Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany (15 page)

Instead of the spacious, barracks-like quarters of the
Funkhaus,
these suburban studios were located in the cramped basement of a post office. Reichsradio personnel lived and worked out of a small inn in nearby Gussow. The major commentators of the Overseas Service were dispatched to locations across the Reich. Douglas Chandler (“Paul Revere”) and Robert H. Best were sent to Vienna. William Joyce (“Lord Haw Haw”) worked from the studios of Radio Luxembourg, transmitting his commentaries via landline for transmission to Great Britain. The already damaged Berlin broadcasting complex was hit again in a series of raids in November–December 1943—bombings that killed 2,700 Berliners and left a quarter million homeless.
¹⁹⁴

The war’s reverses were particularly devastating to Otto Koischwitz. In July, his wife Erna was killed in her hospital bed as she recovered from the tragic childbirth. The hospital was destroyed and everyone in it perished.
¹⁹⁵
His newborn son was dead. Indicted for treason in the United States, he faced the possibility of trial and execution. The widespread fame among the troops of the American woman who spoke to them nightly meant that an indictment of Axis Sally would follow. Defeat followed defeat for the
Wehrmacht
in the summer and fall of 1943. In Western Europe, the resignation of Mussolini in July was followed by the Italian surrender in September. In the East, the Germans’ last great attempt to wrest the strategic initiative from the Red Army failed with the loss of hundreds of tanks at the Battle of Kursk.

As prospects for a Nazi victory faded, it was essential that Midge put a different face on her service to Germany. She approached Koischwitz with an idea:

When Karl Schotte was sent to a concentration camp in August, Koischwitz was named to replace him as the permanent head of the USA Zone. His new status enabled him to gain the necessary approval to go to the POW camps and travel with Midge to Holland, Belgium and France. Using his influence in the Foreign Office, he obtained an alien passport (
Fremdenpass
) for Mildred in October of 1943—a highly unusual privilege for a foreign national with no papers. She had first applied for one after the US consulate retained her American passport in 1941, but she received no response. With the intervention of the newly promoted department head, her passport was granted almost a full two years later.

It was not long before Dr. Goebbels expressed his dissatisfaction with a Foreign Office employee managing the USA Zone. The Propaganda Minister demanded that O.K. cut all his ties to the Foreign Office or resign. The former professor resigned as manager to join Midge on her travels to prison camps and hospitals, recording prisoner interviews on erasable cylinders that functioned as the 1940s equivalent of magnetic recording tape. At the end of the tour, the couple brought the recordings back to
Köenigs Wusterhausen
where the completed programs were assembled with Midge providing introductory and closing comments.

It was Halloween day in a camp near Frankfurt-on-the-Oder when Midge, the Professor and two accompanying technicians had their first meeting with a group of American prisoners of war. The group had lunch with an imprisoned American corporal and some of his comrades. Mildred remembered the meal as “quite gay and friendly” as the men expressed surprise at the sound of a woman speaking English. Despite some early reluctance, a few prisoners eventually agreed to record messages. Unfortunately, the Foreign Office official who approved the trips listened to the recordings and complained about the lack of political and military content. The criticism led to the introduction of commentary at the beginning and end of each broadcast, where Midge would customize the broadcast to suit the current propaganda line.

Mildred’s radio series
Christmas Bells of 1943
debuted on the first Sunday of December and continued through the holiday season. German Radio’s Yuletide gift to GI wives and mothers was monitored by shortwave listeners in the United States and Canada. The listeners sent letters to the families relaying their words. A number of these messages reached the prisoners’ families thanks to the efforts of these dedicated hobbyists. The Foreign Office and the Reichsradio’s management viewed the Christmas offering as a propaganda success and immediately granted permission to the couple to gather interviews for a program to be called
Easter Bells of 1944
.

Holland provided a welcome refuge from the dangers of Berlin and became the couple’s favorite destination for work and play. Their first visit took place on November 29—just in time to celebrate Midge’s 43rd birthday. After a short visit to a camp in Braunschweig in January, they returned to Hilversum on February 19—this time to celebrate O.K.’s birthday. Seven months after the death of her mother, Koischwitz’s eldest daughter Stella joined the couple for a ten-day trip. The grueling treks to the prison camps and hospitals left little time to sleep, and there were signs that the strain of the past months had an effect on the Professor’s health. Koischwitz had been diagnosed with incipient tuberculosis in 1929 and the privations of war did not help his already fragile constitution. Mildred regularly petitioned Adelbert Houben, the second in command of the Overseas Service, for an advance on travel expenses. She explained later that the money was spent obtaining food for the Professor from the black market:

Houben was annoyed by her constant requests for additional funds and even asked Mildred’s friend and colleague Hans von Richter for an explanation of where the money was going. At the time, Midge was earning a combined sum that rivaled only the salary of Dr. Anton Winkelnkemper, the head of the entire Overseas Service who reported directly to Goebbels. In the Netherlands, she was able to obtain enough food to sustain her beloved Professor, but by the time she returned to Germany she was “broke as usual.”
¹⁹⁸

Three weeks before Easter, the two broadcasters traveled to Pomerania to visit an
Arbeitskommando
(work detail) where twenty Americans were working on a large German estate. The visitors from Reichsradio dined with the wife of the estate owner and then went out to the barracks to visit the prisoners’ quarters, which Mildred cagily described as “bohemian.” Although this visit to the farm was reportedly a pleasant experience, it was a trip to the main camp in March 1944 that brought Mildred Gillars face to face with the anger and resentment of the men she entertained.

Stalag IIB

On an autobahn one and a half miles west of the city of Hammerstein sat one of the most brutal prisoner of war camps in Germany: Stalag IIB. Renowned for its cruelty, the camp was reeling from the execution of eight American prisoners in late 1943 for an “attempted escape.” American witnesses at the scene described the incident as cold-blooded murder rather than an escape attempt. Two of the dead soldiers were thrown into the latrine where they remained decomposing in the sun for days as a warning to the other prisoners.
¹⁹⁹

Food rations were minimal, with each prisoner receiving 300 grams of bread and 500 grams of potatoes per day. Twice a week, they were given 300 grams of meat, 20 grams of margarine and a minimal amount of cheese once a week. The food was distributed once at midday with only ersatz coffee for breakfast. Only Red Cross food parcels—one per prisoner per week—kept the men from utter starvation. At war’s end, the US War Department cited the camp’s treatment of American prisoners as “worse… than at any other camp established for American POWs before the Battle of the Bulge. Harshness at the
Stalag
deteriorated into outright brutality and murder on some of the
Kommandos
. Beatings of Americans on
Kommandos
by their German overseers were too numerous to list but records indicate that 10 Americans in work detachments were shot to death.”
²⁰⁰

Master Sergeant Robert Ehalt was Adjutant to the Camp Officer at
Stalag
IIB in March 1944. Ehalt, taken prisoner at Anzio three months earlier, walked into the camp office to find Medical Officer Robert Capparell joined by a “Teutonic-looking” man and a woman. The man and woman were seeking recorded interviews with the prisoners for a special Easter broadcast. The man was introduced to the Americans as the editor of “O.K.” magazine. (“O.K.” or
Overseas Kid
magazine was a four to six page broadsheet edited by Koischwitz aimed at Allied prisoners of war and distributed throughout the German camps beginning in March 1943.)

Mildred did not identify herself, and the American soldiers were immediately suspicious. She made no secret that she wanted the prisoners to say that the Germans were treating them well and giving them adequate food. After chatting with the officers for several minutes, she told them that she was born in Maine and had lived in Greenwich Village before the war. When Ehalt and Capparell asked her directly if she was Sally from the
Sally and Phil
show on the German radio, she quickly changed the subject. (That show, aka
Jerry’s Calling
, featured the woman who would become known as the Rome Axis Sally—Rita Luisa Zucca.)

Convinced that the woman before them was none other than Axis Sally, Ehalt refused to permit the men to cooperate without first obtaining permission from the senior American officer in the region. They made a call to Colonel Drake, who was interned at
Offlag 64
in Poland. A medical officer was called in to help verify that the voice on the line was indeed that of the colonel. While the Professor and the medical officer were speaking to Colonel Drake, Ehalt and Capparell engaged in small talk with the evasive woman. Annoyed that she kept referring to “we Americans” and “us Americans,” Capparell asked Mildred why she was freely walking around if she was such a good American. She only replied that she was an “idealist.”
²⁰¹
She noted that the conditions at the camp were not good and told them that she would do what she could to improve them.

Koischwitz returned after a few minutes and told Ehalt that Colonel Drake said that he would leave it up to the US camp leadership to decide whether or not to participate in the recordings. Ehalt made the final decision and flatly refused. Koischwitz exploded in anger, grabbed his bag of equipment and announced that they were leaving. As they walked through a barracks holding over 250 American prisoners, the men howled, catcalled and shouted obscenities at Mildred and Koischwitz. In the midst of this torrent of abuse, one soldier handed her a gift—a carton of Chesterfield cigarettes. Thanking the soldier, she opened the box only to find it filled with horse manure. Revolted, she threw the “gift” to the ground and turned to the screaming prisoners saying “What a bunch of ungrateful people these American people are!”
²⁰²

Despite the fracas at Stalag IIB, their travels eventually yielded enough interviews to provide several programs for the
Easter Bells
show. On Easter Sunday, Mildred spent the entire day in the small makeshift studio in the post office basement assembling 28 programs of interviews with captured servicemen for future use. She described the day in an idyllic light:

The widowed Professor painted in the peace of Mildred’s room as Germany placed its hopes in an Atlantic Wall of steel and iron to halt an Allied invasion of France. It was April 19, 1944, and D-Day was less than eight weeks away.

Medical Reports

In late 1943, the German High Command requested that the Overseas Service broadcast medical reports of captured and injured Allied fliers shot down over Germany and German-occupied territory. In the hope of Allied reciprocation and propaganda gains, the name, service number and type of injury of the wounded were broadcast, as well as a description of their condition. The shows would highlight the humanitarian efforts of those German doctors and nurses who saved the lives of the captured airmen. Although the announcement of the names of three captured prisoners of war was standard boilerplate at the end of each English newscast since the beginning of hostilities, it was the first time that the wounded were used as a propaganda tool. Like a carrot dangled at the beginning of each broadcast, the news announcer held out the possibility of hearing the name of a loved one in return for not turning the dial each evening.