As the journey began, Mildred told Samaha that the American authorities in Germany assured her that she was only being taken to the United States for interrogation and that she was not under arrest.310 With typical bravado, the prisoner defiantly told her young companion that she “did not expect to be kicked around by anyone, especially her own country.”311 Mildred regaled her new friend with quotations from Shakespeare and her knowledge of astrology, noting “The study of the stars is one of my favorite hobbies.”312 Despite the risk of opening up to a representative of the US government, Mildred told the WAC that she had become quite fond of her and proposed that they meet socially in United States. Samaha cagily drew the lonely actress out. The WAC told her FBI debriefers, “I played on her ego and complimented her on her alertness, hair-do, etc.”313 Samaha was greatly amused that Mildred “accepted such flattery with a great deal of enthusiasm.”314
When the conversation turned to her work for the Germans, Mildred was equally forthcoming. “English was always my first love,” she told the guard, “I always made it a point to not acquire a foreign accent.” She prided herself on retaining her American manner of speaking. Mildred revealed intimate details of her day-to-day work as a radio broadcaster. She even described the technical processes of her work, describing how she recorded the majority of her broadcasts on what she termed “film rolls” (magnetic recording cylinders or bands). These cylinders were generally erased after transmission and then reused. Mildred doubted that many of them survived.
Samaha told the FBI that Axis Sally “could do anything she wanted in connection with her work; she had a free rein to travel and actually did travel to Holland, Paris, Belgium, Italy and other places and frequently used her recordings as an excuse for such travel.… She realized that she worked for the German government against the United States during the war, but made no direct statement acknowledging her guilt.… [Gillars] stated that she spent six months in Algiers during the war, and although she had never made a live broadcast from Algiers, the Germans probably used her recordings there.”315
These were dangerous half-truths that falsely gave the Americans the impression that she was an employee of unquestioned loyalty to the Nazi cause. Mildred was candid as she explained her escape in the face of the Soviet advance:
“I had slipped out the back door of the radio station in Berlin as the Russians were entering the front entrance.… The Russians were very, very anxious to get a hold of me.”316 Although the remark reveals Mildred’s egotism, her fears were reasonable considering the fate of her colleague Fred Kaltenbach (“Lord Hee Haw”) who fell into Soviet hands after the fall of Berlin. When an attempt to trade two captured SS officers for the radio announcer failed, the Soviets informed the American government in June 1946 that Kaltenbach died in custody, of “natural causes.”317
Mildred told the officer that she did not keep company with the highest of Nazi officials, but was disarmingly honest about her opinion of Hitler’s late wife, Eva Braun. “She severely criticized Eva Braun for her appearance, personality, etc….” Samaha said. “Her attitude showed marked jealousy.”318
This bit of gossip would prove to be of great interest to J. Edgar Hoover and his friend Walter Winchell.* The newspaper columnist and radio broadcaster for the New York Daily Mirror was instrumental in inflaming public opinion against the defendants in the “radio traitor” trials, reserving special venom for the female propagandists. As early as 1947, Winchell repeatedly referred to Axis Sally in his radio show as “Hitler’s girlfriend.”
Mildred was becoming detached from reality, casting herself as the star with the guard playing the role of personal assistant. “From the beginning of the trip,” Samaha claimed, “she more or less took the attitude that I was sort of a personal companion rather than a bodyguard.”319 The prisoner even attempted to order her around on several occasions. She was living in a fantasy world, acting as though she were onstage. In her mind, Mildred was no longer the gofer who served the film star Brigitte Horney hand and foot.320 In her delusion, Axis Sally was the celebrity.
Although it may never be known if Mildred’s bizarre behavior ever led the Justice Department to question her fitness to stand trial, the week of psychological tests ordered by the Army Counter-Intelligence Corps were probably enough for both the G-men and the prosecutors. Nevertheless, Samaha’s encounter with Axis Sally reveals a woman with a tenuous grip on reality.
Mildred falsely boasted that she was the only broadcaster at the USA Zone who neither used a prepared manuscript nor was censored. Claiming that all of her broadcasts were “ad-libbed” was an extremely damaging admission. She could no longer hope to convince a jury that she was a mere pawn parroting the Propaganda Ministry’s line. Douglas Chandler’s conviction in June 1947 provided only a limited precedent for the coming trial of Axis Sally. Chandler was in every way an architect and refiner of the propaganda message that went out daily over the airwaves.
Every morning at 11 a.m. Joseph Goebbels met with his department heads to convey that day’s message, called the Tagesparole or “watchword.” The meetings consisted of one long monologue by the Reichsminister. The department heads (in the case of radio, Hans Fritzsche) then communicated the “watchword” to their staffs to discuss how to tailor the day’s message to their specific audience. Chandler (along with Best and several other Americans including Constance Drexel, Jane Anderson and Edward Delaney) actively participated in the planning meetings. The expatriates helped craft the uniquely American spin that would adorn Goebbels’ core message. An admission of responsibility for the authorship of her pro-Nazi screeds could send her to prison for life (as were Chandler and Best), or death in the electric chair.
“I have no one…”
It was 1:30 in the afternoon when the airplane touched down in Washington. A barrage of questions greeted Axis Sally as she descended the steps onto the tarmac. Posing for photographs, she waved off questions about her future, stating, “Those are very big questions and they require very big answers and I can’t say now.”
A “lonely and dispirited” figure, she told her story to reporters. “I went to work for Radio Berlin because I am an actress,” she explained. “It is very difficult to return under such circumstances, of course. I have been living in a country subject to a great deal of tragedy for the last nine years.”321 To the mothers and fathers of America who had buried their sons as a result of Hitler’s aggression, Axis Sally’s tears over Germany’s nine years of tragedy must have rung hollow. Her first meeting with the press that Saturday afternoon in August 1948 set the tone for how the public and the press would look at the friendless woman over the ensuing months.
She reminisced about her last visit to Washington, DC. Sixteen years earlier she had performed at the National Theater in a play whose name she could not recall. Now she would play the most serious role of her life: defendant. Flanked by Federal agents and military police, US Commissioner Cyril S. Lawrence approached and read out the warrant for her arrest, stating that between December 11, 1941 and May 6, 1945 she “unlawfully, willfully, and treasonably adhered to the government of the German Reich, an enemy of the United States, and did give the said enemy… aid and comfort.”322
Her face froze as the Commissioner read out the charges. Lawrence coolly informed her that the charges carried a maximum sentence of death. She fell quiet as she finally comprehended the seriousness of her situation. “If Miss Sisk-Gillars yet realized she faced a possible death penalty,” one witness to the proceedings reported, “she did not show it. She listened attentively to the charges for which she had been brought home from Berlin—but she had nothing to say.”323 The Commissioner asked how she chose to respond to the charges against her.
“I wouldn’t agree with them,” she abruptly replied.324
Lawrence then asked if she had any relatives or friends in the United States who could help her prepare her defense.
“As far as I know,” she replied, “I have no one here in the United States
.”
He informed her that the FBI had located her half-sister, Edna Mae Herrick. Reporters on hand noted that Mildred seemed “surprised and not very interested” in this revelation, but she was likely wondering about her absent mother.325 Unknown to her, Mae Gillars had died in March 1947. She spent her final years in the Toronto rooming house she owned and managed, ill and grieving over her imprisoned daughter whose innocence she protested until the day she died.
“When did she get here?” she asked, referring to her half-sister as she was led away to the District of Columbia Jail.326
“A pretty dismal place, that jail—dark, noisy and smelly,” was how one newspaper columnist’s description of the District jail that once held mental patients and violent criminals.327 Led into a bare cell to await a hearing, bail was impossible as Federal law proscribed bond in treason cases. As officers booked her, the Commissioner advised her to find an attorney as soon as possible. When asked her age, the haggard and gray woman who had survived like an animal in demolished buildings and internment camps remained an actress to the core.
“Thirty-nine,” she told the booking officer, subtracting nine from her actual age.328
In the small town of Ashtabula, Ohio, a 39-year-old dance instructor was gazing at a newspaper picture of a woman with a prominent jaw and smiling eyes that resembled her own.
Edna Mae Herrick was positive that the woman who had arrived over the weekend from Germany was none other than the delicate “china doll” she had idolized as a child. The press soon called on the half-sister of Axis Sally for her reaction to her sibling’s return. Ever loyal, Edna Mae Herrick swore to stand by Mildred:
“I believe if my sister did anything which was treasonable to her country,” she said, “she did it unwillingly. If she is in trouble, I want to be by her side.”329
For over a year and a half, Edna Mae and her family had suffered for the actions of her distant sister. When Mildred was arrested in March 1946, she was fired from her job for the sole cause of being kin to Axis Sally. Nine months later, as false rumors of Mildred’s arrival in Miami swirled in the press, she again felt the heat of public outrage. With her mother’s health growing worse day by day, Edna Mae wrote to J. Edgar Hoover in January 1947. Alternately beseeching and defiant in tone, the handwritten letter cited the bitter loss of her own job, the meanness of the American media, and the disastrous effect of the controversy on her mother, Mae:
Personally, I feel sorry for the “dog eat dog” attitude of the world today. We seem to have too many churches for the few Christians. Walter Winchell and others apparently feel justified in standing in the judgment seat and making what they think is a patriotic stab. Well, I suppose they have to make their living. It would suit them better to first check by real people. Friends right in New York who knew and loved Mildred. I think the real Democratic news would have been to ask America “why I, an innocent party, was fired from my job when Mildred was arrested in March?” Jews did this to me!—And I, with a young son to support.
Whoever this woman is, she must be desperately tired. If it is my sister, I do wish we could have her home soon for a much needed rest. We have very little money and it’s frightening to think of what a drag through court will cost. I can’t see why, if the American court there could release her, why this additional time and cost must be spent.
I hope this letter hasn’t annoyed you, but rather will lend light on the subject. I hope with all my heart, Mr. Hoover that you can help before the whole thing kills my mother.330
Less than two months later, Mae Gillars passed away.
Edna Mae and her husband, E. Reid Herrick, were busy building a new house. The unfinished home had no furnace yet, so the family kept warm by lighting three fireplaces. With Mae gone, there was no question that she would support her sister to the bitter end. “It was a mess,” Edna Mae recalled in an interview shortly before her death, “but it never entered my mind not to be there for moral support. I don’t think Mildred cared one way or another if I was there. I did it for my mother.”331
Edna Mae packed her bags for the long trip to Washington and the longer wait for Mildred’s day in court. She barely knew what to expect after more than a decade of silence. So much had changed. Their mother was dead. The family home in Conneaut had been sold. Her sister, now gray and battered by the cruelty of war, was sitting in a narrow, damp cell built to house prostitutes, thieves and murderers. The effects of her newfound fame on her family always weighed heavily on Mildred’s mind. Two years earlier she had spoken of her fear that her actions might harm her family, especially her mother.
“I am hoping my mother will not hear about this at all,” she told CIC interrogators in April 1946. “I don’t like to run the risk of my relatives and school friends finding out about it. Such notoriety has never been in my family before.”332
If there was any doubt about the extent to which Mildred Gillars had cut off her relations with family and friends in the United States, it was apparent on the day of her arrival in Washington. As she was booked into jail, she listed a friend, Mrs. E. Arnold of Dietz, Germany (where she found shelter during the 1946 Christmas amnesty), as her next of kin.333
The taint of her infamy was impossible to escape. Her mother Mae, heartbroken by her failure to convince her headstrong daughter to return to America in 1939, was only one casualty. The rest of the Hewitson and Gillars families were similarly affected by the shame of being related to Axis Sally, as FBI agents discovered when they visited Mae’s brothers in New Brunswick, Canada. Accompanied by an officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the agents traveled to the province in an attempt to verify Mildred’s American nationality. Mae’s elder brother, William Hewitson, was an elderly farmer who had not been off his Fredericton property in almost a decade. His 62-year-old younger brother, Joseph, was willing to go to Washington to testify at his niece’s trial, but was short of cash and required a fifty dollar cash advance to pay for the train ticket.
Mildred’s Uncle Joseph acknowledged that the controversy had hit his family hard. Still, he did not believe that his niece had worked for the Nazis voluntarily and could not fathom “how she could do the things which she is reported to have done.”334 Joseph pleaded with the agents to refrain from contacting his sister, Cora Ross, who was ill in a Nova Scotia hospital. The sickly woman was especially disturbed by news reports concerning her infamous niece. The investigators decided not to pursue the Hewitsons further after the FBI collected enough documentation to confirm her American birth.
Voices from the Past
As Axis Sally settled into her cell, she could not know how close she had come to avoiding prosecution altogether. In January 1947, a troubled Assistant Attorney General Lamar Caudle told Washington columnist Drew Pearson that the Justice Department was having trouble meeting the Constitution’s “two witness” requirement for a treason conviction. At the same time, the Army was pressuring his department to drop the charges rather than hold her indefinitely. In 1961, Pearson explained his role in keeping Axis Sally in jail:
Caudle said they could find no witnesses. No Americans had actually seen Axis Sally broadcast to American troops on behalf of Hitler. Caudle told me of his predicament, and I broadcast an appeal to ex-GIs who had been prisoners of war in German camps and who might have seen Axis Sally in action. Two GIs answered the appeal.335
Caudle also sought the help of Walter Winchell. When the Justice Department lawyer mentioned that the Army had requested a reconsideration of Mildred’s case, Winchell made sure his audience was duly outraged. Assuming the mantle of spokesman for “Mr. and Mrs. America,” the columnist demanded an explanation from the War Department:
The Department of Justice has denied the application of the Army to drop proceedings against Axis Sally. Secretary Patterson ought to explain the position of his department to the American people. The Gold Star mothers would be particularly interested in whether the War Department should intervene to save the voice which taunted our wounded and dy
ing [that] they were suckers—not heroes.
Assistant Attorney General Caudle, who turned down the request, did it with a grin. “We’re not taking Sally off your hands,” he said, “because among other things I’d have Pearson and Winchell around my neck.”336
After months of arrest, release and then re-arrest, the Army could not hold Axis Sally indefinitely. The rank and file soldier who enjoyed her music from afar could not give eyewitness testimony to her treachery. Men who saw Axis Sally at work in the flesh were required—the GIs that Mildred sought to help by broadcasting messages to their loved ones as they lingered in a prison camp. Caudle needed the few who were disgusted to see an American woman in league with the enemy that killed and maimed their comrades.
Pearson and Winchell’s campaign to see Axis Sally behind bars paid off. Within days of Drew Pearson’s January 26 appeal, the columnist received handwritten letters from two former American prisoners of war. Albert J. Lawlor of Stony Brook, NY, had been held in Stalag VII A near Furstenberg on the Oder between February 1943 and April 1945. Lawlor described his encounter with Axis Sally:
A woman came to this camp one day sometime between September 9, 1943 and May 12, 1944 to make a propaganda broadcast. She said her given name was either Midge or Madge and [she was] a typical girl. During her stay at the camp, in company with technicians and other men, one of whom was called “Professor,” all of who spoke English very well and who, by their own admission to me, had lived and worked in the United States, they made records to be broadcast to the United States.
Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany Page 17