Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany

by Richard Lucas

  This approach became known as the Fourth Way—in which each man or woman achieves the balance of his or her intellectual, physical and spiritual faculties. Dances and rituals originating from the pre-Islamic cult of Sufism were combined with mental exercises appropriated from Buddhist monasteries to enhance the modern life of Western man—a life deemed “mechanical” and unthinking. “The Work,” as it was known, was aimed at overthrowing the unsatisfying and dreamlike mechanical life and replacing it with self-observation, self-awareness and self-consciousness.

  In Moscow, Gurdjieff began to teach the sacred exercises to a growing coterie of followers, but the violence and unrest of the Bolshevik Revolution pushed him westward. Eventually, Gurdjieff and his followers settled in France where he established the “Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man” (known as “Le Prieuré”) in 1922. Located 70 kilometers south of Paris at Fontainebleau, Le Prieuré drew a stream of eager and curious followers from Europe and America, including notables such as the artist Man Ray (Eugene Radnitzsky), novelist Thornton Wilder, and the poets Edna St. Vincent Millay and Ezra Pound.83 Gurdjieff sought to expand his following through traveling exhibitions featuring the costumed dances learned at Fontainebleau.

  In 1923, a dancing troupe traveled to Paris and London; and on January 13, 1924, the charismatic, hypnotic mystic with balding head and piercing eyes arrived in New York. Young Bernard Metz and a group of twenty dancers traveled with their “master” to demonstrate the Fourth Way in action. The strange display of rituals and dances captured the attention of New York’s “smart set.” The New York Tribune announced the arrival of a “New Cult Hero Here to Water Acid Emotions” and the Syracuse Herald declared that the mysterious European had come “To Teach America to Dance Its Troubles Away,” promising “Novel Methods by Which a Modern Mystic Expects to Make All Our Difficulties over Taxes, Prohibition and the High Cost of Living Quickly Vanish.”84

  After his wildly successful visit to America, Gurdjieff returned to France. A novice driver, he was nearly killed when he drove his car into a tree. During his convalescence at the Prieuré, Bernard Metz tended to his temporarily crippled master and carried his chair. During the next two years (1925–26), Metz became a notable figure in the movement, not only serving as one of Gurdjieff’s personal secretaries but also helping to translate his first book, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, into the English language.

  In later years, Mildred was circumspect and vague about her association with Metz and the Gurdjieff movement. She would claim that her relationship with Metz was “fleeting”—but it is evident that the dashing Briton had made quite an impression on her. She recalled Metz many years later:

  He was a very serious person whom I had known in New York, London and Paris. He had been secretary to a wellknown philosopher.… We had both been more or less students with the philosopher, and he knew all my ideas on life and ideals, he realized that it was a very grave step which I had made, that of leaving the United States, and leaving the theater behind me—which I loved above everything else.85

  Mildred’s claim that she and Metz were “more or less students” of Gurdjieff points to at least a flirtation with the charismatic leader’s teaching. It is clear that she wished to continue her relationship with Bernard Metz even after he was assigned as a diplomat at the British Consulate in Algiers. In December 1932 she made the fateful decision to leave the United States. Many years later, thoroughly imbued with the National Socialist mindset, Mildred was not eager to admit the depth of her involvement with Metz. It was likely embarrassing for Axis Sally, whose diatribes against the British Empire and International Jewry were legend, to admit that it was her interest in an English Jew that led her across the sea to North Africa.

  After sailing to Cherbourg on the SS Champlain, she visited Paris for a few days and then traveled to Marseilles. From Marseilles, she sailed on to Algiers and landed at the end of January 1933. Metz was busy in the winter months of 1932–33 as one of the last remaining followers of Gurdjieff to remain at the Prieuré—closing up the Institute as it fell into receivership. The two were reunited in the exotic port city when Metz was appointed pro-consul in August 1933. She decided to remain in Algiers and seek employment in the colony. Years later, Mildred would not elaborate about her reasons for staying, explaining in 1949: “[I was] feeling very unhappy about my failure in the American theater, and felt that [she] would like to get close to nature and have a chance to seek a lot of sunshine, á la Rousseau, back to nature….” She neglected to mention that Algiers was the destination of Britain’s newest recruit to the diplomatic corps.

  The Algiers that Mildred Gillars and Bernard Metz encountered in 1933 was a popular winter vacation spot and a profitable port for Europeans, but for the native Arabs it was a hopelessly impoverished backwater of Colonial France. The Muslim population were a subjected people who could not gain French citizenship as long as they adhered to Islam. These French subjects were forbidden to assemble in large groups, bear arms or leave their villages and homes to travel without permission. Large, tree-lined boulevards where European businesses thrived contrasted with the crooked, narrow alleys and streets four to six feet wide on which the locals trod. Correspondent Charles K. McClatchy described the sights, sounds and smells of the city to American newspaper readers after he returned from a February 1929 voyage:

  In Algiers the most alluring charms are blended with the filthiest stains. As probably nowhere else has God created a more beautiful picture, probably nowhere has man—and woman—more brutally, more beastly, defaced his handiwork.… [We walked] through the most noisome and filthy alleys… amid scenes of human degradation that would shame even the pen of Zola…86

  Upon her arrival, Mildred consulted a consular official named Touchette about the possibility of obtaining employment in the colony. Although he told her that it would be very difficult to get work in North Africa, Touchette eventually found her a job as a tutor to the son of an American family. Within weeks she was fired, blaming the loss of her job on the recalcitrance of the little boy.87 She met with considerably more success as a model and salesgirl for an Algiers dress maker named Madame Zegue. Her French improved greatly over the ensuing months, and she earned the modest sum of a thousand French francs. Meanwhile, Bernard Metz moved quickly up the diplomatic ladder and was promoted to vice-consul on January 22, 1934, but his relationship with Mildred cooled.88 His rise in the diplomatic service continued long after she left the city when he was promoted again to run the Algiers consulate until the outbreak of war in 1939.

  In the spring of 1934, Mildred received a letter from her mother. Mae Gillars was coming to Europe, and asked her daughter to meet her in Hungary that summer. After a year and a half in Algiers, Mildred said goodbye to Bernard Metz and sailed to Italy to begin the trek to Budapest. Briefly passing through Naples, Florence, Rome and Venice, she met her mother in the Hungarian capital after a three and a half year separation. The happy reunion lasted over a month when they received a cable from a family friend who happened to be vacationing in Hamburg. Mae Gillars remembered in 1946: “While we were there [in Budapest], a friend who was on a Cook’s tour sent us a telegram saying she would be in Hamburg for five or six days and asked us to join her there. We went, and then when she left, Mildred and I decided to visit Berlin. We were just touring around.”89

  On to Berlin

  Adolf Hitler had been Chancellor of Germany for over a year and a half when Mildred and Mae Gillars arrived in Berlin on September 4, 1934. The regime was in the process of consolidating power and removing the last vestiges of Weimar democracy from the political arena. The systematic repression of Germany’s Jews was not yet fully implemented. The first concentration camp, Dachau, had opened in June 1934 to intern Communists, Social Democrats and other political opponents.

  Even at that early date, though, laws were already in place to remove Jews from key sectors of German society. In April 1933 legislation was enacted to remove “non-Aryans” from t
he civil service, to exclude Jews from the legal profession, and to limit Jewish access to German schools. The German population was being slowly conditioned to accept the gradual elimination of Jews from the political, economic and social landscape.

  Three months before Mildred and Mae entered Berlin, Hitler eliminated the greatest threat to his leadership when he ordered the execution of Ernst Röhm, the leader of the SA (Sturm Abteilung or Storm Troopers) as well as hundreds of storm troopers on the evening of June 30 in the purge known as the Night of the Long Knives (Nacht der langen Messer). When the elderly president Paul von Hindenburg died on August 2, Hitler’s power became absolute. Now the unquestioned leader of the Reich, with the sworn allegiance of the armed forces to the Führer alone, Hitler and his ministers turned their attention to the elimination of Jewish influence from German life.

  For the average citizen, the disorder and street violence that characterized the Weimar period had been replaced by an uneasy calm and a noticeably improving economy. By September 1934, Nazi economic policies of increased government spending, abolition of trade unions and nonpayment of war reparations to Germany’s former enemies began to bear fruit. Six million Germans were unemployed when Hitler assumed the Chancellorship on January 30, 1933. In 1934 unemployment had been reduced to less than four million. The downward trend would continue in 1935 when universal conscription took thousands of men of working age into the armed forces and off the unemployment rolls. When the regime formally scrapped the provisions of the Versailles Treaty proscribing rearmament, the nation’s factories began to function at full productivity.

  Newspaper and radio correspondent William L. Shirer arrived in Berlin the very week that Mildred and Mae Gillars came to the city. He described his own feelings as he took in the atmosphere of the New Berlin:

  The constant Heil Hitlers, clicking of heels and brown shirted storm troopers or black-coated SS guards marching up and down the street grate me, though the old-timers say there are not nearly so many since the (Röhm) purge. We’ve had some walks and twice have had to duck into stores to keep from either having to salute the standard of some passing SA or SS battalion or facing the probability of getting beaten up for not doing so.90

  Mae Gillars was not impressed with the capital of the thousand-year Reich and, within a month, was eager to return to America. Whether it was the improving economy, the contagious spirit of hope or an attraction to the land of Bach, Mozart and Wagner, her daughter decided to remain in Germany. She requested financial help from her widowed mother to pursue a new career:

  I told Mother that it had been an age-old dream of mine to study music in Germany, and I should try it for at least a year, and I still felt too depressed about things in America. I loved New York so very much, and felt that advance was impossible, and she told me that she was perfectly willing to supply funds for me to study in Germany if I wanted to continue, and we left it that way, and she returned to America around the end of September.91

  Despite the fact that Mildred’s musical ability was, to say the least, limited, she hoped to study piano:

  I set about to find a room immediately where I could have a piano, because that was of paramount importance, of course, and after I found… a piano teacher, an excellent piano teacher, and practiced diligently eight hours a day, and shortly after my mother returned to America, I got a letter telling me that she regretted very much, but owing to financial reverses, she would not be able to keep her promises.… It was a terrible shock, really, so the next step was to go to the pawnbroker with my jewelry…92

  Whether Mae actually suffered a financial setback or had second thoughts about subsidizing her 33-year-old daughter’s latest artistic endeavor, Mildred was forced to give up her apartment and look for work in Berlin. In a stroke of good fortune reminiscent of her first days in New York with Florence Pendleton, Mildred developed a friendship with the Silesian-born widow of the late American actor and New York Times drama correspondent C. Hooper Trask, who wrote a column called “News of the Berlin Scene.” Thirty-nine-year old Trask had died in June 1933 when, on an Italian vacation, the couple’s automobile careened off a 45 foot precipice and crashed.93 A mutual friend in New York advised Mildred to look up Claire Trask and introduce herself.

  Mrs. Trask was recovering from the accident that had claimed her husband’s life and had left her badly injured. Bereaved and suffering, the 42-year-old widow needed a friend, companion and caretaker. Mildred stepped into the void. Claire Trask assumed her husband’s career as a Times correspondent, and was well connected to the Berlin drama and film scene. The unemployed music student ingratiated herself with the older woman. In the same manner that she coaxed an invitation to move into Florence Pendleton’s apartment, she told Trask that she was on the verge of homelessness:

  She had noticed that my ring was gone, and she said something about it, and I told her that I had pawned it to pay the rent, and she exploded in a very delightful way—she had a way of doing that—and said I should have told her. She said she wasn’t going to have any friend of hers going to the pawnshop, and she saw no further reason for me staying with Mrs. Herzfeld, and she would look for me at her place.94

  Mildred moved into the Trask home in November 1934 and, with her new patron’s help, soon found a job as a translator at the Berlitz Language School in Berlin. In January 1935, she began teaching English to German students. Her female manager at Berlitz resented the former showgirl: “You know how women can be with women, sometimes, it is a shame, and it was a rather hard pull for a time because she didn’t want any women teachers around.” Mildred earned 1 Reich mark, 20 pfennig per lesson but the manager refused to give her a permanent contract and salary. It was only after “certain men in the institution interceded that she weakened” and gave her a contract.95 Again, Mildred relied on the good graces of men whom she cultivated to further her career or to merely survive.

  It was not only the kindness of men that she relied on, for Claire Trask was extremely generous with her new friend. Mrs. Trask gave her a comfortable life at her residence, refusing money for room and board. The maid even served Mildred as though she were a member of the family. Mildred supplemented her teaching income by writing English translations of German books and articles, including the 1937 book Vivid Portraits, with a Simple Camera by W.H. Doering (which was published in Boston). It was through Mrs. Trask’s connections in the German film industry that Mildred began translating for UFA (Universum Film AG), the legendary film studio that had produced such classics as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Josef von Sternberg’s 1930 international hit The Blue Angel. Mrs. Trask’s late husband often worked on translations and dubbing for the studio during the Weimar years, and in 1931 had hosted a radio program broadcast to the United States with the German stars Emil Jannings, Lilian Harvey and Conrad Veidt.

  Claire Trask “knew all the film stars in Germany, and the managers and the directors,” she recalled, “and so I began doing a great deal of translating for UFA—doing subtitles for films, and that sort of thing.”96 In essence, Mildred picked up much of the translation work that Hooper Trask had performed before his tragic death. UFA did not fully come under the regime’s total control until March 19, 1937 when Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment assumed responsibilty for every aspect of the studio’s output. Mildred’s work for UFA would serve as an introduction to working for a propaganda organ of the German government.

  Critic or Propagandist?

  While living with Claire Trask from 1935 to 1938, Mildred became fluent in the German language, studied interpretive dance, and assisted Mrs. Trask in her job as the New York Times’ Berlin correspondent. It was a time of growth, opportunity and achievement that towered over anything she had experienced in her own country. Mildred remembered:

  I did quite a lot of writing… by myself and in conjunction with Mrs. Trask; well, of course, naturally, I never worked on any of her articles—either I did the article or I didn’t—but you see, I was
responsible for getting the work because I had no friends in Germany and she had good connections with UFA.97

  Claire Trask walked a fine line as a reviewer of German film and theater in the Times. Critical of the political and racially motivated changes that came to the Berlin drama scene with the January 30 revolution, a review of her prodigious output from 1934 to 1938 reveals the progressively heavy hand of the Propaganda Ministry weighing on her ability to write genuine film and theater criticism. Mrs. Trask noted in a December 1934 article that Germany’s film industry was in crisis due to the Nazi state’s withdrawal of two films from exhibition in the city’s theaters. She described the “benign” influence of the Propaganda Minister:

  It has long been evident that Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Education and Propaganda, is keeping a benign official eye on the celluloid strip.… Dr. Joseph Goebbels himself… personally stopped the run of the two films. He expressly states that the barring of these two pictures is not due to their running counter to state policy or National Socialistic beliefs but because they are “superficial, tasteless, void of any imagination, misusing their cast, musicians, etc. to turn out dull, stupid film ware.”… This controversy had added little to stabilize an already restless, unsure and much hampered industry.98

  Mrs. Trask tempered her criticism with evenhanded praise for the latest offerings of the major German studios such as UFA and Tobis, and reported on the popularity of American films in Berlin’s movie houses. Light Hollywood fare such as Dancing Lady starring Joan Crawford and Clark Gable, Morning Glory with Katherine Hepburn, and the historical drama Queen Christina, starring the immensely popular Greta Garbo, filled the capital’s theaters with dubbed German versions.