Hildegard Eisner née Ring

Else Käthe Hildegard Ring was born on May 5th 1891 in Berlin. Even though Hildegard was her official first name, she was called Hilde by her family. Her father Louis Ring was a city elder of both Charlottenburg and Berlin, marking the family to be a well-established one of the western parts of Berlin. Hilde married the industrialist Rudolf Eisner in 1915 and in 1924, her son Peter was born, followed by her daughter Helene in 1927. The family led a prosperous life in the Berlin Tiergarten-district. But the Nazis coming into power in January 1933 changed everything, as the Eisner family was subjected to the full force of the anti-Semitic policies of the new state. With his business aryanised, stolen and absorbed by Mannesman Steel, Rudolf, Hilde and their two children fled Germany in February 1938. They first went to Prague, then Warsaw and finally to the UK, arriving on July 7th 1939, just before war broke out. Her husband was interned as an enemy alien by the UK Government during the first half of the war on the Isle of Man and died of pneumonia in 1946 in London, aged 58. She outlived him by over 40 years, first in London and then in Brockenhurst, Hampshire.