Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany (13 page)

“[From March to July 1943] Professor Koischwitz was trying to get me away from
Sender Bremen
and to have all my time concentrated on programs to the USA. So we had many talks about it, around Deutschland House and in this coffee house.”
¹⁶⁶
The pressure on her to join the USA Zone full-time became so intense that she later described it as a constant source of discord between the couple. Koischwitz used his considerable pull within the Foreign Office eventually to outmaneuver Schmidt-Hansen.

“After long negotiations… Schmidt-Hansen finally agreed to release me from
Sender Bremen
until 8.30 in the evening. This caused a great deal of trouble in the studio because of the times,” she later remembered.
¹⁶⁷
Her schedule was frantic, finishing
Morocco Sendung
at the Deutschland House and then running over to the “Big House” to start her nightly duties for the Overseas Service.

Mildred was not the only radio broadcaster who was influenced to change loyalties as the result of a romantic liaison. Before the 1938
Anschluss
, Robert H. Best was a correspondent in Vienna for the
Chicago Tribune
and a bachelor. His engagement to an attractive Austrian woman and devout Nazi named Erna Maurer (along with disappointing career reversals) likely played a central role in his decision to remain. William L. Shirer, the CBS Radio correspondent, recalled that when American reporters were interned at Bad Nauheim during the first days of America’s involvement in the war, Best mentioned to the other internees that his fiancée owned land in Austria that she could not abandon.
¹⁶⁸

Best left Bad Nauheim and reemerged as “Mr. Guess Who,” the host of the
Best Berlin Broadcast
for
Sender Bremen
, much to the shock of all who knew him in Vienna. While interned, Best offered his services to the regime. He was interviewed by Werner Plack, a liaison responsible for recruiting English-speaking radio personalities. Several years before, Plack had briefly been an actor and wine merchant in Los Angeles and was reputed to be skilled at vetting prospective announcers. Best had been a radio correspondent for Radio Vienna, and his prior experience made him an ideal candidate for Reichsradio. This man, whose closest friend and protégé before the war was Jewish and who was never regarded as an anti-Semite by his fellow correspondents, became one of the crudest commentators on the German radio. The tone of his diatribes resulted in instances where the Foreign Office took issue with the overt, unsophisticated anti-Semitism displayed in his broadcasts.

Neither were the British immune to the charms of the
frauleins.
Norman Baille-Stewart was a British army officer who fell deeply in love with a German woman. Shortly thereafter, he offered his services to Germany as a spy. He sold military secrets during travels to Holland and Germany and was arrested in 1933. After imprisonment in the Tower of London, he was released in 1937 and fled to Germany in search of the woman he loved. He briefly broadcast for the European Service (until December 1939) and then Nazi “black” propaganda efforts from 1942 on under the sobriquet “Lancer.”

In Mildred’s case, as in the others, a German began a romantic relationship with a lonely and unattached enemy national to influence the object of their “affection” to, in the words of American journalist Dorothy Thompson, “go Nazi.” Whether these relationships were born out of romantic love or service to the Reich may never be conclusively known, but they nevertheless served as effective recruiting tools.

As Koischwitz and Midge drank coffee and made plans, the remnant of Berlin’s Jewish population served as slave labor in the city’s war production factories. Goebbels, in his role as Gauleiter of Berlin, was infuriated that his city was not yet
Judenfrei
(Jew-free) and actively pressed the Gestapo and SS to remove the remaining Jews from factory work and dispatch them to the East for extermination. The factories were to be kept running by importing Poles to replace the murdered Jews. By the beginning of 1943 there were approximately 10,000 Jews remaining in the capital working at war-related jobs. In a mass roundup, trucks went through the streets of the city and Jewish men, women and children were pulled out of their homes and workplaces for deportation. The arrests extended to the
mischling
(those whom the Reich determined were of partial-Jewish ancestry) and those married to non-Jews.

In March the regime was forced to relent on the matter of those Jews married to Gentiles, as hundreds of angry wives congregated on Rosenstrasse demanding the return of their husbands. Fearing the wrath of the female workforce that the Nazis relied on for political support and factory work, it was thought to be politically wise to release the husbands and wives of the protesters. These violent mass arrests, like so many others that preceded them, could not have gone unnoticed by the couple whose political and romantic alliance grew stronger by the day. In fact, while Berlin’s Jews were being sent to their fate, Mildred’s broadcast of May 18, 1943 stressed Jewish culpability for the war and the misfortune that had befallen America:

Mildred’s resistance to political broadcasting weakened not only because of her infatuation with Koischwitz, but also due to pressures stemming from her status as an enemy national without papers. An incident in a Berlin train station in the fall of 1942 may have played a role in her decision to yield. After a day of shopping for antiques, she walked through the station and realized that she had left her food ration coupons in a nearby coffee shop.

“I went into a phone booth and called the shop. While I was talking, I noticed people gathering around the booth. While the shopkeeper was telling me she’d found the tickets, I noticed the crowd getting larger—more and more faces appeared.
¹⁷¹
A man suddenly yelled out, ‘You can tell by her accent, she’s an American.’
¹⁷²
He tore open the door to the telephone booth and grabbed hold of my arm, and said, ‘I’m from the Gestapo, come with me.’”
¹⁷³
Frightened, she argued, “You can’t do this to me. I’m with the radio company.” Producing her Reichsradio identification card, the agent examined it, brushed it away, and proceeded to arrest her.

Recalling an earlier incident when she was accused of sabotage for neglecting to read a few lines of scripted text in her broadcast, she protested. “I told the agent that I had to call the radio station—that if I didn’t show up for the broadcast—that would be sabotage.”
¹⁷⁴
The agent allowed her to call her manager, Schmidt-Hansen. She turned the telephone over to the agent and, as they spoke, Mildred suddenly saw a man in the crowd motioning to her. Taking advantage of the confusion, the stranger grabbed her wrist and pushed her into the open doors of a departing train. Frightened and shaking, she returned to the broadcasting studio. The agent arrived at the
Rundfunkhaus
a few minutes later. After a few minutes of discussion with Schmidt-Hansen, the agent apologized to Midge and left, saying, “Well, ten times out of eleven you’re wrong, but the eleventh time you’re right.”
¹⁷⁵
The incident was a sobering reminder of the precariousness of her position in Germany and her dependence on her superiors at Reichsradio to move about freely without arrest or harassment.

While their relationship deepened, Otto Koischwitz kept a disturbing secret from his mistress. The Professor began the affair with his star announcer with the full knowledge that his wife Erna was pregnant with his fourth child. Despite the impending birth, he professed his love to Mildred in two letters from his boyhood home in Silesia. Troubled by the situation, he went away in April 1943 on a weekend trip to what he termed his “Mount Olympus”:

Koischwitz’s love may have been favored by Providence, but the fortunes of the Wehrmacht were not. The remnants of the Sixth Army surrendered at Stalingrad on February 2, 1943, and Hitler’s government declared three days of national mourning for the fallen. German cities were under attack by Allied bombers: Wilhelmshaven on January 27, Berlin on January 30 in daylight raids; Essen and the Ruhr on March 5. Even Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda machine could not disguise the desperate turn of events. The message had to be retooled to prepare the
Volk
for the sacrifices that lay ahead. Hitler, enraged by the reversals on the Eastern Front, disappeared from view. It was left to Goebbels to proclaim the new message to a carefully selected group of Nazi party loyalists at the
Berliner Sportpalast
(Sports Palace) on February 18. Known as the “Total War” speech, it set the theme for all radio propaganda for the duration of the war:

In Goebbels’ estimation, Germany would be the final defense against the Bolshevization of Europe and the destruction of Western civilization. “Total war” would require sacrifice to the last man, woman and child. There would be no turning back. “Total war” meant victory or total destruction for the German nation.

Family Affair

Not content with merely recruiting his mistress, Koischwitz did not hesitate to use his children as soldiers in the propaganda war. His eldest daughter, Stella, had been recruited as an actress in her father’s radio plays as early as 1940, playing the part of Mildred’s daughter. By early 1943, Koischwitz had cast all three of his daughters in a new show called
Seven at the Mike
with Mildred fittingly cast as Mistress of Ceremonies.

Seven at the Mike
was aimed at the wives and mothers of America. The children sang and a panel of women, including Lord Haw Haw’s wife, Margaret Cairns Joyce, discussed the social and cultural dimensions of wartime German life. Although it is not known definitively whether Erna Koischwitz knew of the romantic relationship between her husband and Midge, it is unlikely that his history of philandering had gone unnoticed at home. Nevertheless, her children were coaxed by her husband to work side by side with his paramour.