Inge Ginsberg

Ginsberg was born Ingeborg Neufeld on 27 January 1922 in Vienna, Austria, the older of two children, to Fritz Samuel Neufeld (1889–1960), a businessman, and Hildegard Neufeld (née Zwicker; 1901–1975), into an affluent Jewish family.^[1] She had a younger brother; Hans Walter Neufeld (1925–2005).^[2]

Her father was the proprietor of a freight forwarding company in Vienna. The Neufeld family could trace their Austrian monastic roots back 800 years to the Melk Abbey.^[3] Her mothers family was originally from Zittau, Saxony in Germany.

Ginsberg attended schools up to 12th grade in Vienna.

During the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938, her father was sent to Dachau concentration camp. Ginsberg secured his released through bribery.^[4] In 1939, he was among the Jewish passengers on board the MS St. Louis during its journey to Cuba and back.^{[citation needed]}

In 1942 her mother was able to flee across the Alps to Switzerland with the two children and Ginsberg's boyfriend Otto Kollman after surviving in Vienna for years.^[4][1] They managed to avoid deportation as her brother and fiancée were "essential workers", employed as grave diggers.^[5] However, the threat still loomed over them, and her mother sold her jewellery collection to an Austrian count who arranged for them to be smuggled to Switzerland.^[5] They were first in the Adliswil reception camp and later in several labour camps in Lucerne, Langenbruck and Lugano.

After the war Ginsberg married her first husband, Otto Kollmann, who had fled from Vienna with her.^{[citation needed]} They had one child together.^[1] In the following years they lived mainly in Zürich and worked together in their musical careers.^{[citation needed]} They moved to the USA together. In 1956 she separated from him and worked as a journalist for the weekly newspaper Weltwoche in Zürich.^{[citation needed]} She invested some of her wealth in the stock market and bought two properties in New York.^[5][6]

At the invitation of the Weizmann Institute, she was able to fly as a guest on the first flight of an El Al plane from Zürich to Tel Aviv. In Israel she met her second husband, Hans Kruger and they married in 1960.^{[citation needed]} He was the manager of a luxury hotel, the Dan Hotel Tel Aviv. She had originally planned to lead a pioneering life in a kibbutz.^{[citation needed]} She bought an apartment in Tel Aviv with the proceeds from the sale of three farms near Haifa. Her far-sighted grandmother, a lifelong Zionist, had acquired them in 1936.^{[citation needed]}

In Israel she also met her third husband, also a Jewish emigrant from Vienna. She moved to Ecuador with Kurt Ginsberg and married him after a difficult divorce from Hans Kruger in 1972.^{[citation needed]} She wrote several books based on her time in Ecuador. The couple lived alternately in Quito, Tel Aviv and Switzerland and later moved to New York for health reasons. When her husband died in 1999, she continued to live in Switzerland and New York.^{[citation needed]}

In 2020, Ginsberg survived a COVID-19 infection.^[7] She died 20 July 2021.^[1]

In 1944 Otto Kollmann, her first husband, worked as a bar pianist in Cafe Federale in Lugano. He was recruited by the American secret service Office of Strategic Services to listen to the German-speaking guests.^{[citation needed]} Through his recommendation, Ginsberg was hired as housekeeper at the diplomatic villa, Villa Westphal, used as a safe house by resistance fighters.^[1] The villa's residents were mostly Americans, but also Italians who came and went across the nearby border to fight the German occupiers and the Italian fascists.^{[citation needed]} Inge was actively involved in smuggling weapons from Ticino into the war zone^[4] and in smuggling the wounded from Italy into Switzerland.^{[citation needed]} This happened with the knowledge of Major Max Waibel, Head of Intelligence Section 1 of the Swiss Army.^{[citation needed]}

At the beginning of May 1945 Ginsberg witnessed a secret operation through being at Villa Westphal. It involved SS General Karl Wolff, commander in chief of the German troops in northern Italy. This event, called "Operation Sunrise", in which the Swiss secret service was also involved, resulted in a truce that ended the war in northern Italy prior to the overall German surrender on 8 May 1945. It was part of a deal between the Germans and the Americans, thanks to which it was also possible to save Italian cultural treasures such as da Vinci's "Last Supper" in Milan from the threat of destruction.^[8]

In May 1945, with the start of Cold War in Europe, Ginsberg and her husband ended their activities as spies.^{[citation needed]}