Prosecutor Kelley strenuously objected to this hagiography of a dead traitor, and Judge Curran asked Mildred to keep it short. She explained that Koischwitz wrote two letters to her from Silesia that confessed his confusion about their emotional attachment. “He realized in the spring of ’43 what was happening and he reverted back to his boyhood habit of going to his Mount Olympus—he got the answer that God favored his love.”426
Laughlin valiantly fought on against Mildred’s frustrating evasiveness. Her refusals clearly annoyed the lawyer when he had to demand an answer from his own client:
LAUGHLIN: Now Miss Gillars, were you in love with Professor Koischwitz?
GILLARS: Mr. Laughlin, it is very difficult to discuss personal things on the witness stand, just as it is difficult to discuss religion or anything else that is sacred to you.
LAUGHLIN: Well, would you care to answer the question?
GILLARS: Of course, I loved him.
LAUGHLIN: And did Professor Koischwitz exert an influence on your life?
GILLARS: I consider Professor Koischwitz to have been my destiny.
LAUGHLIN: Would you care to tell us, Miss Gillars, just what you mean by that?
GILLARS: Well, I believe that people are the result of other human beings who have been in their lives, and I believe that without the presence of Professor Koischwitz in my life I would not be fighting for my life today, and I also believe if you have been happy, then you must be prepared at any time to accept a lifetime of misery. It has to be worth that much to you.427
Even after Germany declared war on the United States, Mildred insisted that she remained a simple announcer. Not until Koischwitz witnessed the extent of her talents and realized that he could put her popularity to use did she encounter pressure to perform propaganda. She broadcast chiefly for Sender Bremen to Europe and the United Kingdom until the professor took over the USA Zone from the imprisoned Schotte. She “pleaded and begged of Koischwitz to do nothing about [a transfer].” “Please let me stay at the Sender Bremen station,” she asked, but Koischwitz would hear none of it.428
Finally she relented: “I suppose it is very difficult for a person who has never been in that position [in a dictatorial state] to be able to appreciate my position. You could not just go around saying, ‘I don’t want to do this’ and ‘I don’t want to do that.’”429
When she protested to Koischwitz, he slyly appealed to her artistic sensibilities. “Even Shakespeare and Sophocles could be taken as propaganda,” he told his wary accomplice.430
A difficult day on the stand ended with a crippling admission. As Mildred effusively extolled the professor’s life and work, she drew a direct connection between Koischwitz and Hitler’s Foreign Minister. Exaggerating her lover’s role, she told the jury that her beloved served as a liaison for Joachim von Ribbentrop.
“He was the go-between for von Ribbentrop and the broadcasting to the American zone. I knew he was in contact with Ribbentrop because he once left me in France to drive to Adolf Hitler’s headquarters and meet Ribbentrop.”431
No one could have been more surprised by her statement than her own attorney who, less than a month before, told the jury that his client never had any association with the “unholy lot” that led the world to slaughter. Instead, she revealed that she intimately loved a man who was welcomed to the Führer’s lair.
On the final day of her testimony, John Kelley grabbed his stack of transcripts and read excerpts from Axis Sally’s broadcasts. With his voice full of contempt, he read the words “She’ll never surrender until you boys surrender.… How ’bout it?” The prosecutor asked, “Did you think that was going to entertain your countrymen in the foxholes?”
Mildred grew combative. “I knew that they were not taking that seriously. I had many written reports on it, and Professor Koischwitz knew it too.”
Undeterred, Kelley read from the transcript where Midge wondered if the GIs wives and girlfriends were not “sort of running around with one of the 4-Fs back home.” Kelley spat out, “Did you think that was going to entertain them?”
GILLARS: I had proof that it did…. I was just clowning.
KELLEY: Were you clowning in your Medical Reports when you gave on the radio a mother’s name and told her that her son had died? Then continued to tell her about his sufferings just prior to his death? Were you clowning then?
GILLARS: You know I wasn’t.
KELLEY: I don’t know. You tell me. Were you clowning then?
GILLARS: I was not.
KELLEY: Did you ever want the United States to lose the war?
GILLARS: No.
She denied ever posing as a Red Cross worker to deceive wounded men to obtain interviews. She insisted that if any of her group had said he or she represented the Red Cross, there would have been no recording, “concentration camp or no concentration camp.”432 Too many men had testified to the contrary. In the days following the June 1944 invasion of France, Allied forces moved so rapidly that many hoped and some believed that the war would be over by Christmas. German armies were in rapid retreat and it only made sense that Axis Sally would have trouble finding willing participants. In the face of so much prisoner testimony, Mildred’s heated denials devastated the credibility of her entire testimony.
She denied that she exposed herself to Michael Evanick and she denied that she ever threatened the men of Stalag IIB with retaliation for the horse manure incident. In order to believe the defendant, the jury would have to believe that every former prisoner who took the stand against her had lied. John Bartlow Martin wrote in his private notes as he observed her days on the stand that “her aplomb is keener at the start of the day.… It wears down to where she almost stops lying at the end of hard days on the stand.”433
Her power of self-delusion was evident, no more so than when she described her visits to the prisoner-of-war camps. None of the cruelty and hardship experienced by the prisoners appeared in her recollections. She called one “very picturesque, their washing on the line, so very Bohemian”—a world where the inmates peacefully strummed on guitars and mandolins, asked for her autograph and excitedly lined up to be interviewed.434
The more she spoke the more divorced from reality she seemed. In one instance, she thanked the Irish “who have suffered for over 900 years” for giving her the strength to face her persecutors. In another, she told the court that Sender Bremen owed her hundreds of Reich Marks, and the USA Zone owed her thousands, though the broadcasting company and the regime that created it was ground to dust. Her capacity for self-deception had its limits. When the jury listened to a particularly damaging broadcast where she referred to American pilots as “murderers,” Axis Sally fell to the floor unconscious. The judge quickly called a recess and an ambulance rushed her to the jail infirmary. Edna Mae attributed it to a pork chop her sister had eaten for lunch but the attending press drew a direct connection between her illness and the words on the recording.
When Mildred returned to the stand the following day, the shaky witness testified that she became increasingly uncomfortable with her role at the radio station. As the Allies pushed through North Africa and Italy in 1943, she decided to do something for the American boys in captivity. “I begged to be allowed to enter the prisoner of war camps because I wanted to see how the American boys were getting along,” she insisted. “The only thing that could bring me a little happiness in the chaos of war was the feeling that I could be of some service to the people of my own country. I told Professor Koischwitz that my only reason for being was to go the prisoner-of-war camps. He knew I was not a propagandist.”435
The Other Sally
Laughlin introduced the existence of the Rome Axis Sally to the court, and Mildred explained the reasons for her fury at discovering the existence of the other broadcaster. The woman used the name Sally repeatedly in propaganda broadcasts directly aimed at advancing American troops in the field, and designed to confuse and break their will. She told the court that she was enraged that another w
oman would usurp her notoriety, but the nameless woman’s ability to violate the fine line she had established in her own mind between entertainment and treachery was intolerable.
She expressed her belief that there were lines that she simply would not cross, and it was particularly frightening to be in a position where she could not control the statements or actions of the woman in Rome. Mildred told of how she burst into the office of Adelbert Houben to demand that the woman stop using the name Sally.
I told them: either that girl in Rome would stop calling herself Axis Sally or I would leave the microphone because I was not giving out military information or trying to muddle up GIs by telling them where their position would be tomorrow. My only interest at all times was to try to stay in touch with America, and to do something for them the only way I could in my difficult position.436
Laughlin sought to expose the name and story of the “Rome Axis Sally,” even bringing up the name Rita Zucca in open court, but Judge Curran stepped in again to limit the scope of his questions. Again, Laughlin’s attempt to expose the arbitrary nature of the government’s treason prosecutions went nowhere. The court forbade him to address the issue of those American citizens (Zucca, Georgia von Richter, Constance Drexel, Jane Anderson, et al.) who broadcast for the Nazis but did not face trial in an American court.
In three and a half days of testimony, John Kelley rattled Mildred into several critical and damaging admissions. She acknowledged that the State Department asked all Americans on non-official business to leave Germany after the invasion of Belgium and Holland. She pleaded untruthfully for a thirty-day extension on her passport in order to raise funds for her passage to the United States. She also acknowledged that she had made no effort to ask the US Embassy for passage home after the Gestapo threatened her, just as she had made no effort to run into the arms of American forces liberating Paris in 1944. Asked why, she simply responded, “I didn’t want to be separated from Professor Koischwitz by any troops, because I wanted to be with Professor Koischwitz.”
KELLEY: That meant more to you than anything in the world, did it?
GILLARS: I believe that a man generally means more to a woman than anything else. I would have died for him. Yes.
Legally, the most devastating discovery of the Government’s case occurred when John Kelley introduced into evidence an expired passport found in the possession of Mildred’s block leader in Berlin. Although Mildred testified that she had no passport or papers identifying her as an American citizen after the vice consul “snatched” it, the revelation of the passport’s existence tore what was left of the defense’s case apart. At the end, her tired attempts to limit her answers to saccharine, flag-waving recitals of love for America met with solemn derision by prosecutor Kelley:
GILLARS: Mr. Kelley, why else do you think I risked my life to go to France to get those messages to send back to America?
KELLEY: Why do you think the Germans were paying you to get those soldiers to go on the air with you?437
Exhausted and weeping, Axis Sally asked the judge for a recess. When the trial resumed, the intensity of the questioning did not let up. With eyes full of tears, she met the questioning with defiance. When the questions concerned the eldest daughter of Professor Koischwitz, the prosecutor hit the rawest of nerves. Stella Koischwitz was a teenager when Berlin fell to the Red Army, and Kelley claimed that the young girl cast her father’s mistress out of her apartment.
Mildred replied, “Stella was not there. Professor Koischwitz’s mother was there and she was frantic because Stella had disappeared. The streets of Berlin were strewn with naked corpses and dead horses—”
“Forget about the naked corpses,” Kelley interrupted, “and answer my question.”
Mildred straightened in her seat. “It was my own decision to leave.”
“When did you last see Stella?” Kelley shot back.
Again, she became evasive “If you have the testimony of Stella, I’d prefer that you and her—”
Furious, Kelley shouted at the defendant. “Will you please answer my question?”
White as a sheet, she asked the Judge, “And what happens if I refuse?”
After the lawyers approached the bench, the prosecutor withdrew the question, moving on to even more sensitive subjects—the most embarrassing aspect of her love for her “man of destiny.”
KELLEY: Isn’t it a fact that when you and Professor Koischwitz declared your love for each other his wife was pregnant and bearing their fourth child?
GILLARS: I found out about it the day before the child was born.
KELLEY: You knew that he was married?
GILLARS: Are these ad hominem tactics going to be pursued? Is that the only kind of attack you have, Mr. Kelley?438
Her evasions ran so deep that she even attempted to deny that it was her voice on the recordings. Kelley read aloud from the transcript of the May 1943 Home Sweet Home program that made such an impression at the start of the trial. “I love America but I do not love Roosevelt and all his kike boyfriends who have thrown us into this awful turmoil.”
“Did you say it?” Kelley pressed her again.
Flustered, she wavered, and once more, Judge Curran stepped in. “You heard the Government Exhibit #1 when it was played back? Is that your voice or not?”
Unbelievably, Mildred attempted to claim that she could not be sure. “But Your Honor, you can’t always know. I have had so much experience with broadcasting, and the voice of a girl whom I know very, very well, I have listened to her voice five times now, and I swear to you that I do not recognize her voice. If I hadn’t known that she had been in the studio…”
Even John Kelley seemed taken aback by this stunning denial of reality. “Just a minute, Miss Gillars. My question to you is: is that your voice that was played back to you?”
“Well, it seemed to be my voice,” she reluctantly admitted.439
What logic there was to her defense had been pummeled away by Kelley’s deft cross-examination. Despite the obvious worldview behind her radio statements, she insisted that she never adhered to Nazi ideology and could not answer whether she had ever opposed Nazism or any of its measures, stating, “I don’t know how to answer that question, because to act in opposition would have meant death.”440
Then Kelley turned to the question of anti-Semitism. Reading from transcripts of her most virulent broadcasts, Mildred took the mantle of avid anti-Communist at the dawn of the Red Scare. “I have made many statements about Communism and fighting on the German side against Communism, and that is what I meant at all times.”
Kelley did not retreat an inch. “You didn’t use the word ‘Communism’ very much, did you?”
“I used the word ‘Bolshevism’ more than Communism,” she shot back.
The prosecutor’s eyes met hers. “Your specialty was the word ‘Jew,’ wasn’t it?”
Quietly Mildred admitted, “I used it quite often.”441
He challenged her assertion that she temporarily quit her job in January 1945 because of the presence of the convicted traitor, Lt. Martin James Monti.
“Just why wouldn’t you have been glad to assist or help a spy—an American spy—in working for his country in Germany?”
She searched within herself for an answer.
“I don’t like unclean people.”442
When Mildred’s testimony came to a close, John Kelley called Johannes Schmidt-Hansen as a rebuttal witness. Flown to the United States at government expense, Schmidt-Hansen was allegedly the man at Reichsradio who had demanded an oath of allegiance from Mildred in 1941. Laughlin requested that the former radio manager be brought in as a defense witness, but a lengthy interrogation by the FBI on his arrival from Germany changed that. Schmidt-Hansen took the stand and testified that he had no memory of requesting a written loyalty oath from his unruly American employee.
“Do you have any recollection of ever asking Miss Gillars to supply you with a statement or oath of allegiance to Germany?” the pros
ecutor asked.
Nervous and stammering, Schmidt-Hansen replied, “I do not recollect having asked—”
Kelley interrupted the witness and demanded a straight yes or no answer.
“No,” the thin, shaking German replied.
Laughlin sensed that the witness had been intimidated. Under cross-examination, Schmidt-Hansen’s certainty withered as he admitted that the incident might have indeed happened. It had been ten years since the event, he explained, and “it is impossible for any human to recall exactly such details. I do not deny that it might have been a matter of routine…a form letter for security reasons.”443 Schmidt-Hansen also claimed that he could not remember if he discussed the oath with Mildred’s colleague, Erwin Christiani.
The defense recalled Erwin Christiani to the stand to rebut Schmidt-Hansen’s testimony. A few days earlier, he had told the court of Mildred’s fateful decision to remain in Germany: “She told me there was nothing to expect for her in America but she loves America and wanted to go home. But on the other hand, she loved her work in Germany and wanted to continue because so many people thought she was so good.”
Christiani told her it was “impossible for German forces to enter the US, and Mr. Roosevelt had said that American soldiers would not fight in Europe, so I was sure there would be no war. I told her I thought she would have a better future in Germany.”444
Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany Page 23