GILLARS: Oh, Providence, Rhode Island. Well, I spent some very happy hours there myself. (laughs) Probably not so happy as you.
ZIMMERMAN: What’s that?
GILLARS: Not so happy as you.
ZIMMERMAN: Oh, no! (laughs)
GILLARS: (laughs) Well, it’s home to you. And who are you calling in Providence?
ZIMMERMAN: My wife. Mrs. Blanche Zimmerman
GILLARS: What street does she live on?
ZIMMERMAN: 62 Doyle Avenue
GILLARS: How do you spell that avenue?
ZIMMERMAN: D-O-Y-L-E
GILLARS: Oh Doyle! An Irish name. All right, what would you like to say to your wife now?
ZIMMERMAN: Uh, nothing much just that I’m well and happy and, about all, just very happy.
GILLARS: Well, you are happy you’ve got through a lot of air raids (unintelligible).
ZIMMERMAN: Well, after what I’ve been through I think I’m glad to be alive.
GILLARS: I’ll bet that you’re glad for a lot of things.
This exchange is fascinating because it is between a virulently anti-Semitic broadcaster and a prisoner described in an FBI report as having “a very Jewish appearance.”228 One must wonder what Midge knew of the fate of Europe’s Jews when she commented, “I’ll bet you’re glad for a lot of things.” Sharing a bed with an official of the Foreign Office, she was very likely exposed to the rumors if not the details surrounding the relocation of Jews to the East.
Midge asked Zimmerman if he was getting enough to eat. In a syrupy tone, she replied, “Well, lots of people aren’t, so that is something to be happy about too, isn’t it?”
Zimmerman’s reply, “Yes, if you call grass soup once a day enough to eat,” was edited out of the final broadcast. The Survivor interviews were, at times, heavily edited to dispose of comments that did not fit the profile of the happy and thankful prisoner. Zimmerman’s response about “grass soup” was just one incident. Listening to the recorded conversations today, the exchanges seem oddly disjointed.
The volatility of Mildred Gillars’s emotional state is evident from the broadcasts as well. The exchanges between Midge and the prisoners could go from extremely warm and chatty to cold, cutting and distant in a matter of seconds. Even the editing and splicing of the engineering room could not disguise the sudden change in tone. One prisoner from Ohio who preceded Carl Zimmerman on the August 22, 1944 broadcast made the mistake of assuring his wife that he hoped to be home by Christmas:
MIDGE: And the town, please?
POW: Cleveland, Ohio.
MIDGE: Oh, Cleveland, Ohio? My goodness I know that awfully well. What part? What street?
POW: 42 East 96th Street.
MIDGE: East 96th Street. And have you got any folks over there?
POW: My mother and dad.
MIDGE: Hmmm. Well, I’ll give you the microphone. Say what you want to now.
POW: Well, hello, mom and dad. I’m OK. Don’t worry too much, mom. I’ll be home by Christmas! I hope.
Midge’s voice suddenly became cold and caustic.
Midge: Good thing to add the “I hope” isn’t it?
POW … Yeah.
Midge: Cause you don’t want to give them any false hope. Anyway, you’re going to get there as fast as you can, anyhow.
POW: Soon as they end the war….229
The idea that Germany would be defeated within four months was not the message that Midge wanted conveyed to the listeners in America or to her superiors in Berlin. For Mildred and Koischwitz, the month of July was filled with visits to prisoner-of-war camps, stockades and hospitals. At Chartres in mid-July, she accidentally lifted up her skirt when a soldier became entangled in the microphone wire. The watching prisoners began to whistle and catcall. She smiled and said tauntingly, “You like that, eh?” then raised her dress up around her thighs revealing her most attractive feature, the long legs of a former showgirl.230 At the Hospital de la Pitiè near Paris, she interviewed severely wounded soldiers sporting a Red Cross armband.231
Meantime, the disappearance of Koischwitz’s “breezy” commentaries that summer raised suspicions about the fate of “O.K.” William L. Shirer of CBS took notice of the Professor’s new role on the frontlines:
Goebbels, for some reason, sent the Professor to the firing line. As a “front-line reporter,” his specialty was broadcasting eyewitness accounts from the various battlefronts on which the Americans were facing Germans. Since General Bradley’s Americans began their race through France, I have not been able to catch any more broadcasts by him. Presumably, he began moving too fast to allow for a pause at the microphone.232
Koischwitz was unexpectedly called back to Berlin at the end of July 1944. As Midge and O.K. waited for the train, she borrowed some money to buy a rare leather-bound set of books by Goethe. She gave it to him as an early Christmas present because she feared that they might not be together during the holidays. Before he left, Koischwitz made arrangements for the safe evacuation of Mildred with his German Foreign Office colleague, Werner Plack.233 As the Americans approached the French capital in early August, Plack abandoned her. When she reminded him of his promise to Koischwitz to drive her back to Germany in his car, he refused, saying, “I am sorry. I have no room. There is so much baggage.”234 In a panic, she telephoned Koischwitz in Berlin.
“When I telephoned Berlin,” she would remember, “I had a feeling that something had happened. I asked for Dr. Koischwitz and at that moment I knew that I’d never hear his voice again.…”235
A voice came on the line: “Professor Koischwitz is dead.”236 Mildred immediately fled Paris on August 15 for Holland in a military convoy. She then boarded a train bound for Berlin, paying for her ticket by bribing a conductor with coffee.237 Despite rumors of suicide, Koischwitz died in the Berlin-Spandau Hospital on August 31, 1944 of tuberculosis and heart failure.238 Crushed by the death, Mildred barely arrived in Berlin in time for his funeral on September 4.
Max Otto Koischwitz died alone. The war had taken his wife and infant son. The Germany he loved was crumbling around him. Although it is plausible that he could have taken his own life, it is more likely that Koischwitz, who had been diagnosed with incipient tuberculosis in 1929, and was looking for interviews with POWs in the sickrooms of the Hospital de la Pitié not more than four to five weeks before his death, had finally succumbed.239 It is also possible that the deteriorating sanitary conditions in wartime Europe played a role in aggravating his already fragile state. Either way, Midge was now without the man to whom she had cast her fate. Her lover—the man who convinced her to betray her nation, who protected her and provided her access to the highest echelons of German society—was gone.
CHAPTER 8
Alone
“Well Sally, we’ll be in Berlin soon—with a great big kiss for you—if you have any kisser left.”—Corporal Edward Van Dyne in the Saturday Evening Post, January 1944240
“Our fate is rolling in from the East…”
—Anonymous diarist, Berlin, April 20, 1945241
SEPTEMBER 1944–JANUARY 1947
As Mildred said goodbye to Max Otto Koischwitz in September 1944, Allied forces were closing in on the Reich. On the Western Front, the US First Army stood north of Aachen poised to breach 400-plus kilometers of fortifications known as the Westwall. Patton’s Third Army had reached Metz farther south, while Montgomery’s British-Canadian forces were pushing into Belgium and Holland. The advance would slow in the ensuing months, culminating in the last great German offensive, in the sector of the Ardennes.
In the East, the military situation was dire. Following the destruction of Army Group Center that summer after a huge Soviet offensive, the Wehrmacht was in retreat from Finland and the Baltics, Ukraine and the Balkans. By October, Riga and Belgrade were in Soviet hands, while the Red Army had advanced to the outskirts of Warsaw. Despite the self-delusion that characterized Hitler’s inner circle in the last months of the war, more practical leadership prepared for the ine
vitable siege of Berlin. On October 18, the Volkssturm (Home Guard) announced the imminent call-up of all males between the age of 16 and 60 for the final defense of German soil.242
It was in that desperate autumn that Axis Sally returned to the microphone. Shaken and grieving from the loss of her mentor and protector, she feared an Allied victory. Her attitude began to change toward her superiors at Reichsradio. Returning to the studios at Köenigs Wusterhausen, she was called into a meeting with Johannes Schmidt-Hansen and Eduard Dietze. In a blatant appeal to her ego, the two radio executives had plans for their “star”—a transfer to a new clandestine station in the Black Forest aimed at the advancing Allied forces:
They were opening a new station in the Black Forest and they were spending enormous sums of money on it, and said it was going to make me a world radio star and I told Mr. Schmidt-Hansen that I wasn’t the least interested in becoming that, and that I wanted nothing to do with the station.243
Schmidt-Hansen’s description of the new effort amounted to nothing less than psychological warfare on the advancing US soldiers. “The soldiers would have the impression that this female voice was right in the bivouac with them,” she recalled.244 Mildred was unmoved by the flattery and Dietze testily invoked the name of her late lover, insisting that Professor Koischwitz would not approve of such intransigence. She stood her ground:
I told them that I would have nothing whatever to do with it, and I would appreciate it very much if they wouldn’t beg me, and that I was just going to continue until the end of the war with these broadcasts which had been inaugurated with Professor Koischwitz—that and nothing more.245
Although some of her colleagues did transfer to the Black Forest operation, it was clear that Mildred was no longer willing to bend to a regime whose time was short. Her resistance would increase in January 1945 when she would be forced to associate for the first time with a man she deemed to be a traitor.
Lieutenant Monti Reports for Duty
On October 2, 1944, an American flier based in Karachi went AWOL (absent without leave). Lt. Martin James Monti, a St. Louis native and ardent isolationist, had enlisted as an air cadet in 1943 at a time he was certain to be drafted. A difficult and undisciplined soldier, Monti was posted to India while many of his friends in training were sent to the Italian front. After being denied a transfer request to Italy, he snuck aboard a military transport bound for Cairo, and made his way by land to Tripoli. He then boarded a ship to Naples where, once again, he requested a transfer and was denied. Unwilling to return to India, Monti commandeered a P-38 reconnaissance aircraft and flew it into enemy airspace. Landing the plane near Milan, Monti surrendered. His German interrogators were eventually convinced that his flight was a voluntary defection and began to look for a use for the young airman. A military propaganda unit steered Monti to the Overseas Service in the hope that he might have some value in its radio efforts. Although one manager of Reichsradio’s North American section, Heinrich Schafhausen, found Monti “immature and lacking in general education,” he was hired as a commentator for the USA Zone.246
By January 1945 Monti had become the latest addition to the staff of American announcers at Reichsradio. Mildred viewed the lieutenant with intense suspicion:
This man (Monti) came into the room. He said “Hello.” I just looked at him, turned around and walked out of the office without speaking. This was my one and only contact with him… directly after that, I conferred with Houben [Adelbert Houben. Program Controller for the Overseas Service] and told him I was aware that a former American flier was now working at our station. I said, “That man is either a spy or a traitor and I refuse to work with either one. If you’ve been thinking I was a traitor all these years, I’m sorry it has taken me so long to find it out because I’ve never considered myself one and I don’t think my German co-workers consider me one.247
Emboldened by Germany’s worsening position, Mildred gave Houben an ultimatum: “Either Monti is removed or I go.”248 Houben could not possibly overturn a decision made by the highest levels of the propaganda apparatus—especially at the behest of a recalcitrant employee. Mildred stormed out of the office and announced, “I have made my last broadcast.”249
Within days, she was called to Berlin to answer to Kurt-Georg Kiesinger, the Foreign Office’s liaison with the Propaganda Ministry for Overseas Broadcasting. Kiesinger (who went on to become the Chancellor of West Germany in 1966) tried to assuage her concerns about Monti, but to no avail. After the meeting at the Foreign Office she visited the Propaganda Ministry to collect her weekly food ration coupons. Horst Cleinow, the manager of the Overseas Service, ordered her food rations withheld until she returned to work.250 A few days later, a letter arrived summoning her to an interview with the Gestapo. Mildred immediately telephoned Dr. Anton Winkelnkemper, the head of the broadcasting service and Cleinow’s superior, to plead her case:
Dr. Winkelnkemper pleaded with me to come up to his office… and he tried to persuade me to go back to work, and I remained adamant: “If you can keep the Gestapo away from me, I will be grateful to you, and if you cannot, I will take the consequences.” And I went home after that, and I was in constant touch with Mr. Kiesinger of the Foreign Office and Dr. Winkelnkemper who took care of the Gestapo, and finally persuaded me to return to work and said that Mr. Monti was not working at the microphone.251
Mildred narrowly escaped the consequences of her intransigence when the young American lieutenant turned out to be a total failure on the air. Due to a breathtaking lack of skill as a radio commentator and analyst, Monti was on the radio only a few times in early 1945. He proved to be a dull speaker with a limited intellect and an underwhelming command of the English language. Not long after his failure as a radio propagandist, he moved on to become one of the few Americans to join the Waffen SS. After the German surrender, US forces arrested Monti still dressed in his SS uniform. (In 1948 he was convicted of treason and sentenced to 25 years in prison, though was paroled in 1960.)
Meantime, Mildred feared that Monti could be a spy sent by the Allies posing as a defector, and if so he would be a witness to her actions. If he was a genuine defector, she could not afford to be associated with him. Her refusal to work with him could protect her from the testimony of a potential eyewitness, as well as support her contention that her wartime deeds were not motivated by treasonous intent. She could use the incident to point out a distinction that she had made long ago in her own mind: Monti is a vile traitor but I am different—I am an entertainer. Later, she would explain her visceral distaste for Monti by claiming “I don’t like unclean people.”252
By February 1945, the German offensive in the Ardennes, known as the Battle of the Bulge, had been rolled back to its starting point, after it had only temporarily succeeded in delaying the Allies’ relentless advance toward the Rhine. Hans Fritzsche, the head of the Propaganda Ministry’s broadcasting division, authorized a travel pass for Mildred in preparation for the coming evacuation from Berlin. Once more, she visited Hans and Georgia von Richter’s home at Castle Schackendorf.
The terrible pounding of day and night air attacks convinced the couple that the time had come to flee to the west. Suffering from nervous exhaustion, the von Richters were leaving for a posh sanatorium in the southwest spa town of Bad Mergentheim. The meeting was bittersweet for Mildred, who had dined with Koischwitz at the von Richters’ home in happier days. As Hans von Richter said farewell, he took Midge’s hand and tried to relieve her fears:
Well, Midge, it will soon be over, and you have our address at Bad Mergentheim, and the three of us will stick together for ever; you have nothing to worry about. Georgia and I are your friends.
Leaving Mildred with the assurance of their undying loyalty and friendship, the couple drove off to escape the coming storm.
By April 16, the long-awaited Soviet advance into the capital had begun. Hitler issued a final decree to the men on the frontlines:
SOLDIERS OF THE GERMAN EASTERN FRONT: The J
ewish Bolshevik archenemy has gone over to the attack with his masses for the last time. He attempts to smash Germany and to eradicate our nation. You soldiers from the east today already know yourselves to a large extent what fate is threatening, above all, German women, girls and children. While old men and children are being murdered, women and girls are humiliated to the status of barracks prostitutes.253
That night, Mildred left her apartment at 7 Bonnerstrasse for the last time. Her furniture and remaining possessions were left behind. With the Soviets only kilometers away from the outskirts of the city, the radio studio was her only refuge. As a military target, the radio facilities were protected against Russian shelling and air attack. In late April, musician Walter Leschetitzky was patrolling the Köenigs Wusterhausen studios. In the midst of the final battle, the SS and Volkssturm were conscripting every man and boy regardless of age or condition. Those who refused to join in the defense of the city were hanged for “desertion,” “treason” or “defeatism.” Leschetitzky was one of those conscripted and assigned to the Combat Transmitter group (SS) to defend the radio station. Despite the massive artillery barrage, Reichsradio was still holding on.
Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany Page 13