
pared manuscripts for the British Broadcasting Company designed
for German audiences.
Desiring more direct involvement, she underwent training by the
OSS at Camp O outside London and, under the code name Crocus,
was paradropped into France near Lake Geneva in September 1944.
Her main objective was to establish contact with resistance groups in
Austria. On 17 April 1945, after being shot by a border patrol near
Feldkirch while returning from Vienna to Switzerland, Meisel com-
mitted suicide. Authorities were unable to ascertain her true identity
at the time.MEISINGER, JOSEF (1899–1947). A senior SS official stationed in
Poland and Japan during World War II, Josef Meisinger was born
in Munich on 14 September 1899. A combat veteran of World War
I, he was attracted to the Nazi Party and participated in the abortive
Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. Meisinger served in the Bavarian police
force until he came to the attention of Reinhard Heydrich, joined
the SS in March 1933, and accompanied Heydrich to Berlin the fol-
lowing year. His responsibilities as a key official in the Reich’s new
police force included detecting inner-party conspiracies, suppressing
abortions and homosexual activity, and preventing intimate relations
between Jews and non-Jews. In this capacity, Meisinger clumsily
prepared the dossier at the center of the Fritsch Affair and was de-
prived of his office after the general’s rehabilitation.
With the outbreak of war came a field assignment in Poland,
where he headed the Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police) in German-
occupied Warsaw from October 1939 to March 1941. Yet the ex-
treme measures instituted by Meisinger alarmed his superiors and
resulted in his reassignment to Tokyo as the police attaché and
liaison to the Japanese secret service (Walter Schellenberg later
characterized him as “so utterly bestial and corrupt as to be practi-
cally inhuman”). At one point, while meeting with local occupation
officials in Shanghai, Meisinger called for the execution of some
17,000 exiled European Jews, but the Japanese government decided
MEISINGER, JOSEF • 293