McCARTHY: By just seeing her working for them, my morale was upset, by this woman working for the Germans.
LAUGHLIN: Wasn’t your morale at a very low ebb when you were in a prison camp anyway?
McCARTHY: No sir. When you see when they take one boy and shoot a man, we got clannish and the Americans stuck together. We didn’t care what would happen. Every time another boy was shot—we would fight them all the harder.414
LAUGHLIN: Mr. Witness, when did you first know the name of the defendant?
McCARTHY: When the first FBI agent told me what her actual name was.
LAUGHLIN: That was 1946?
McCARTHY: That is right.
LAUGHLIN: You didn’t know it before that?
McCARTHY: No, I knew her by the [name] Berlin Bitch or Axis Sally.
LAUGHLIN: Berlin what?
McCARTHY: Berlin Bitch.
The Court of Public Opinion
Three weeks of testimony had passed and public interest in the trial began to wane. Some commentators expressed doubts about the wisdom of bringing the aging, down-on-her-luck actress to trial at all. New York Daily News columnist Ruth Montgomery expressed a common opinion: “A good number are beginning to wonder whether dramatizing the stage-struck propagandist by assigning her the leading role in real life is the best way to render justice.” Montgomery suggested stripping Mildred of her citizenship and leaving it at that:
Would it not have been greater punishment, then, to have revoked the American citizenship of Axis Sally and consigned her forever to live—scorned and friendless—in the country to which she sold out? Like Philip Nolan in Edward Everett Hale’s “The Man without a Country,” Axis Sally might have been eternally forbidden to return to her native land; never again could she have visited her relatives, friends and former neighbors in Maine or Conneaut, Ohio.415
Estimating that the Justice Department had already spent one million dollars to bring Axis Sally to trial, Montgomery pointed to the many government witnesses flown in from Germany, some of them formerly enthusiastic Nazis. The US government provided them regular stipends and allowed them to stay and work in the United States as the trials progressed. “None [of the German witnesses] have shown any interest in leaving the land of plenty when the treason trials adjourn. Our government is permitting them to live wherever they choose and take well-paid American jobs. It’s a lucky break for the Nazis,” she concluded.416
Desperate to avoid returning to the privations of occupied Germany, the former colleagues of Chandler, Best and Gillars were more than willing to buttress the government’s case. The hypocrisy was not lost on some observers. “Nuremberg had a low opinion of Nazi officials, but it turns out they are expert, reliable and lovable while working for the prosecution.”417
Even Walter Winchell, whose consistent call for Axis Sally’s head made him a virtual press agent for the trial, seemed to sense the changing tenor of public opinion. In one column, Winchell wrote that a member of Mildred’s legal team had phoned reporters during the first week of February. The unnamed lawyer told the press that the syndicated columnist had offered to pay Axis Sally’s legal expenses out of guilt and remorse. Realizing that the public’s thirst for vengeance was not nearly as keen as his own, Winchell was loathe to call off the dogs, instead just chalking it up to basic American decency:
This repulsive woman is more than a show-off and she should be punished, although we doubt that any U.S. soldier (who was agonized by her voice) wants to see her hanged. It is part of the dignity of this nation that Americans do not want to see a woman hanged. Perhaps it would be punishment enough if she were the first woman without a country. Let her live up to her Nazi broadcasts. Let her live in America but never again be privileged to salute it or call it her own.
Still, there were those who wanted blood. Syndicated columnist Robert Ruark had no reservations about meting out the ultimate punishment to Axis Sally:
The British strung up Haw Haw for a sin no greater than the one that Miss Gillars is charged. If it can be shown that the well-constructed Miss Gillars is guilty, in the Haw Haw manner, she rates a noose or a hot seat or a gas pill or whatever the maximum penalty for broad treason the court is empowered to decree.
Hometown newspapers throughout the country interviewed local veterans to ask what should be done with Miss Gillars. Although embittered by Axis Sally’s wartime activities, some vets were reluctant to support a death sentence. “I’d hate to see her get death but if that is what our constitution calls for in case of such a crime—then we will have to abide by the constitution,” remarked Louis Doerr, a onetime commander of Am Vets in Mansfield, Ohio. Doerr, formerly assigned to the Army’s Psychological Warfare Division, put the charges against Mildred Gillars into perspective, recalling, “At that time, there were a number of women broadcasting over German radio, but Axis Sally was considered by our outfit as being the best propagandist.”
Only one announcer used the name Sally regularly—the star of Jerry’s Front—the former New Yorker Rita Zucca. Other veterans had more detailed memories of Sally’s broadcasts. A former seaman who listened at his base in Scotland remarked, “We picked up Axis Sally practically every night. On several occasions she specifically mentioned us in her broadcasts when she urged the Americans at our base to desert and come over to the Nazis.”
None of the recordings played at the trial featured her identifying or addressing specific military units. A former Ohio infantryman, Dale Beer, stated that he first heard Axis Sally in France in July 1944 (when Mildred and Koischwitz were in France interviewing hospitalized soldiers and producing their programs in Hilversum, Holland). Beer stated: “During the broadcast she [Sally] mentioned the names of several divisions in our territory, and we were surprised when she didn’t name the Ninth Infantry, our outfit.”*
“Mere words do not constitute the crime of treason,” James Laughlin posited in his request for a summary acquittal. “Things have come to a pretty pass if a person cannot make an anti-Semitic speech without being charged with treason. Being against President Roosevelt could not be treason. There are the two schools of thought about President Roosevelt—one holds that he was a patriot and a martyr. The other holds that he was the greatest rogue in all history, the greatest fraud and the greatest imposter that ever lived.”418
Judge Curran denied the request and ruled that the trial proceed. Laughlin asked the government to fly in a number of defense witnesses from Germany, but the judge agreed to only four. Emil Beckman, Franz Schaefer, Maria (Ria) Kloss (who discovered Mildred after her suicide attempt in Berlin) and Erwin Christiani, the radio technician who helped her decide in 1940 whether to return to the United States or remain in Germany. Kloss and Christiani had not yet arrived in the US, so Laughlin impetuously moved the trial forward by calling unused former prisoners on the prosecution’s list.
The first of these men was a Northwestern University student named Gunnar Dragsholt. Laughlin asked Dragsholt if at any time Mildred identified herself as a representative of the International Red Cross. He responded that she had not. Satisfied, Laughlin dismissed him, but the 30-year-old veteran did not leave the stand. He had been one of the scores of outraged men who met Axis Sally at Stalag IIB during the “horse manure” incident.
Instead of stepping down, the young man pointed at the defendant, shouting over Laughlin’s objections, “She threatened us as she left—that American citizen. That woman right there! She threatened us!”419
Laughlin angrily tried to stop the out-of-control witness but Kelley rose and asked him to tell his story:
She told us that she was an American citizen. She said she was doing the thing she was doing out of loyalty and patriotism. She also said she was being paid by the German government. I asked her if it was not strange that if she was an American she could go floating around Germany, while the rest of us Americans were locked up behind barbed wire. She said she had high ideals. We called her a traitor and shouted names at her when she left the camp. She shou
ted vile names right back at us.420
On Monday, February 21, the defense called the radio scriptwriter Emil Beckman. Beckman testified that the Gestapo and the SS constantly watched the entire staff of Reichsradio and that his superior, Horst Cleinow, personally threatened him with deportation to a concentration camp. Warned that a mistranslation or any “attempt at appeasement” was a crime, Cleinow told him, “One false utterance and you will be put away.”421
Judge Curran erased the impact of Beckman’s testimony by instructing the jury to disregard it, as Beckman was the person threatened, not Mildred. Although Ulrich Haupt, Adelbert Houben and other witnesses also testified to the dangers of such “sabotage,” Judge Curran insisted that the jury consider Mildred immune from this menacing atmosphere.
The Final Witness
Almost four weeks had passed before the jury heard from the accused. With few witnesses available to the defense, and the undeniable weight of the evidence stacked against her, Mildred’s only hope was to take the stand in her own defense. Determined to tell her side of the story, Axis Sally strode up to the witness box and sat down, forgetting to take the oath. Laughlin gently asked her to stand and swear to tell the truth. On that cold February 16, 1949 she abandoned her silence and her customary black dress. She arrived wearing a smart green sweater, tan jacket and a black skirt.422 Her attorney asked her to describe her rootless childhood. She explained that she never knew her father, whom she referred to as “Mr. Sisk.” Glossing over her bitter, unhappy life with her alcoholic stepfather, Mildred focused instead on her days of fulfillment on the college stage and years of discouragement and want in Cleveland and New York.
With only the slightest of detail, Mildred told how she followed young Bernard Metz to Algiers. When that fleeting romance failed, she left North Africa with no prospects. When her mother left Europe to return to America, she found herself alone and broke in the newly born Third Reich. America could offer no respite, as the nation remained in the deepest phase of the Great Depression. A constant theme in her testimony was her relentless search for stable employment and financial security—a search that finally culminated in a career on the radio waves.
After several hours of testimony, her story turned to the summer of 1940. Germany was the master of Europe. Dunkirk cast British and Free French forces back to England. All of France was either under Occupation or under Petain’s rule. After a long drought, Mildred finally found gainful employment at Reichsradio and needed her passport renewed by the American State Department. Jews, intellectuals, leftists and other enemies of the Nazi regime sought refuge in North America. When a vice consul named Vaughn found out about Mildred’s collaboration with the hated Nazis, he grabbed her passport and threw it into a drawer. She told the jury that her only option was to return to work. When asked why she thought the consul was so angry, she pled ignorance, stating that she was “confused” by the diplomat’s actions.
Mildred explained that she was fortunate to find work in Berlin as a war economy and rationing took hold. She had built a life in Berlin full of friends, especially a physicist named Paul Karlson. After six years of struggle in Germany, there was nothing left for her in the United States but poverty. Although ships left regularly to ferry US citizens home as America moved closer to war, she did not board one. Pearl Harbor would prove to be the point of no return.
With great emotion, Mildred described the shock of December 7, 1941, and how she vehemently expressed her contempt for the Japanese surprise attack to her German colleagues. The Axis alliance virtually guaranteed that Germany would honor its commitments and go to war with America. With the realization that the attack made her an enemy of the German state, she lashed out, “I went to pieces in the studio. I told them what I thought of Japan and what the Germans would find out about them. I expressed myself in a very violent way. The shock was so terrific and I lost all discretion, and then I went home.”423
What happened after that became one of the main areas of contention between the prosecution and the defense. Mildred got a call that evening from her friend Erwin Christiani, a radio engineer, who advised her not to come in the following day. Only an oath of allegiance to Germany, she claimed, would enable her to continue working and avoid arrest. She then went to her friend Paul and asked him to type up an oath in German. She neither kept a copy of the note nor recalled the exact wording, but she insisted that it happened and that Christiani could back up her story. After a few days off, Mildred testified that she returned to her duties with her written oath in hand. Laughlin asked her to tell the jury why she signed the note.
GILLARS: It is obvious that one has to live somehow, and after all…
LAUGHLIN: Did you sign it to save your life?
GILLARS: Well, I signed it in order to live and up to that time, I had never done anything in the least bit propagandistic.424
Her equivocation that she signed the oath in order “to live” rather than to save her life undercut the direction of Laughlin’s argument. It was only the first of several missteps by the defendant in which she stubbornly stuck to her own version of events—whether or not they condemned her in the eyes of the law. Laughlin tried to portray the headstrong woman on the stand as a victim at the mercy of a totalitarian regime. At critical junctures, her words and manner belied that image. Her defense repeatedly seemed to be that it was not treason in her own mind or her German compatriots’—thus it was not treason. In Mildred’s own mind, she swore allegiance to the Reich to eat another day, to keep a roof above her head—and above all, to evade a concentration camp.
In the first few days of her testimony, Mildred’s dramatic tales of life in wartime Berlin garnered more headlines than her line of defense. In a tone reminiscent of a spy film, she told the court of her arrest by the Gestapo in the autumn of 1942. She had lost her food ration coupons while shopping at a Berlin department store. A Gestapo agent overheard her American accent as she spoke on a public telephone. He cried, “You can tell by her accent that she is American” as he forced the door of the phone booth open. With no Fremdenpass (identification papers for foreigners) and no US passport, she carried only her Reichsradio identification card.
Panicked, she told the agent that she was late for work, exclaiming, “If I don’t get to the station, that’ll be sabotage”—an offence that would inevitably land her in a concentration camp. After her manager Johannes Schmidt-Hansen intervened, the Gestapo agent apologized for the misunderstanding and she returned to the studio. The story provided a terrifying illustration of her fragile existence in Germany and her dependence on the good graces of her Nazi masters.
Her assertion that German officials tried to recruit her to provide information on the Wright Airplane Works in Dayton, Ohio and promised her “any kind of passport” in return for espionage and sabotage work stunned the assembled press. Despite Mildred’s self-serving monologues, her tale of a second run-in with the Gestapo was gripping.
She described a “charming” agent named Denner who pointed out to the expatriate that she did not have a US passport, and remarked that the German government was “rather generous” by letting an enemy national “run around” Berlin without papers. He offered her a passport in return for espionage work. The revelation made headlines, even in The New York Times, as did her flag-waving response: “I want you to know that even though I am working for the German Broadcasting Company I would never, under any circumstances whatsoever, not even if it were to mean my death, do anything against my country.”425
Assuming the mantle of a female Nathan Hale, she turned down the offer. The story emphasized the compartmentalization in her own mind between entertaining and “idealistic” radio work and overt acts destructive to the United States and its armed forces. In her mind, she performed radio work “to live” and “to survive”—to remain employed and avoid deportation.
The following day (February 24), Laughlin turned his attention to the man most responsible for the creation of Axis Sally—the charismatic Otto
Koischwitz. The silver-haired Laughlin asked his visibly distressed client to describe the beginning of her affair with the married father of three. Again, he faced resistance in his attempt to portray her as the lovesick victim of a scheming Lothario.
“When did you first keep company with Professor Koischwitz?” he asked.
“Well, to keep company seems like a strange expression,” she said, followed by a long silence. Finally she took a deep breath. “He just grew into my life. It’s not always so easy to draw a line of demarcation between admiration, compatibility and love, especially under the circumstances as they were at that time.”
Laughlin pressed for a more revealing answer. “When did you first speak words of love?”
Mildred stiffened and protested, “Mr. Laughlin, I wonder if it is necessary to go into all of this. You see, there is such a thing as a person waiting all his life to find another.”
When Kelley objected to her non-responsiveness, she snapped back at the prosecutor, “Words of love were not spoken, Mr. Kelley. They were written from Silesia in the spring of ’43.”
Clearly in love with the dead professor’s memory, she waxed poetically about Koischwitz’s innate love for the idyllic Silesian countryside and his yearly visits to a mountain he called his “Mount Olympus.” Like his Führer’s habit of retreating to the “Eagle’s Nest,” the professor went to his mountain hideaway to commune with nature and contemplate life’s mysteries.
Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany Page 22