She limited her comments to another declaration of her innocence: “There is no doubt in my mind that I received an unfair trial,” she said. Her voice trailed off as if she finally recognized the futility of her protests. “It all happened so long ago…” she mused.532 Nevertheless, the 66-year-old seemed content with her obscurity:
Miss Gillars appeared at peace with the world. The tiny lines around her eyes were scars of laughter. She was dressed simply—a black skirt with a three-buttoned over jacket and white blouse. She wore just a touch of makeup and her grey, upswept hair was kept in place with a comb. She asked that no picture be taken of her.533
The school’s principal, Sister Mary Assumpta, told Spicer of the positive influence her infamous employee had on her students, remarking “She is definitely a good influence on the girls. She has developed their taste for art and literature.”534
In her first seven years at the convent, her salary had increased from $30 to $100 per month. Her duties expanded as well. By the late 1960s, Mildred was teaching English, German and French, piano, drama and choral music. On Saturdays, she taught piano at the Cathedral to inner city children. But the convent and the Order were facing challenging times. In 1961, the convent had an average of 30 high school-age girls in attendance, but the reforms of the Second Vatican Council and the loosening morality of American life took its toll on the Order of the Poor Child Jesus. By 1968, the number of high school girls interested in religious life attending the school fell to 11.
That year, Mildred suffered a detached retina and her doctor recommended immediate surgery. As local surgeons could only promise a 66% chance of success, she requested to see a California doctor who reattached retinas through a new method—laser technology. The doctor, profiled in National Geographic magazine, claimed a 90% success rate with the technique.
Her finances, precarious as always, got a much needed boost when her probation officer secured her Maine birth certificate and encouraged her to apply for Social Security and Medicare. A visit to the benefits office revealed that she had $450 in retroactive benefits coming—money that would be essential for her trip to the West Coast. In June 1968, she traveled to Palo Alto, California where she underwent successful laser surgery. She recovered in San Francisco, staying with a longtime friend, Sister Mary Clarice. Through that summer, she earned extra money babysitting or tutoring students recommended by the local nuns.535 In the autumn she returned to Columbus for the new school year but first stopped in Beckley, West Virginia to see her prison chaplain, Father Thomas Kerrigan.
Redemption
Sunday, June 10 1973 was commencement day at Ohio Wesleyan University. The audience was startled to see a 72-year-old woman with a deeply lined face and serene smile dressed in cap and gown. When her name was announced, she grinned broadly as she walked up to receive her degree at long last. It was an education that had an interregnum of fifty years, broken when a headstrong girl dashed off to Cleveland to begin what she hoped would be a stellar career as a stage actress.
That Sunday, most did not recognize the name of the scorned traitor of yesteryear. After the discord of the Vietnam and Watergate eras, it might not have mattered. University President Tom Wenzlau shook her hand and smiled. The University did not formally announce her graduation, but the wire services and the evening newscasts covered it uncritically. There was no public outcry. Walter Winchell had died the year before—a shell of the Red-baiting, flag-waving columnist who had flagellated Axis Sally, Tokyo Rose and countless others on a weekly basis. Drew Pearson, the columnist who supplied prosecutor Lamar Caudle with former POWs to testify against Axis Sally, passed away in 1969. After the graduation ceremony, one editorial writer wrote charitably of Axis Sally’s “redemption”: “Hers is a story of penance, reparation, and now, deserved joy and forgiveness from others.”536
Mildred attended classes at several local institutions in order to complete her degree. One of her teachers at Otterbein College was Senior Lecturer Robert Boyer, who gradually became aware of his senior student’s checkered past:
It was a rather slow process. At first, there were just some hints that she had been in Berlin when Americans were not in Berlin for the most part. That she had served some time in what she called the “ladies finishing school,” which I found later, was Alderson prison for women in West Virginia. Then finally, she told me one day she was being given a degree from Ohio Wesleyan—it was then that she got a little bit of publicity. I actually saw her on the Walter Cronkite evening news and was quite surprised, although, as I say, there had been hints.537
For the most part, the old woman was unapologetic about her past actions in Germany. In time, Mildred explained to Boyer the factors that led to her decision to remain in Germany:
[Mildred] lived apparently rather an impoverished life. I think it is important to know that at the middle of the war perhaps 1942, 1943, she was making the equivalent of $1,000 a month from foreign broadcasting for her work. She lived in a very elegant apartment and had many, what we would consider luxuries. And so to get out from under what she had started. She was being threatened by the Gestapo, so I never got the idea that she was ideologically a Nazi—a hardened Nazi, if you will.538
At the age of 74, she moved out of the convent to an apartment house on Broadmeadows Boulevard near Ohio State University. Mildred tutored language students from nearby Bishop Watterson High School.
Jim Dury was teaching German, American History and French in the 1980s when it came to his attention that a local woman was offering her services as a language tutor. At first, he did not know the true identity of the “nice old lady” providing a service to his students, but eventually a colleague pulled him aside:
A fellow teacher with whom I worked with as coach of the school’s inter-scholastic quiz team told me that she had run across Miss Gillars name in a question: “By what better name do we know Mildred Gillars? Axis Sally—needless to say, we were astounded.
The tutoring was a major help to my students—bringing them from D’s to A’s. She was also a very cultured and intellectual woman. She exposed my students to German music and culture. I remember one student being amazed that she did crosswords in German.539
After a number of chats about her tutoring, Dury discreetly asked about her years in Germany and posed what likely was the most uncomfortable question of all:
Once I uncovered her past, I did on one occasion that I remember ask her how she happened to be in Germany during the war and she responded vaguely about a man she was involved with at the time—I believe a German officer.
I also once obliquely asked how the Germans could not have known what was happening to their Jewish (and other) neighbors and fellow citizens. I remember only a short, and somewhat rueful, “we didn’t know” answer.540
With no car or telephone at first, she surrounded herself with books and keepsakes, and regularly tended to a small flower garden. Colleen Wiley and her daughter Iris lived in the same apartment building and eventually became friends with Mildred in the 1980s. Neither mother nor daughter knew of their elderly neighbor’s notorious reputation until after her death. Iris recalled that Miss Gillars was generous with her time, helping the high school students raise money for school activities through paper drives. Once, Mildred brought the Wiley family a gift—a homemade chocolate cake made with sauerkraut. She told them that the ground sauerkraut kept the cake moist—a baking tip she likely picked up in Germany.541 Her apartment was “book lined… crowded with knickknacks and old drawings,” one visitor noted, reminding Iris of “a little European flat” full of books and art.542
Unlike Iva Toguri D’Aquino (Tokyo Rose), who publicly and successfully obtained a Presidential pardon in 1977, Axis Sally never sought one. As she always believed in her innocence, she saw no reason to request clemency or express remorse. Closed to questions, each inquiry was met with the same refrain: “No questions at all.”543 Her refusal to talk was legend in the local media. One of her parole officers said in 1977, �
�[It] has been a running battle for 15 years. She’s never given an interview that I know of. Even to give her side.”544 One Ohio columnist, Mike Harden, said that although Axis Sally refused his repeated interview requests, she did make a book recommendation in 1983: “She suggested that I read a certain book about a woman who shoots a journalist who keeps hounding her.”545
In 1979, Axis Sally was released from parole—bringing more than thirty years of internment, incarceration and probation to an end. Her friend Robert Boyer recalled that day:
She received a letter from the State Department stating that her parole was over and that they no longer had any interest in her and so forth. She was rather amused—one of the lines in the letter stated that given the fact that they believed she probably would not repeat her offense, they were releasing her from parole and also from the fine. She was rather amused by that.
She asked a strange question at that point. She said, “Do you think I am a citizen again?” And I said I don’t know whether you ever really lost your citizenship. I said why don’t you call the State Department or someone who would know that kind of law? She never did as far as I know.546
In 1988, Mildred Gillars was diagnosed with metastatic colon cancer. Admitted to Grant Medical Center for inpatient treatment, she eventually demanded to return to her apartment. Her neighbor Colleen Wiley checked on her regularly but she was so troubled by Mildred’s weak and frail state that she phoned the doctor. The physician admitted that Mildred was much too ill to be left alone.547 Shortly after, she took a turn for the worse and returned to the hospital.
At 3 a.m. on June 25, 1988, Mildred Gillars passed away. Her death certificate listed her occupation simply as “Teacher.”548 A friend, James Sauer, announced that there would be no public funeral service for the woman the world knew as Axis Sally. On June 28, a small group of friends attended her burial at St. Joseph’s Cemetery. “She was a charity case,” the cemetery caretaker recalled.549 Impoverished most of her life, she remained so at its end. All of her earthly possessions (furniture, clothes, books, etc.) amounted to an estate worth only $3,194.16. All money from the estate was used to pay for her eight doctors, rent and hospital care.550
To this day, no head or footstone marks her grave. Even in death, the woman who drank from fame’s bitterest cup demanded privacy.
A week after Mildred’s death, her obituary appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, and on the wire services. After the turmoil of the Vietnam War, Jane Fonda’s 1972 propaganda broadcasts from Hanoi, and the student movement’s overt support of the Viet Cong as American forces fought, the crime and punishment meted out to Axis Sally seemed like a quaint relic of a bygone national morality. The Times chose to focus on the style of the woman rather than the substance of her crimes:
Her 1949 trial attracted enormous public attention as much for the soap opera quality of Miss Gillars’ life as for her crime. At her trial, Miss Gillars fascinated the public and the press with her flamboyance and cool self-possession. She cut a theatrical figure in tight fitting black dress, long silver hair and a deep tan. She had scarlet lips and nails.… She sent a frisson through the trial when she described her obsessive love with Mr. Koischwitz, who was married.551
The “newspaper of record” repeated the false assertion that Mildred moved to Berlin “to marry a German citizen,” who it misidentified as Otto Koischwitz, “a former professor at Hunter College in New York.”552
Back in Ohio, Colleen and Iris Wiley were shocked to learn that their elderly neighbor was one of the most infamous women of World War II. Interviewed by the Columbus Dispatch shortly after Mildred’s death, Mrs. Wiley was effusive about her friend. “She was brilliant. She spoke and taught French and German. She was a great reader. She loved to go to the Ohio Theatre and see the old movies. She was interested in about everything. We thought the world of her.”553
In Ashtabula, another woman who thought the world of Mildred Gillars opened the local newspaper to discover that her half-sister had died. Edna Mae had neither seen nor heard from Mildred since 1961.
In 1995, Edna Mae gave an interview to Carl Feather of the Ashtabula Star-Beacon. The still mentally agile former dance teacher had not come to terms with the passing of her sister: “It doesn’t seem possible that she could be dead,” she told Feather. One final time, the elderly woman came to Mildred’s defense and tried to explain why the government, the judge, the jury and the press treated her with so much malice compared to other “radio traitors” of the day: “I think perhaps it could have been the hotsy-totsy air she had. She just thought she was a perfect person.”554
“The story should be told…”
Within weeks, former students and friends of Axis Sally began to share their memories and reveal what they were told about her days in Hitler’s Germany. Most friends and acquaintances did not pry into her past, but over the years, a story emerged that was part fact, part fiction, and tailor-made for American consumption. A letter to the editors of the Columbus Dispatch from Mary M. Badders of Lawrence, Ohio shed some light on the tale she told. Starkly different from a trial testimony that few were likely to research and even more unlikely to find, the story tied up the loose, embarrassing ends of her life; and made her past actions and beliefs somewhat palatable to those who discovered or knew about her past. Collaborationists in Vichy France, the Nazi conquered lands of Eastern Europe, and German war criminals constructed such exculpatory stories to argue their innocence or ignorance, insist on their doubts and even opposition to Hitlerism, in an attempt to make each day “livable” in a world haunted by the deaths of six million Jews and countless dead and wounded. Mrs. Badders’ letter gives a summary of Axis Sally’s story:
Recently, Mildred Gillars, aka Axis Sally, died. As one who knew her, I would like to share a brief portion of her story.
When World War II broke out in Europe, Gillars had been living in Europe for a number of years and was engaged to be married to an officer in the German army. This man opposed Adolf Hitler and was imprisoned. Gillars was also arrested and instructed that unless she cooperated with the Nazis, her fiancé would be shot. Unknown to her, he had already been killed.
Thinking she was buying his life, she did as she was told. I am not trying to justify what she did. It was terribly wrong. But it does point out, though, that without absolutes of right and wrong firmly established in our minds, we listen to our hearts, we practice situational ethics and we make horrible mistakes.
The beautiful part of this story, however, is that during the same time in Germany, there was an order of Catholic nuns who were also persecuted by the Nazis. Some of the nuns escaped to France. From there, they traveled to England and later to the United States. When Gillars was in prison, these same nuns, who should have hated anyone associated with the Nazis, faithfully visited her and prayed for her.
When she was released from prison, they gave her a job at their convent school (I was a student at that school). Through their efforts, she was converted to Christ because they loved their Lord enough to forgive, to pray for an enemy, and to do good to those who persecuted them.
I do not justify Gillars’ actions, but I do feel the story should be told.555
Robert Boyer spent many hours with Mildred in the last years of her life. He recalled one instance where the subject of the extermination of Europe’s Jews came up. It was met with an uncharacteristic and uncomfortable defensiveness:
I can only remember one occasion in which we were riding in the car and the radio was on and there must have been something about the Holocaust or the Nazi period on and she turned to me and rather emphatically said, “You know, we didn’t know about all of that,” meaning apparently the destruction of the Jews and the extermination camps and so forth. And I was rather taken aback by it, and she went on to say, “When the news is controlled you don’t know what’s really going on.” Now I don’t particularly buy that argument—but that’s the only time I heard her give a defense for what she had done.
<
br /> It’s the excuse that I have heard from many, many Germans who lived through that period in Germany and that is they claim not to have known it is difficult to understand how they could not know just from the evidence of their eyes, when all the Jews disappear from your town you must make certain conclusions, but I’m sure there was a certain amount of intentional blindness. 556
Nevertheless, Robert Boyer explained that his friend displayed a certain pride in surviving the many misfortunes of her life and took comfort in friends and faith:
She lived a simple life, but a good life. She had many friends, I think, all of whom knew her situation and I think she was quite proud of the fact that she had come through it all—and was not broken.557
Epilogue
MAY 2010
On a grassy hillside in Lockbourne, Ohio is the unmarked grave of one of the most reviled names in American history. Surrounded by veterans of that struggle, she maintains her privacy in death. Not even a simple number marks the lot where she lies. Only a gusting wind breaks the silence of that common ground where a statue of the Holy Family keeps watch over the victors and the vanquished. In Ohio, Mildred Gillars came full circle—back to the land where her rootless childhood finally settled into a few happy, hopeful years. As a young lady, her thirst for notoriety and the stage set her on a path that led to desperation and poverty.
In Berlin, she finally found rewarding employment—first, as a film critic and then as a radio announcer for the Nazi state. Willfully blind to the suffering of Berlin’s Jews and the approaching clouds of war, she chose to remain in Germany. When she experienced success unlike anything she had ever known in America, that good fortune reinforced her belief in the wisdom of her decision to stay. When the war claimed the life of her German fiancé, she descended into an adulterous affair with her radio manager—a naturalized American indicted for treason. His death in 1944 snuffed out her last chance to become a German citizen by marriage. At the war’s end, she was unmarried, impoverished, alone and without a country.
Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany Page 28