Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany

by Richard Lucas

  Despite the lull in street violence and harassment against Jews during the period immediately prior to and during the 1936 Berlin Olympics, 24 laws explicitly discriminating against Jews were instituted that year. An additional 22 followed in 1937.113 This torrent of exclusionary law ranged from the removal of Jewish children from German schools to the “Aryanization” of Jewish businesses—the brazen expropriation and reassignment of property to party members and their associates. As the world edged toward the conflict that Hitler sought over Czechoslovakia, the race laws were amended again to regulate the naming of Jewish infants. Jewish parents were obligated to adhere to the “Guidelines on the Use of Given Names” issued by the Reich Minister of the Interior. To ensure that Jews were readily identifiable and unable to evade persecution, the decree also announced that as of January 1, 1939, all Jewish males and females must assume an additional given name—Israel for men and boys and Sarah for women and girls.

  Those Jews who did not or could not leave faced harassment, arrest and ultimately deportation to concentration camps. On October 18, 1938, Hitler ordered over 12,000 Polish-born Jews deported to the East—4,000 of whom were accepted by the Polish government. The remaining deportees were left on the German–Polish border without a country. The son of one of those wretched and starving families was in Paris when he was notified of his family’s plight. Herschel Grynszpan decided to take action and walked into the German Embassy in Paris. Drawing a pistol, he shot and critically injured the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath on November 7, 1938. On the evening of November 9, vom Rath died and Goebbels asked Hitler for permission to unleash the wrath of the German people on the Jews in retaliation for the diplomat’s death.

  With Hitler’s consent, Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass) erupted in so-called “spontaneous” outbursts orchestrated by the Gestapo and the SS. Nazis and their followers burned synagogues, beat and humiliated Jews in the streets, looted Jewish-owned businesses, and killed in cold blood. The Gestapo was at least partly responsible for the eleven Berlin synagogues that went up in flames, as well as the destruction of temple books and Torah scrolls. At the end of it all, at least 91 Jews were killed, with hundreds injured and others sent to concentration camps. Foreign journalists, vocal in their disgust and nauseated by the unrestrained orgy of racial hatred, reported on the bloodletting. It was obvious to the Western democracies that Germany was no place for their citizens, and their respective foreign services and embassies counseled their nationals to return home. Mildred, who was riding higher than she had ever been, chose to remain in Berlin.

  Mae Gillars made one final attempt in the summer of 1939 to convince her daughter to return to the United States. Mildred traveled to England to meet her mother and brought her back to Germany. Mae remembered her daughter as “very young and happy” that summer. As the two women strolled through the city, they came upon a massive throng of people in a square listening to a speech. Over the loudspeakers came the unmistakable voice of Adolf Hitler.

  Mae remembered: “Mildred and I were walking along the street when we came to the square where he was speaking. It was impossible to get by. We slipped into a restaurant and had a cup of coffee. Of course, you couldn’t help hearing him. There was a public address system in the restaurant and Mildred translated his speech for me. But she was never interested in politics—never, not even in the U.S.”114

  As Germany’s dispute with Poland over Danzig moved Europe toward war, Mae left without her beloved daughter. “I could hardly get out of the country,” she recalled. “Trains were almost tied up with troop movements when I left.”115 As Mae Gillars boarded a train crowded with soldiers destined for combat, she embraced her daughter for the very last time.

  CHAPTER 4

  Wolves at the Door

  SEPTEMBER 1939–DECEMBER 1941

  When Hitler’s armies marched into Poland on September 1, 1939, Mildred had been working for the German actress Brigitte Horney as a personal assistant for over a year. When the film star fell on hard times and could no longer pay a secretary, she was sacked. For the next nine months, she had no regular employment. Attempting to parlay her lifelong interest in antiques into a source of income, she occasionally bought and sold a few pieces, and added to her meager income by teaching a few English lessons and translating documents.116

  Although the German government sought to minimize the war’s economic impact on day-to-day life in the Reich, it nevertheless instituted rationing on clothing, gasoline, soap and other essential goods. Ration coupons were distributed to German citizens, but Mildred as a foreign national was ineligible for such aid. In the spring, when the situation was particularly dire, her luck suddenly changed:

  I received a telephone call one day from a certain art historian whom I had known for many years. He asked me how I was getting along, and I said “horribly” and that the wolves were coming closer and closer to the door…. I was getting along very badly and didn’t know what step I could take to keep body and soul together.117

  The art historian had spoken to Dr. Eugen Kurt Fischer, an acquaintance of Mildred’s and a former professor from the University of Königsberg. Although she knew the professor socially, she was unaware of his position in the Nazi government as an official at the European service of Reichsradio (Reichsrundfunk). The Reichsradio Corporation, an arm of the Ministry of People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda, run jointly with the Foreign Office, was bombarding the British Isles with a steady diet of news and propaganda through its Sender Bremen (Station Bremen). The European Service was having considerable success with the broadcasts of one William Joyce, better known as “Lord Haw Haw.”

  Joyce, an American-born Irish Fascist, was a protégé of Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists. At the height of his influence, Joyce had a large listening audience—an estimated 6 million regular and 18 million occasional listeners in the United Kingdom alone.118 He and his wife Margaret Cairns Joyce (“Lady Haw Haw”) narrowly escaped arrest and fled England on August 26, 1939. Ingratiating himself with the German Propaganda Ministry and seizing upon his many contacts within the regime, Joyce was hired to anonymously write and record commentaries on British policy, politics and the progress of the war.

  Joyce’s popularity was not only attributable to his skill as a broadcaster, but also to the lack of forthright news and comment available on the British Broadcasting Corporation. The BBC had suspended entertainment programming the day war was declared and heavily censored all news. The censorship was so indiscriminate that many English listeners immediately turned to Joyce’s commentaries after the 9 p.m. BBC news to hear the details their government had been holding back. Making matters worse, the BBC had also unknowingly reported fictitious reports of successes on the front only to report later that the Allied forces were, in fact, retreating.119 Entertainment programming was limited to theater organ music and records. Inevitably, listeners looked elsewhere on the dial. The BBC had been slow to respond to the German propaganda onslaught. In fact, the programming staff had fled to “undisclosed locations” when war was declared in anticipation of a massive blitzkrieg on London.120

  As Holland, Luxembourg, Denmark, Belgium and Norway fell in April and May 1940, those popular commercial stations on the Continent that the British public listened to daily were expropriated by the Germans for pro-Nazi broadcasts.121 In a matter of months, Reichsradio had the facilities and high-powered transmitters to cover the entire European Continent. Combined with the huge 100 kilowatt transmitters and antennas that the regime established in the Berlin suburb of Zeesen, German shortwave radio covered the world twenty-four hours a day in twelve languages on both medium wave (AM radio) and shortwave bands.

  As German forces racked up success after success in Western Europe, Joyce was brutal in his evaluation of the conduct of the British war effort, and singled out Winston Churchill, the man selected as Prime Minister in the face of these reversals, for special contempt. During the withdrawal of British forces from
Narvik, and later Dunkirk, “Lord Haw Haw” underlined the differences between the British radio’s depiction of events and the reality on the ground:

  This unprecedented slaughter is not called in England by its true name.… As you listened to the British radio a week ago did you get the impression that there was going to be any withdrawal at all? Did you think that the necessity of a rearguard action was being contemplated by the Dictator of Britain? I did not. Until defeat turned into rout—absolute—the whole world was being told hour after hour by the BBC that the situation was well in hand, and fresh victories were served up with every transmission.… We have long recognized the fact that the British people have been deceived, but isn’t it a slightly novel experience to see them treated as congenital imbeciles?… As the bloody and battered fragments of what was once the British Expeditionary Force drift back in wreckage to the shores of England, it is not impossible that the public will turn savagely upon the men who have so cruelly and unscrupulously deceived it.122

  Joyce reserved his greatest vitriol for Churchill:

  Is it not a little amusing to think of the trumpetings and flourishings with which Churchill became Prime Minister of Britain? He was the man to frighten Hitler. He was the providential leader who was going to lead Britain to victory. Look at him today, unclean and miserable figure that he is, and contrast his contemptible appearance with the bright hopes that his propagandists aroused in the minds of people foolish enough to believe that this darling of Jewish finance could really set the might of National Socialist Germany at naught.123

  Reichsradio’s management hoped to duplicate the success of the European Service on the North American continent. Unlike today’s radios, it was common for radio sets of the period to include shortwave bands for international listening. Who could speak to these American and Canadian listeners in terms that they could understand? American expatriates in Berlin were few at the outset of the war as most were trying to flee Germany in the face of hostilities, but the Radio Department of the Foreign Office did find some willing candidates. One of the first was Frederick William Kaltenbach, an Iowaborn German-American teacher fired from his job at a Dubuque high school in 1935 for leading a brown-shirted student organization based on the Hitler Youth. Angered by his termination, Kaltenbach left the US for Germany as an avowed convert to National Socialism and began his service for the Reich reading press releases in English. Dubbed “Lord Hee Haw” for his folksy style, he was cast as the American equivalent of William Joyce.

  Another recruit was Edward Leo Delaney, an Illinois-born actor and author of dime-store novels, who began broadcasting for the Germans under the alias “E.D. Ward” in late 1939. Kaltenbach, Delaney and a Foreign Office official who would have a defining role in the creation of “Axis Sally,” Dr. Max Otto Koischwitz, dominated the USA Zone’s commentaries early in the war.124

  On September 8, 1939, Hitler issued a decree stating that von Ribbentrop’s Foreign Office would be responsible for the general guidelines and instructions of all foreign propaganda (radio, film, newspapers and pamphlets) for the duration of the war. Ribbentrop’s political victory over Goebbels exacerbated an already vicious rivalry between the two ministers. Moreover, Hitler decreed that those instructions would be “adopted unchanged and implemented.”125 In order to ensure that the guidelines were carried out, the Führer specified that von Ribbentrop assign “competent officials as liaisons” to the Propaganda Ministry.126 This development signaled a considerable loss of influence and control for Goebbels, who regarded these liaisons as spies for his arch-enemy.

  Although the Propaganda Minister still retained control over domestic propaganda and efforts in Bohemia, Moravia, the Government General in Poland and the occupied countries of Western Europe, he experienced a bureaucratic defeat he found hard to take. Intensely critical of the Foreign Office overseers, the minister found their input “stupid,” “intellectual” and far too gentle on the Jewish Question. To circumvent their influence, the Reichsminister held daily conferences where he directly communicated his personal orders to department heads without interference. The two staffs at times engaged in violent disagreements. In one instance, Goebbels ordered that one Foreign Office representative be physically removed from a studio for meddling in his broadcasts.127

  Despite the efforts of Kaltenbach and Delaney, the Foreign Office was dissatisfied with the quality of the USA Zone’s speakers as early as March 1940. Several of the announcers had distinct and, in certain cases, thick German accents. Dr. Markus Timmler, head of the Radio and Culture section, expressed as much in a memorandum to the USA Zone management:

  There are not enough speakers who have a command of English with an American accent. The current speakers are also used for the announcement of the German news. Hence, those announcers are limited from the start because they do not have a command of American English, but speak enough German. It results in speakers with a German accent to which the American listeners are especially sensitive, which ruins the effect of even the best news material.

  The same applies in certain cases to speakers with Oxford accents who are not appropriate for American broadcasts. Hence, it is urgently recommended to not use announcers for two languages, but to search for high-class speakers who have a very good command of American English…

  It is advised of the importance of our American newscasts to use as far as possible American-born speakers.128

  Enter “Midge”

  Within a month of Dr. Timmler’s critique, a down-on-her-luck Mildred Gillars entered the cavernous headquarters of the Reichsradio Corporation. The broadcasting complex consisted of three major buildings: Das Grosse Haus (the “Big House”), the “Deutsch land House” and a large barracks that housed several radio studios. The Big House had hundreds of rooms that accommodated the organizational maze that was the corporation. It was only one of the buildings devoted to Germany’s massive overseas broadcasting service, which broadcast daily around the clock.

  Johannes Schmidt-Hansen, the manager of the European Section, asked the nervous actress to audition at the microphone. Her mellifluous voice and command of English impressed Schmidt-Hansen and he told her that she would be getting a phone call with a formal offer. Mildred was skeptical: “I had been promised things like that for years and years along Broadway; since practically nothing ever materializes, I just thought it was another one of those things.”129 When the call finally came, she was told to report to the station the next day (May 6) at the rate of 18 Reichmarks per performance. Her duties were originally limited to station identification and the introduction of records and musical performances.

  She began as a shift announcer for two nights a week and for the next seven months eked out a living on a per show basis. Her ease at the microphone was such that she was promoted within three months to be the first female host of a musical variety program on the European Service. Her income rose as she took on more work, and she was offered substantially more for political broadcasts. Over the next four and a half years, she would clock over 10,000 hours of broadcasting to become the highest paid radio personality on the Overseas Service. Paid from a cashier’s window in the broadcasting complex, she was eligible for the ration coupons that would become more and more critical to daily life as the war progressed.

  In those early days, Mildred was a “cut and dried” announcer, longing for the day when she could work with what she called “live bands instead of dead records.” At the beginning of her employment, she was a popular figure by all accounts, and her radio colleagues remembered her as light-hearted and friendly. Easily given to teasing and joking in the studio, her attitude was in direct contrast to the tense atmosphere created by Goebbels and his underlings: “She did not take her job very seriously and made fun of a great many things in Nazi Germany,” a musician recalled after the war.

  At times her comments could be reckless, and she gained a reputation as a “loose cannon.” “I often had to warn her that her speeches about Goebbels would be
very dangerous for her,” a colleague recalled.130 Another orchestra member remembered that she would sign off the broadcast with the words “Heil Hitlerchen” in what he described as an “absolutely joking manner.”131 Werner Berger, the chief director of radio plays, described her political and social views at the time:

  Miss Gillars was not a narrow-minded National Socialist, for within artists’ circles it was not customary to hold one’s tongue, and one did not need to be careful in front of her. As far as I remember, she was probably convinced of the theories of National Socialist ideology, which, in her opinion, were ideal.132

  However, there was an unstable and volatile side to her nature. Berger continued:

  At times she had sentimental attacks, which could develop into hysterical outbursts. Perhaps it was the pressure of the doubt about her conviction that led her to this.133

  Berger’s intimation that German officials suspected that her political conversion might not be genuine may have stemmed from what they knew about her personal life. It was not politics that would wed Mildred Gillars to the German cause, but a man.

  The Professor

  Shortly after she joined Reichsradio in 1940, Mildred appeared as an actress in a series of ten radio dramas entitled Dr. Anders and Little Margaret, written by the commentator and Foreign Office official Max Otto Koischwitz. From a dramatic standpoint, the plays were poorly written. “Most of those things were so boring,” she remembered in 1949.134 Unimpressed by the plays, she was drawn to the dark-haired, moody intellectual. An erudite Silesian-born scholar, Koischwitz emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1924. Unable to earn a living in the Weimar Republic, he taught German Literature and Drama courses at New York University, Columbia University and Hunter College.