Villains, Scoundrels, and Rogues

by Paul Martin

  As an employee of the RRG—the German state radio system—Gillars attempted to foment discontent among American servicemen stationed in Europe and North Africa. She told them they could never defeat the Third Reich, that their leaders were inept, and that they were certain to be killed or maimed. She tried to make soldiers homesick by suggesting that their wives and girlfriends were cheating on them while they were off fighting. She sought to undermine support for the war back home by telling American women that their loved ones were risking their lives for nothing. Cruelest of all were her interviews with POWs, in which she tried to make it appear that captured Americans were being treated well by the Nazis.5

  No matter which tack she took, Gillars had little chance of persuading anyone that opposing Hitler was wrong. Since 1938, the world had seen too many examples of unprovoked Nazi aggression. By 1942, the truth was emerging about Hitler’s systematic slaughter of Jews and other so-called inferior peoples. By supporting Hitler’s madness, Gillars damned herself in the eyes of her fellow Americans, even though her broadcasts had little effect on morale. Soldiers laughed at her clumsy propaganda efforts and only tuned in because she played popular jazz and swing music between her monologues. Nevertheless, she would pay the price for her disloyalty after the war, when she was brought back to America to stand trial for treason.

  Tall and slender, with long silver hair, Gillars was a striking woman—not beautiful, but stylish, and with a self-assurance some saw as arrogance. A photograph taken in 1946 shows her sitting on a cot after her arrest in Berlin. She seems perfectly at ease, holding a cigarette in one hand, her legs crossed in a slightly provocative pose. She is gazing at the camera with a pensive look, as if she were sizing up her captors and not the other way around. Gillars came by that aplomb through her theatrical training and her years as a struggling actress. Her whole life, in fact, was a struggle, a prolonged effort to find happiness and success. Most of the time, she failed at both.

  Born in Portland, Maine, in November 1900, Gillars had a turbulent childhood. When she was six, her mother left a violent, alcoholic husband, taking her daughter with her. In 1908, Gillars’s mother remarried, and a few years later the family moved to Ohio. Gillars’s stepfather turned out to be a drunkard as well and may have abused his stepdaughter.6 Following high school, Gillars enrolled at Ohio Wesleyan University to study drama. She took classes in literature, oratory, and music, winning praise for her acting in student theatrical productions.

  An indifferent student, Gillars failed to complete her degree. In 1923, she moved to New York City to pursue her dream of becoming an actress. Although she talked about lofty artistic goals, the best she could manage were a few parts with small-time touring companies and vaudeville revues. Her career settled into a pattern of frustration and mediocrity. At times, she was destitute and close to starvation. She was even taken into police custody for a publicity stunt related to an obscure movie.7

  Hoping to improve her prospects, Gillars traveled to Paris at the age of twenty-eight. After a short stay, she returned to New York, only to find life even harder in the wake of the disastrous stock market crash of 1929. In 1933, she headed back across the Atlantic. She ended up in Algiers, working for a dressmaker for several months. By the summer of 1934, she was in Berlin, where she found employment as a translator and English instructor at the Berlitz Language School. She also did some freelance translating for a German film studio and wrote movie and theater reviews. Later, she served as an actress’s personal assistant, a job she lost in 1939 following Germany’s invasion of Poland, the catalyst for World War II.

  During the early part of the war, Gillars made a decision that would set the course for the rest of her life: she accepted a job as an announcer with the RRG. She would offer several rationales for that decision during her postwar trial, although the real reason was obvious: her long-stymied desire for professional recognition.

  Gillars’s career as a Nazi broadcaster began in 1940. At first, she had no propaganda role. As an announcer, she earned 180 marks a month, at a time when the top American employed by German radio was being paid 2,500 marks.8 After just a few months, however, Gillars had her own program. Going by the name Midge, she played music interspersed with cultural commentary. She also began appearing in radio dramas. In this cradle of evil, Gillars was finding the artistic outlet she craved.

  In the spring of 1941, the American embassy in Berlin began encouraging US citizens to return home. Most of them did, although Mildred Gillars wasn’t among them. She said later that an official at the American consulate had confiscated her passport, leaving her stranded in Germany. Another explanation she offered was that she’d fallen in love with naturalized German citizen Paul Karlson, who told her he wouldn’t marry her unless she stayed in Germany.9 The marriage never took place, though, since Karlson was soon killed in action.

  America had yet to enter the war when Gillars decided to remain in Berlin. At the time, England was the main target of German propaganda. While turncoats such as William Joyce—popularly known as Lord Haw Haw—aimed their fascist, anti-Semitic rants at Britain, other radio propagandists spent their time trying to persuade America to stay out of the war. That all changed on December 7, 1941, when Japan, Germany’s Axis ally, attacked the US fleet at Pearl Harbor.

  Gillars later claimed that when she heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor, she broke down, criticizing Germany’s alliance with Japan in front of her fellow employees. “I lost all discretion,” she said.10 Knowing that such comments could send her to prison, she allegedly signed a German loyalty oath in order to continue working, although no such document was ever found. Following that dramatic episode, her career headed in a new and sinister direction.

  In 1942, Gillars began a close association with Max Otto Koischwitz, a naturalized American citizen who’d taught German literature at New York City’s Hunter College before the war. The temperamental, pro-Nazi Koischwitz had left his teaching position in 1939 and returned to Germany. When he and Gillars met in Berlin, Koischwitz was a member of the German Foreign Office and a rising figure in Nazi radio operations.

  Despite having a wife and three daughters, Koischwitz began an affair with the socially isolated Gillars. It was a symbiotic relationship. Gillars won steady promotion at the RRG, and Koischwitz reeled in a female propagandist with a smooth, sexy voice. Gillars’s salary rose to 3,000 marks a month, making her Germany’s highest paid broadcaster.11 She convinced herself that everything she did from then on was because of her love for Koischwitz. “Of course I loved him,” she would testify at her trial. “I consider Professor Koischwitz to have been my destiny.”12

  That destiny led her to partner with Koischwitz in the production of “Home Sweet Home,” “Midge at the Mike,” and other propaganda programs. Koischwitz wrote the scripts, and Gillars read them convincingly. Although she later claimed that Koischwitz had wielded mystical powers over her, her on-air delivery certainly made it sound like she agreed with what he’d written. If not, she was a much better actress than any of her former employers in American theater had given her credit for.

  “Do the British love us?” Gillars asked American listeners in May 1943. “Well, I should say not! But we are fighting for them. We are shedding our good young blood for this ‘kike’ war, for this British war.”13 The words may have sprung from her anti-Semitic lover’s demented mind, but Gillars spoke them, as she did in a July 1943 broadcast: “The Jews . . . have got us into this war. . . . The Jews are sending our men over to Europe to fight so that their money bags will get filled.”14 And this in October 1943: “This is no war between Germany and America . . . but a war between the Jews and the Gentiles.”15 It was hate-filled tripe, but Gillars spewed it out on cue.

  Koischwitz’s maddest creation was Vision of Invasion, a radio play that aired on May 11, 1944, shortly before Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy. Meant to demoralize Allied troops, the play graphically depicted the bloody horrors that awaited the invaders at the h
ands of the vaunted Germany army. Playing the distraught mother of an American soldier, Gillars lamented her son’s death, which she could miraculously detect from afar. “The dead bells of Europe’s bombed cathedrals are tolling the death knell of America’s youth,” she moaned.16 As theater, the play was dreck, but as propaganda, it may have had some slight effect, if any of the anxious, frightened young soldiers preparing for the invasion chanced to hear it.

  In August 1944, Koischwitz succumbed to tuberculosis and heart failure, knocking the props from beneath Mildred Gillars’s tenuous stardom. The Third Reich was entering its death throes as well. Gillars continued broadcasting right up to the eve of Germany’s surrender in May 1945. Afterward, she went into hiding. When American forces rolled into Berlin, they put up wanted posters bearing Gillars’s photograph. On March 15, 1946, agents arrested the propagandist at a boardinghouse where she was living under an assumed name. She’d been selling off her few remaining possessions to get by, leaving a trail that authorities were able to follow.

  Gillars spent more than two years under detention in Germany before she was flown back to the United States. Finally, on January 24, 1949, the forty-eight-year-old Gillars walked into the US District Court in Washington, DC, to stand trial for treason, a charge that carried a potential death penalty. In keeping with Gillars’s background, the seven-week proceeding was pure theater. Time magazine gave a snarky description of her grand entrance: “Her silver-gray hair hung in a shoulder-length bob as she entered the Washington courtroom. She wore her unfashionably short dress with an ingenue air. There was a peacock blue scarf at her throat, her long, horse face was dazzlingly tan, her mouth and nails crimson.”17

  The prosecution produced a number of ex-employees of the Nazi radio service who identified Gillars as Axis Sally. Gillars’s immediate supervisor, Adelbert Houben, swore that “no foreigner was forced to work” for the RRG.18 Several former American POWs who’d been interviewed by Gillars said that she’d told them she was working for the Red Cross in order to gain their trust.19 The jury listened to hours of taped propaganda programs, including the dreadful radio play Vision of Invasion. (After listening to Gillars’s histrionics in that broadcast, one writer said that she deserved to be convicted if only to keep her from ever again appearing on radio.)20

  When it came time for Gillars to testify, she threw out a number of defenses, embellished with tears and studied gestures. She claimed that she’d never been disloyal . . . that she didn’t believe any of the propaganda she’d broadcast . . . that she was merely trying to entertain American troops . . . that she’d only cooperated with her Nazi bosses out of fear. (“You could not just go around saying, ‘I don’t want to do this’ and ‘I don’t want to do that.’”)21 She grasped at the notion that she couldn’t be prosecuted for treason because she was a German subject. She had no proof of that, but a similar defense had worked for another wartime propagandist, Italian-American Rita Zucca. (Zucca had legally renounced her US citizenship before she began broadcasting to American troops in Italy. Confusingly, Zucca was also referred to as Axis Sally.)

  Gillars’s flimsiest excuse was that she’d done it all for love. With a heaving breast, she said that her deep bond with Max Otto Koischwitz had led her to reluctantly submit to his pressure to engage in propaganda directed at Americans.22 As she and her attorney framed it, the manipulative professor had taken an innocent radio hostess and forced her into becoming a mouthpiece for the Nazis. How could a weak, love-besotted woman have resisted, Gillars seemed to be saying. All she needed to do to complete the scene was to hold the back of her hand to her brow. (Gillars actually swooned at one point in the trial.)

  Her testimony was entertaining—if at times delusional—but the jury wasn’t buying Gillars’s dramatic pretensions. Neither was the press. Time said that “she slipped into the role of a foolish gentlewoman as though it were a loose kimono, got a handkerchief within easy dabbing distance of her eyes, and set out to explain that she had been true to the red, white & blue all the time.”23 New Yorker columnist Richard H. Rovere wrote that, while she was “determined not to destroy the illusion of herself as a woman of mystery, glamour, and intrigue,” she seemed more like “a woman who has been fighting an uphill battle to make a living from a dress shop in Queens.”24

  On March 10, 1949, the jury found Gillars guilty on a single count of treason in connection with her participation in the Vision of Invasion broadcast. On March 25, she received a sentence of ten to thirty years in prison and a $10,000 fine.25 In August 1950, after losing her appeals, Gillars was incarcerated in West Virginia’s Federal Reformatory for Women (the same facility in which Japanese-American Iva Toguri—also known as Tokyo Rose—was held following her conviction for wartime propaganda in the Pacific).

  Gillars busied herself in prison with gardening and crafts, and she also led the Protestant and Catholic choirs. Though she wasn’t raised a Catholic, Gillars had spent a short time in a convent as a child. While in prison, she converted to Catholicism, and after she was paroled in July 1961, she returned to Ohio to teach music, drama, and languages at a convent school. She eventually completed enough college credits to earn her undergraduate degree in speech from Ohio Wesleyan University. She spent her final years in seclusion, passing away in Columbus in June 1988 at the age of eighty-seven. She was interred, possibly at her own request, in an unmarked grave.

  By any measure, Mildred Gillars led a sorrowful life, although hers was a lowercase tragedy. As author Nathaniel Weyl observed shortly after Gillars’s conviction, “She was not a very important figure in the scheme of things. She drifted into treason rather than deliberately seeking it. She was not the sort of woman who cares passionately for ideas or who is capable of spirit-destroying hatred. She was merely greedy and her greed increased as her time ran short.”26

  Throughout her trial, Gillars posed as a worldly sophisticate despite her history as a serial failure. In her own country, she’d been a nobody, but in Nazi Germany she was a rarity—a well-spoken, theatrically trained American female who was willing to set aside her loyalty to her country for money and fame. When the prosecutor pressed her on why she didn’t go home in 1941, Gillars left no doubt as to her reason for staying in Nazi Germany. “Go home to what?” she asked incredulously. “To poverty again?”27

  Even if Gillars truly was reluctant to engage in propaganda, as she claimed, she’d still agreed to work for a monstrous regime. In the end, her turn as a radio star was a mirage, a desperate attempt to rise above a lifetime of commonness. This lonely, frustrated woman bargained away her honor for a pittance and paid for her moment of acclaim with lasting infamy.

  Maggie and Kate Fox

  Maggie Fox (left) and Kate Fox

  Icy blasts swirled around the tiny frame farmhouse on a bleak March evening in 1848. The weathered story-and-a-half dwelling sat in a snow-covered field in the hamlet of Hydesville, New York, a farming community just east of Rochester, midway between the Finger Lakes and Lake Ontario. Inside the home, the Fox family—John, Margaret, and their two daughters, Maggie and Kate, huddled in the dark beneath their blankets and quilts, shivering from the cold and, perhaps, from the desolate night sounds as well. The howling wind seemed to carry the voices of the dead as it probed the cracks and crevices of the old wooden house. If spirits were to walk abroad to meddle in the affairs of man, it would be on a night like this.

  The family shared the same bedroom in the tiny home, with John and Margaret sleeping in one bed and Maggie, age fourteen, and Kate, eleven, in another. The two girls snuggled together for warmth, an easy camaraderie for the sisters, who were seldom far apart at any time. The dark-haired Fox girls were a fetching pair: Maggie, plump and pixie cute, and Kate, slender, solemn, and ethereal, with huge, soulful eyes. Maggie and Kate were the only Fox children remaining at home, their four older siblings having grown up and moved on. Perhaps that was why the sisters felt the loneliness of their isolated dwelling so keenly. It would have been nice to have more friends
around to dispel the monotony. As the girls whispered beneath their blankets, they may have been discussing an ingenious way to add a bit of fun to their lives.

  The Fox family had moved into their rented home the previous December, while awaiting the completion of their new house a short distance away. The winter was especially harsh that year, trapping the family indoors for much of the day, the long nights sending them to bed at an early hour. Those nights seemed to stretch forever, black and silent except for the ghostly voices carried on the wind. Maybe there were spirits hovering about the house—who could say? That question seemed to find an answer in the middle of March, when a new night sound startled the Fox family into alertness. Shortly after the four had retired, they heard distinct rapping noises, as if someone were knocking on the floor, walls, and ceiling of their bedroom.1 Mrs. Fox implored her husband to investigate, although a search of the house revealed no possible source of the noises.

  The rapping sounds continued every night for the next two weeks. On the night of March 31—the eve of April Fool’s Day—Mrs. Fox sent her husband to ask a neighbor family to come witness the strange noises. Mr. Fox returned home with their neighbor Mary Redfield. Mrs. Redfield listened to the rapping sounds, which appeared on que. Mrs. Fox and her daughters had recently begun interacting with the rapping noises, convinced that they came from the spirit of a murdered peddler who’d been buried in their cellar (itinerant peddlers were often the focus of ghost stories in that period). Mrs. Fox asked the “spirit” a series of questions, to which it responded with a rap for “yes” and silence for “no.” Other questions required the spirit to answer with a series of raps: How old is Maggie? Fourteen raps. How old is Kate? Eleven raps.2

  The incredulous Mrs. Redfield immediately fetched her husband, who invited several other neighbors. Before the night was over, a crowd of villagers filled the Fox home. The next night, several hundred people stopped by to witness the spectacle, which Mrs. Fox attributed to her daughters’ affinity with the spirit world, since the rapping only occurred in their presence. Maggie and Kate were delighted to play their parts, asking their resident shade numerous questions on behalf of their neighbors: Who was your murderer? A former resident of the house named John Bell. Is there a heaven? Yes. Are the spirits of our dead friends and loved ones around us? Yes.3