“If Mr. Holzworth should call again, please notify him that I do not care to have any further interviews with him,” the angry prisoner told the jail superintendent.362 Despite the rebuke, Holzworth continued to pursue her. Finally, on August 26, Mildred typed out a letter to the Chief Justice of the District Court requesting assistance in finding competent legal counsel:
I have been out of the country for more than fifteen (15) years and during this time have virtually lost all contact with family and friends in the United States. This condition, more or less, makes me a stranger in my own country. As you know [sic] doubt have become aware of the conditions surrounding my case through its coverage in the newspapers, this condition is most confusing.
Quite a number of attorneys have contacted me and the officials of the District Jail offering their services in my behalf. I do not know to whom I should turn to for this advice in selecting counsel. It has been recommended that I contact your Honor, the Chief Justice of the District Court for advice in securing counsel.
I would appreciate and be indebted to you if you would kindly furnish me with the names of a few attorneys whom you feel are competent to handle my case involving the various conditions that will arise at my trial.363
Her refusal of Holzworth’s services damaged any remaining chance that the charges against her might be dropped. As the obstinate prisoner sat in jail without counsel, the prosecutor John Kelley was presenting his case for Mildred Gillars’ indictment to the Grand Jury. Time was of the essence. If her defense strategy included the claim that she did not owe allegiance to the United States at the time of her alleged crimes, her written statement to an officer of the court that she was “a stranger in [her] own country” could sabotage that effort and affirm that she was conscious of her obligations to the United States.
As the days passed, her mood worsened. Edna Mae came to visit every day, but they did not discuss her activities in Germany. “I didn’t ask any questions. I was not interested. I just wanted to get it over with and get home,” she recalled.364 On August 30, Edna Mae arrived at the District Jail accompanied by attorney Daniel Boone, an associate of Washington attorney James J. Laughlin. Laughlin was one of several court-appointed lawyers in the Sedition Trial of 1944. In that mass trial, vocal opponents of American involvement in World War II on both the Left and the Right had been charged with conspiracy against the United States. Laughlin was assigned to represent one of the thirty men and women named in a mass indictment for conspiracy to demoralize the armed forces and overthrow the United States government.
After a chaotic 102-day trial that ended only after the judge died of a heart attack, the Sedition Trial was the American equivalent of a show trial.365 Laughlin brought the trial to a standstill when, claiming collusion between the Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith and the Justice Department, he entered a motion to subpoena all of the ADL’s files regarding the sedition cases. Although the judge attempted to ignore Laughlin’s request, the attorney commanded headlines when he issued a copy of the motion to the press—placing the focus squarely on the issue of the ADL’s role in providing information to the government on which to base the prosecutions.
On paper, Laughlin seemed like the ideal attorney to represent Mildred Gillars: energetic, fearless and brazen in manipulating the media to his client’s advantage. While the Sedition Trial proceeded in disarray, only to end with a whimper, the Axis Sally trial was a capital case with an unpopular defendant and a determined prosecutor. The core issues of the case were not the ability of American citizens to voice unpopular viewpoints during wartime, but the responsibilities of a citizen while abroad in the midst of hostilities and the possibility of imprisonment in a concentration camp (and the threat of death that such imprisonment implied). Her case required a sharp legal mind with thorough knowledge of the precedents surrounding the crime of “aid and comfort.”
A public defender with a mediocre reputation and a penchant for conspiracy theories was not the best choice for a defendant whose life hung in the balance. Moreover, it would be impossible for any attorney to focus blame on the Anti-Defamation League or any Jewish organization three years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Belsen and Treblinka.
The reunion of the Gillars sisters was marred by the news of their mother’s death. It was especially bitter for Mildred to realize that her mother died with the knowledge of her imprisonment as a traitor. Grieving and emotionally drained, she was also troubled by Holzworth’s continuing attempts to garner publicity from her case. Holzworth had gone to incredible lengths to get in contact with Edna Mae after Mildred repeatedly refused his visits. When she changed hotels to avoid his pursuit, he reported her missing to the police and sent an alarming telegram to her husband in Ohio stating that she could not be located.
From jail, Mildred angrily dashed off two typewritten letters—one to Holzworth and another to Associate Justice Richmond B. Keech, whom Holzworth had petitioned for the writ of habeas corpus only days earlier. She told Keech: “Holzworth has undertaken to appear in your court as my attorney. He is not my lawyer; I have not retained him, and he has so been notified.” She further told the judge:
I am at this time ill and I am desirous of obtaining medical attention. I have been continuously in custody in excess of nineteen months without a hearing, or without any word from my family, or knowledge of my mother’s death. To say the least, at present, I am utterly exhausted and in the direst need of a respite.
As I don’t know what procedure is necessary, I appeal to your Court to provide, or cause to be provided, proper medical examination and attention, so that I may be able to conduct my defense in a composed state of mind.366
Her letter to Holzworth was caustic and accusing; charging that his “unwarranted and unsolicited efforts have inflicted an immeasurable damage to me in prejudicing my rights prior to my defense.”367 Keech requested that the District Jail provide her with a complete medical examination.
On August 31, Justice Keech informed Holzworth that the court no longer recognized him as Mildred’s attorney. Within minutes of Keech’s order, she was brought before Commissioner Cyril Lawrence who informed her that her hearing would be postponed for two weeks so she could enter the hospital for medical treatment. Lawrence reassured her, “You will not be railroaded. I can assure you, we have in America a system of justice that does not permit anyone to be ‘railroaded’.”368 When the Commissioner reread the charges against her, Mildred testily replied, “I told you that I didn’t agree with you.”369
The Grand Jury returned an indictment on ten counts of treason against Axis Sally on Friday, September 10, 1948. After a week of daily visits to her sister’s cell and testimony before the Grand Jury, Edna Mae Herrick was ready to go home. As she left for Ohio, she spoke to the press. With tears in her eyes, she spoke on behalf of the imprisoned Axis Sally.
“Mildred firmly denies ever having been anything but an American. I know she is innocent.” Quoting her stepsister, she relayed Mildred’s position to the assembled reporters, saying: “I never talked politics. I never told those boys to throw down their arms or that their wives or sweethearts were unfaithful.… I never once let them think I was from the Red Cross. I always said I was with Berlin Broadcasting Company’.”370
Edna Mae took Mildred’s denials at face value and explained her motivations for remaining in Germany: “Now I think I understand how she felt. She loved the German people. When hoodlums come in and take over—that’s no time to run away.”371 Mildred looked upon the Nazis as “we do Al Capone and his gangsters.”372 Departing Washington, Edna Mae announced to the world: “I am going to stand by her side. I want the world to know that’s my stand.”373
It would be an increasingly difficult stand to take as the trial of Axis Sally drew near.
CHAPTER 10
Destiny
“The Nazi-hired recordings of Axis Sally’s broadcasts… have a not-so-amazing similarity to the opinions spouted by isolationists during the war and
before it. If she had made those statements in the U.S. instead of Germany, Sally might have been elected to Congress.”
—Walter Winchell, February 7, 1949374
JANUARY–MARCH 1949
As Mildred Gillars languished in the District Jail, it must have seemed that the predictions she made five years earlier over a German microphone were coming to pass. The Nazis’ post-Normandy propaganda line warned daily of the “Red World” that would inevitably result from an Allied victory. By 1948, half of Germany and practically all Eastern Europe were firmly in the Soviet grip. President Harry S. Truman countered a Communist threat to Greece and Turkey with massive economic aid. Two brutal winters exacerbated the hunger and poverty of Occupied Germany under the Morgenthau Plan. Economic and political turmoil was spreading to the rest of war-ravaged Europe. Not until the proposal of the Marshall Plan in March 1947 did the United States abandon its putative policy against its former enemy and move to rebuild its economy. The geopolitical reality that only Germany could act as a counterweight to Soviet influence in Europe was finally dawning on American policymakers. Those men in the Nazi leadership who believed that Germany’s strategic position would ultimately save their skins miscalculated, for it took a crushing Allied victory to launch the chain of events leading to the Cold War.
Galvanized by the new Soviet threat, the US government’s efforts to tie up loose ends from the last war were haphazard at best. From September 1945, the Allies actively pursued war criminals and former high-ranking officials responsible for implementing Hitler’s policies. The Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal held surviving members of the party leadership accountable for their crimes against humanity and military aggression. At the same time, the Occupying Powers hoped to address the guilt of mid-level Party functionaries, civil servants, SS, SA and Gestapo. In the immediate aftermath of the war, almost two million men were forbidden to hold any job above the level of manual laborer—a policy that left West German society without essential technocrats and skilled workers. The creation of Spruchkammern, or civilian de-nazification courts, established a mechanism to determine a defendant’s political culpability, wartime conduct and fitness to function in the new democracy.
The de-nazification courts were administered by German citizens, many of whom were politically reliable members of Weimar-era parties such as the Social Democratic (SPD) and Catholic Centre (Zentrum) parties. The former Director of the RRG, Hans Fritzsche, was sentenced to nine years at hard labor by one of these courts—despite his acquittal at Nuremberg for war crimes. By 1948, the necessity of rebuilding the defeated nation with knowledgeable and competent officials, industrialists and financiers had taken precedence over the effort to wipe away the stain of Hitlerism.
In time, “de-nazification” became a mere formality. The very week that Axis Sally went on trial in Washington, DC, a German court ordered Hitler’s diplomat Franz von Papen to pay a substantial fine. In return, von Papen was granted a clean bill of political health. Even Otto Skorzeny, the legendary commando who, on the Führer’s orders, engineered the daring rescue of Mussolini and facilitated the escape of war criminals to Spain and Latin America, was de-nazified in absentia in 1952.
In reality, the whitewashing of Nazi pasts began much earlier. As early as September 1945, the American OSS (Office of Strategic Services) was secreting German rocket scientists, weapons experts and intelligence agents out of the former Reich. Given employment and new lives in the United States, the beneficiaries of Project Paperclip lived in relative obscurity, safe from Soviet hands. One of Paperclip’s most illustrious alumni was Dr. Werner von Braun, the rocket scientist who would become the architect of the American space and missile program. Another, Arthur Rudolph, played a central role in the development of the Saturn V rocket that took man to the moon. During the war, Rudolph was responsible for the deaths of thousands of slave laborers at the Mittelbau-Dora V-2 rocket plant. Hubertus Strughold was dubbed the “father of US Space Medicine,” though he performed medical experiments on prisoners at Dachau.
As American intelligence quietly rehabilitated the political pedigrees of former Nazis and war criminals, a penniless American arrived at the Federal District courthouse in Washington, DC. It was January 24, 1949, and a rush of curious onlookers followed the woman with shoulder-length silver hair as she emerged from a caged prison van. Inside, 105 prospective jurors filled the courtroom. Technicians worked feverishly, stringing the wires of 40 headsets along the expanse of the jury box, judge’s bench and attorney’s tables. The electronic equipment was to be used to listen to the defendant’s wartime handiwork.
Mildred strode into the courtroom and took up her position at the defense table. Her attorney, James Laughlin, greeted her with a long, deep bow. Eight US Marshalls guarded the courtroom’s door and windows while a ninth sat only inches behind the accused. Mildred slipped off her black fur-trimmed coat, and quickly turned and smiled at her stepsister, who was sitting in the front row. Her skin, caked with heavy makeup, had an orange tone. The New Yorker columnist Richard H. Rovere gave his impression of Axis Sally:
She has the hair of Mother Machree, and she wears it in the style of Rita Hayworth. At forty-eight, she has the figure of a woman of forty-eight who has worked hard and sacrificed much to keep the figure she had at twenty-four. You wouldn‘t take her for forty-eight and you wouldn’t mistake her for twenty-four. Although she has been in jail for many months, she has a Miami Beach tan, the cosmetic nature of which is given away by the prison pallor of her hands. Her entire getup—the black dress, the black spiked-heeled shoes, the indigo scarf that she uses for gesturing, the generous applications of lipstick and nail polish—suggests that she is torn by an inner conflict: Although desperately trying to avoid conviction, she is at the same time determined not to destroy the illusion of herself as a woman of mystery, glamour and intrigue.
By all the rules of the game, a woman in Miss Gillars’ fix, on trial for her life before a jury that includes five proper-looking members of her own sex, should not be getting herself up like this, but Miss Gillars is following her own course. It is doubtful, however, whether she stands to lose much by this, for the notion of Miss Gillars as a woman of glamour, either sinister or otherwise, is one that—at this stage of the game anyway—only Miss Gillars herself can harbor. The total impression that she makes is not that she is a woman who has spent years in the service of the mighty war machine of the state that was going to endure for a millennium, but that she is a woman who has been fighting an uphill battle to make a living from a dress shop in Queens or a millinery shop in Staten Island.375
The strain of the past five years was visible to all. Her fall had been fast and brutal and it showed. Observers marveled at the stark contrast between the aging defendant and the fantasies her voice conjured up among the GIs. One reporter, Andrew Tully, compared her to:
The kind of girl you’d run into in a second-rate tavern on pay night in most any factory town. She is 48 years old, and she looked like any woman of 48 who wants to put it off. Axis Sally’s face probably was pretty once, but it obviously had many good times. Somewhere she’d picked up a tan and that helped, but it couldn’t hide some sad little wrinkles and that swollen hardness at the cheekbones. And when she tried to put life into her smile, her eyes seemed to protest.376
The Curtain Rises
“Now, ladies and gentlemen,” Judge Edward M. Curran announced to the court, “this is an important case. This woman is entitled to a fair and impartial jury. Are any of the prospective jurors members of the Jewish race?”377
Seven were dismissed.
“Do any of you entertain any prejudice either for or against the policies adopted by Franklin D. Roosevelt or Winston Churchill or any prejudice against Englishmen themselves?”378
No one rose. Seven more had already formulated an opinion about the defendant’s guilt. Three others were dismissed because they could write, read or speak the German language.379 Judge Curran then asked if they had ever been a member of any
organization that could be described as “German-American.” As the judge asked the jury pool to acknowledge any possible bias for or against the woman on trial, he did not reveal his own.
In 1943, Assistant Attorney General Edward Curran had signed the Justice Department’s indictment of Max Otto Koischwitz for treason—a name certain to come up in Mildred’s case and sufficient reason for his recusal from the case. The jurors did not know that the FBI had thoroughly checked their backgrounds to ensure that they held no politically undesirable views that might favorably affect their opinion of Axis Sally. In his own attempt to weed out biased jurors, James Laughlin asked the judge to include questions that would divine their political and religious attitudes:
Did you contribute to bundles of aid to Britain?
Have you ever belonged to B’nai B’rith or any other Jewish organization?
Have you ever written anything about the war crimes trial at Nuremberg?
Do you have any opinion on the Morgenthau Plan for Germany?
Do you have any connection to the new Israeli government?380
Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany Page 19