Immediately, the American press and military announced in no uncertain terms that Rita Zucca was the Axis Sally, and emphasized that the sultry voice that greeted the doughboys on the beach at Anzio belonged to the cross-eyed mother of a newborn infant.269 Zucca was pictured in front of a large radio and a baby’s cradle in Stars and Stripes. Her picture graced The New York Times of June 14, 1945 with the heading “Reminder of Anzio.” Newspapers in the United States demolished the Axis Sally mystique by claiming that the actual woman was nothing like the fantasies of a million GIs. “Soft-Voiced ‘Sally from Berlin’ Found to Be Ugly Ex-N.Y. Girl” was a typical headline, with stories describing the young mother as “ugly and unattractive in person as her voice was appealing.”270 One Stars and Stripes writer called Zucca “cross-eyed, bow-legged and sallow-skinned.”
Nevertheless, Rita was more fortunate than Mildred Gillars would ever be. The Zucca family hired a New York lawyer, Max Spekle, on her behalf. Spekle traveled to Washington to investigate the evidence against her. The press was allowed to tout the successful arrest of the woman who had tormented and teased soldiers throughout the war, but it soon became clear to the Justice Department that Zucca could not be prosecuted for treason in an American court. When the FBI discovered documentation of her 1941 renunciation of citizenship, J. Edgar Hoover informed the Justice Department that a treason case was impossible. Only a month after Rita Zucca’s arrest, Hoover wrote to the Assistant Attorney General:
In view of the fact that [she] has lost her American citizenship, no efforts are being made at the present time to develop a treason case against her. In the absence of a request from you, no further action will be taken regarding this individual.271
The US Government’s case against Zucca was closed. On September 30, 1945, Rita was tried and found guilty by an Italian court of collaboration. Based on the testimony of three American soldiers over two days, Rita Luisa Zucca was sentenced to four years and five months in an Italian jail. She would serve only nine months, after the Italian government declared a general amnesty for collaborators in 1946.
Although Mildred Gillars took no part in the Italian broadcasts and divulged no military intelligence over the air, she would shoulder the blame for both women. When an American soldier heard Axis Sally broadcast their supposedly secret location at Anzio, Como and a score of other places on the Italian peninsula, he likely heard Rita Zucca rather than Mildred Gillars. Mildred was remarkably prescient when she threatened resignation in 1944 because of Rita Zucca’s use of her moniker. The victorious Americans would not care which Axis Sally or Tokyo Rose actually made the most vicious or treasonous statements. The women who “played the Axis game” would have to pay for their crimes. It would prove to be uneven, inexact justice all around.
With one Axis Sally evading American law, the Justice Department was doubly determined to locate other employees of Reichsradio. The CIC dispatched Special Agent Hans Wintzen to Berlin to search for the woman who would replace Rita Zucca as the embodiment of Axis Sally in the minds of the American public. Wintzen knew that the shrewd, self-assured mother in the custody of the IV Army Corps was not the only female voice that FCC radio monitors at Silver Hill had intercepted night after night.
In August 1945, the search was on but the CIC had only one lead. Raymond Kurtz, a B-17 pilot who had been shot down and captured by the Germans recalled that he was told that the woman who had visited his prison camp was Midge of Midge at the Mike. Kurtz remembered that the woman used an alias: Barbara Mome.272 A “Wanted” poster went up in all occupied sectors of Berlin.
On March 4, 1946, CIC received a tip that she had been seen in the British Sector. Wintzen had a plan: the fugitive had distributed her property among friends across the city. As a person without identification papers, she would have to purchase food through the black market. Barbara Mome was selling her property at various antique shops on consignment to obtain hard currency. Wintzen decided to keep an eye on those shops. Certain that she would eventually emerge from hiding to collect her money or reclaim the property, he believed it was only a matter of time before she would be caught.
After weeks of waiting and watching, Wintzen received a tip from a former neighbor that “Barbara” had left some belongings in a basement storeroom adjacent to her former apartment at 7 Bonnerstrasse. Agent Wintzen questioned the building superintendent and was told that the American had asked for her possessions to be stored away in a safe place when she left the apartment for the last time. Wintzen and the superintendent walked into the storeroom to find seven acetate records containing full programs featuring the voice of Axis Sally.273 The discovery, if admissible in court, would prove to be a treasure trove of evidence against her. The storeroom also contained an expired US passport—showing her real name—that had been in the possession of her Nazi Party block leader.
Wintzen interviewed her neighbors, friends and colleagues and asked about her “habits, behavior and other little peculiarities.” He reported:
Gillars had actually visited some of these people subsequent to May 1945 and had picked up or deposited some of her property with various ones among them.… [She] revealed absolutely nothing to them concerning her present address, her present activities, where she was going to or coming from, or exactly what other people she was in the habit of visiting.274
The CIC compiled a list of addresses visited by Mildred since May 1945 and set up twenty-four-hour surveillance on those places. When agents were not available, German police were used to stake out the homes. CIC received tips that she had been seen at “different restaurants, beauty shops and other business establishments” in the Kurfurstendamm section of Berlin. The tips helped to narrow down the search to a small section of the city.
The investigation hit pay dirt when the agents found a small table that had belonged to Mildred in an antique shop hidden away on an isolated side street. The store owner gave the CIC the name of the friend who had sold the table to the shop. “Under intensive interrogation,” the final report said, “this person eventually admitted having sold the item for Gillars and after a long ‘coaxing’ by the investigators, also revealed Gillars’ present address.”275
After eleven desperate months on the run, Mildred had settled into a room rented out by a woman and her sister in the British Sector of Berlin. In the cramped conditions that existed after the capitulation, it was not uncommon for strangers to share rooms in single homes and apartments. On March 15, 1946, Mildred returned late in the evening and rang the doorbell. A German plainclothes detective paced outside. Ushered in by the landlady’s sister, she found a pale, shaking American soldier in the living room. He pointed a revolver directly at her.
Special Agent Robert Abeles, accompanied by the German policeman, announced, “Miss Gillars, you are under arrest.” Momentarily stunned, she reacted with a murmured “Oh…” and asked if she could take one possession with her—a photo of Max Otto Koischwitz.276 The agent granted her request and Mildred Gillars went to prison—clutching a photograph of the man she called her “destiny.”
Her first night in jail was spent in British confinement. As she slept, another prisoner stole the picture of the dead Professor. Sleep was almost impossible as the lights were kept on all night in the cells. The following morning she was transported to the Wannsee Internment Camp outside Berlin where Hans Wintzen interrogated her for an hour. Another Justice Department lawyer, Victor C. Woerheide entered the room:
“Well, I have heard that you would have given yourself up if you had known that you would have received something to smoke.”
“Yes, Mr. Woerheide,” Mildred said, “that is more or less the truth.”
“Well, it was quite a long search and now we have you.”
“You see, I have no experience in this sort of thing,” she replied. “I would just like to know, is there such a thing as eating?”277
Woerheide apologized and asked a soldier to bring in a hamburger. She had not eaten since her arrest and was famished. S
he recalled: “I remember digging my bicuspids into the hamburger and making the remark that it was the first meat I had tasted in three months.”278
As she left her first interrogation, Mildred admiringly told the agents, “I’ll take my hat off to the U.S. investigators. They certainly knew a lot about me.”279
Reporters were ushered into the Interrogation Center to get their first look at the latest incarnation of Axis Sally.
“When I came to Germany in 1934,” she told the press, “I had never heard of Hitler. I still don’t know anything about politics—I am an artist.”
Asked for her reaction to the possibility of the death penalty, she was fatalistic and, as always, highly quotable. “I have always liked to travel, seeking new adventures, and I think death might be the most exciting adventure of all.”280 Sadly, she added, “It doesn’t matter. I have lost everything anyhow.”281
She told the press that her motive for broadcasting was “peace” and declared, “My conscience is clear, and I don’t have anything to hide.… Everything I did, I did of my own free will.”282
On her third day of captivity, a reporter from Stars and Stripes visited her cell to see the mythic figure in the flesh. Relishing the moment, the Army reporter taunted her, “Well, well, well, so you are Axis Sally. Well, I just would like to tell you, Sally, that we are all looking forward to your hanging and it is going to be some field day in Washington.”283
Although the newspapers printed photos of Mildred playing cards with her guards, she was frequently tormented by those GIs seeking to give the “Berlin Bitch” a piece of their mind. She remembered, “From the very beginning, I had only heard of hanging and death, and that I would never need my things, and that I would never eat again.”284
“I never thought he would die…”
Emaciated and still weak from her days in hiding, Axis Sally trudged into a small interrogation room at CIC Headquarters in Berlin. It was April 2, 1946, and although she had given CIC a written statement, Samuel Ely and Helen McRae had more questions. Deprived of even military legal counsel, she answered each question openly—even supplying the names of her managers and supervisors at Radio Berlin. Ely and McRae asked about her background.
She did not know if her mother was alive or dead and told the two interrogators that her father died “a long time ago… we did not get along very well.”285 The prisoner matter-of-factly explained her choice to remain in Germany:
MG It was just that it was time to make a decision. It was very hard but also it was only chance that I had not married a German and then I would have been a German woman. There were millions of such cases in the world. The war for me was one against England and the Jews.
Q. And you decided to stay with Germany rather than the United States?
MG Well, I didn’t have a passport anyway. It had been taken away from me.
Q You feel that Germany was the right side rather than the United States?
MG Well, I can’t get the Jews out of my mind. But women are not versed in politics. It would not be interesting to carry on a political conversation with me. When I don’t know a subject thoroughly, I don’t care to discuss it.
Q Did you ever think about taking out German citizenship?
MG I definitely planned to marry a German, you see, but it never occurred to me—the possibility—I never thought he would die.286
Ely and McCrae asked about a play she recorded prior to the Allied invasion of France. Mildred was particularly proud of her performance in Vision of Invasion and even told her questioners that she hoped that there was a copy of the recording back in the United States. The original recording on a magnetic band was destroyed during the frantic retreat from Paris in August 1944 and she was concerned that her best acting had been lost to posterity. Never thinking that her participation as an actress in a dramatic work penned by another could be construed as an act of treason, she made it clear to the CIC that it was considered some of her best work—by herself and her Nazi masters. She told Ely and McCue that Radio Berlin paid the actors more for that play than for any other show of its kind.
The questioning turned to her motives. Her cooperation waned as the questions became accusatory and damning:
Q All [programs] to the United States were aimed at making people dissatisfied with the war and an effort to make them think the United States was on the wrong side and to make the boys dissatisfied who were in the army. They all had that purpose in mind?287
Fixing a stare on the interrogators, she fell silent. The interview was over.
Exhausted and her health failing, she was treated in the Camp Wannsee hospital for three weeks, including one week in the psychiatric ward. Her confinement was difficult, with inedible food and substandard living conditions. She recalled, “The bathroom door could not even be closed… with an armed guard outside.”288
In July, she was transferred to the Oberursel Internment Camp near Frankfurt am Main. The conditions at Oberursel were not much better. During one meal, an inspection officer came to the table and asked the prisoners about the conditions. Mildred and Donald Day complained about the quality of the food in the mess hall. When the inspector left, they were rewarded for their cooperation with two weeks in solitary confinement.
Mildred and her mother, Mae Gillars, circa 1909.
Mildred as a teenager.
Young Mildred in her first communion dress. All photos courtesy of the Washingtoniana Division, DC Public Library
Mildred Gillars as an actress and showgirl. Courtesy of the Washingtoniana Division, DC Public Library
A young Mildred Gillars performs in Ohio Wesleyan University’s production of "Mrs. Dane’s Defense" in December 1920. Ohio Wesleyan Historical Collection
Charles M. Newcomb was the Professor of Oratory at Ohio Wesleyan who encouraged young Mildred to pursue acting. Le Bijou 1919, Courtesy: Ohio Wesleyan University Historical Collection, Ohio Wesleyan University Archives, Delaware, Ohio
Mildred at “the height of her theatrical career,” in the outfit worn in the Gertrude Vanderbilt show in Washington, a musical comedy which played at the old Belasco Theatre in the early 20’s. Courtesy of the Washingtoniana Division, DC Public Library
Calvin “Kelly” Elliott was engaged to Mildred Gillars while at Ohio Wesleyan University. He later became an interior decorator but never recovered from the loss of his college sweetheart. Le Bijou 1919, Courtesy: Ohio Wesleyan University Historical Collection, Ohio Wesleyan University Archives, Delaware, Ohio
Mildred Gillars working as an “artist’s model” in New York, circa 1928. Library of Congress
Mildred Gillars rides a tractor in Algiers, 1933. She first traveled to the country as the companion of an English-Jewish diplomat, though later claimed otherwise. Courtesy of the Washingtoniana Division, DC Public Library
"Better grab this dame quick. I understand she built up a terrific following among the boys during the war!" Cartoon published January 27, 1947 after Axis Sally’s Christmas release. Papers of Bill Mauldin (Library of Congress) Cartoon Drawings (Library of Congress)
In March 1946, the US Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) posted this “Wanted” poster for Mildred Gillars throughout occupied Berlin. Library of Congress (New York World collection)
Mildred enjoys an American cigarette after her arrest in March 1946. Library of Congress
Iva Toguri d’Aquino (“Tokyo Rose”) poses in dress and apron (1945). Library of Congress
Surrounded by military police, “Tokyo Rose” (actually only one of several women known as such) speaks to reporters in 1945. Library of Congress
Iva re-enacts a broadcast of the “Zero Hour” by “Orphan Ann” from Radio Tokyo for newsreel cameras in September 1945. Library of Congress
Matchbook from Zucca’s Restaurant, a popular 1940’s Manhattan eatery owned by the father of Rita Zucca (the Rome “Axis Sally”). Courtesy World War II magazine and the National Archives
In Frankfurt-am-Main, “Axis Sally” (Mildred Gillars) bids
farewell to Germany as she is repatriated to the United States. She will be arrested for treason upon landing in Washington, DC. To her right is Warrant Officer Catherine Samaha. The National Archives
Mildred Gillars leaves for Washington to face a grand jury treason inquiry. En route, she told her companion that she “did not expect to be kicked around by anyone, especially her own country.” Photo Credit: Harold Briggs/Stars and Stripes. Photo courtesy: Stars and Stripes.
Mildred Gillars (“Axis Sally”) responds to reporters’ questions as she leaves the US Commissioner’s Office, following her arrest for treason in August 1948. Courtesy of Critical Past LLC
A helping hand for “Axis Sally.” A Justice Department agent is shown holding the handbag brought from Germany by Mildred Gillars. She is pictured on the sidewalk before her arraignment, August 21, 1948. Courtesy of the Washingtoniana Division, DC Public Library
An emotional Edna Mae Herrick after the conviction of her half-sister, Mildred Gillars. Courtesy of the Washingtoniana Division, DC Public Library
Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany Page 15