Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany (33 page)

Desperate to avoid returning to the privations of occupied Germany, the former colleagues of Chandler, Best and Gillars were more than willing to buttress the government’s case. The hypocrisy was not lost on some observers. “Nuremberg had a low opinion of Nazi officials, but it turns out they are expert, reliable and lovable while working for the prosecution.”
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Even Walter Winchell, whose consistent call for Axis Sally’s head made him a virtual press agent for the trial, seemed to sense the changing tenor of public opinion. In one column, Winchell wrote that a member of Mildred’s legal team had phoned reporters during the first week of February. The unnamed lawyer told the press that the syndicated columnist had offered to pay Axis Sally’s legal expenses out of guilt and remorse. Realizing that the public’s thirst for vengeance was not nearly as keen as his own, Winchell was loathe to call off the dogs, instead just chalking it up to basic American decency:

Still, there were those who wanted blood. Syndicated columnist Robert Ruark had no reservations about meting out the ultimate punishment to Axis Sally:

Hometown newspapers throughout the country interviewed local veterans to ask what should be done with Miss Gillars. Although embittered by Axis Sally’s wartime activities, some vets were reluctant to support a death sentence. “I’d hate to see her get death but if that is what our constitution calls for in case of such a crime—then we will have to abide by the constitution,” remarked Louis Doerr, a onetime commander of Am Vets in Mansfield, Ohio. Doerr, formerly assigned to the Army’s Psychological Warfare Division, put the charges against Mildred Gillars into perspective, recalling, “At that time, there were a number of women broadcasting over German radio, but Axis Sally was considered by our outfit as being the best propagandist.”

Only one announcer used the name Sally regularly—the star of
Jerry’s Front—
the former New Yorker Rita Zucca. Other veterans had more detailed memories of Sally’s broadcasts. A former seaman who listened at his base in Scotland remarked, “We picked up Axis Sally practically every night. On several occasions she specifically mentioned us in her broadcasts when she urged the Americans at our base to desert and come over to the Nazis.”

None of the recordings played at the trial featured her identifying or addressing specific military units. A former Ohio infantryman, Dale Beer, stated that he first heard Axis Sally in France in July 1944 (when Mildred and Koischwitz were in France interviewing hospitalized soldiers and producing their programs in Hilversum, Holland). Beer stated: “During the broadcast she [Sally] mentioned the names of several divisions in our territory, and we were surprised when she didn’t name the Ninth Infantry, our outfit.”
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“Mere words do not constitute the crime of treason,” James Laughlin posited in his request for a summary acquittal. “Things have come to a pretty pass if a person cannot make an anti-Semitic speech without being charged with treason. Being against President Roosevelt could not be treason. There are the two schools of thought about President Roosevelt—one holds that he was a patriot and a martyr. The other holds that he was the greatest rogue in all history, the greatest fraud and the greatest imposter that ever lived.”
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Judge Curran denied the request and ruled that the trial proceed. Laughlin asked the government to fly in a number of defense witnesses from Germany, but the judge agreed to only four. Emil Beckman, Franz Schaefer, Maria (Ria) Kloss (who discovered Mildred after her suicide attempt in Berlin) and Erwin Christiani, the radio technician who helped her decide in 1940 whether to return to the United States or remain in Germany. Kloss and Christiani had not yet arrived in the US, so Laughlin impetuously moved the trial forward by calling unused former prisoners on the prosecution’s list.

The first of these men was a Northwestern University student named Gunnar Dragsholt. Laughlin asked Dragsholt if at any time Mildred identified herself as a representative of the International Red Cross. He responded that she had not. Satisfied, Laughlin dismissed him, but the 30-year-old veteran did not leave the stand. He had been one of the scores of outraged men who met Axis Sally at
Stalag IIB
during the “horse manure” incident.

Instead of stepping down, the young man pointed at the defendant, shouting over Laughlin’s objections, “She threatened us as she left—that American citizen. That woman right there! She threatened us!”
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Laughlin angrily tried to stop the out-of-control witness but Kelley rose and asked him to tell his story:

On Monday, February 21, the defense called the radio scriptwriter Emil Beckman. Beckman testified that the Gestapo and the SS constantly watched the entire staff of
Reichsradio
and that his superior, Horst Cleinow, personally threatened him with deportation to a concentration camp. Warned that a mistranslation or any “attempt at appeasement” was a crime, Cleinow told him, “One false utterance and you will be put away.”
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Judge Curran erased the impact of Beckman’s testimony by instructing the jury to disregard it, as Beckman was the person threatened, not Mildred. Although Ulrich Haupt, Adelbert Houben and other witnesses also testified to the dangers of such “sabotage,” Judge Curran insisted that the jury consider Mildred immune from this menacing atmosphere.

The Final Witness

Almost four weeks had passed before the jury heard from the accused. With few witnesses available to the defense, and the undeniable weight of the evidence stacked against her, Mildred’s only hope was to take the stand in her own defense. Determined to tell her side of the story, Axis Sally strode up to the witness box and sat down, forgetting to take the oath. Laughlin gently asked her to stand and swear to tell the truth. On that cold February 16, 1949 she abandoned her silence and her customary black dress. She arrived wearing a smart green sweater, tan jacket and a black skirt.
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Her attorney asked her to describe her rootless childhood. She explained that she never knew her father, whom she referred to as “Mr. Sisk.” Glossing over her bitter, unhappy life with her alcoholic stepfather, Mildred focused instead on her days of fulfillment on the college stage and years of discouragement and want in Cleveland and New York.

With only the slightest of detail, Mildred told how she followed young Bernard Metz to Algiers. When that fleeting romance failed, she left North Africa with no prospects. When her mother left Europe to return to America, she found herself alone and broke in the newly born Third Reich. America could offer no respite, as the nation remained in the deepest phase of the Great Depression. A constant theme in her testimony was her relentless search for stable employment and financial security—a search that finally culminated in a career on the radio waves.

After several hours of testimony, her story turned to the summer of 1940. Germany was the master of Europe. Dunkirk cast British and Free French forces back to England. All of France was either under Occupation or under Petain’s rule. After a long drought, Mildred finally found gainful employment at
Reichsradio
and needed her passport renewed by the American State Department. Jews, intellectuals, leftists and other enemies of the Nazi regime sought refuge in North America. When a vice consul named Vaughn found out about Mildred’s collaboration with the hated Nazis, he grabbed her passport and threw it into a drawer. She told the jury that her only option was to return to work. When asked why she thought the consul was so angry, she pled ignorance, stating that she was “confused” by the diplomat’s actions.

Mildred explained that she was fortunate to find work in Berlin as a war economy and rationing took hold. She had built a life in Berlin full of friends, especially a physicist named Paul Karlson. After six years of struggle in Germany, there was nothing left for her in the United States but poverty. Although ships left regularly to ferry US citizens home as America moved closer to war, she did not board one. Pearl Harbor would prove to be the point of no return.

With great emotion, Mildred described the shock of December 7, 1941, and how she vehemently expressed her contempt for the Japanese surprise attack to her German colleagues. The Axis alliance virtually guaranteed that Germany would honor its commitments and go to war with America. With the realization that the attack made her an enemy of the German state, she lashed out, “I went to pieces in the studio. I told them what I thought of Japan and what the Germans would find out about them. I expressed myself in a very violent way. The shock was so terrific and I lost all discretion, and then I went home.”
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What happened after that became one of the main areas of contention between the prosecution and the defense. Mildred got a call that evening from her friend Erwin Christiani, a radio engineer, who advised her not to come in the following day. Only an oath of allegiance to Germany, she claimed, would enable her to continue working and avoid arrest. She then went to her friend Paul and asked him to type up an oath in German. She neither kept a copy of the note nor recalled the exact wording, but she insisted that it happened and that Christiani could back up her story. After a few days off, Mildred testified that she returned to her duties with her written oath in hand. Laughlin asked her to tell the jury why she signed the note.

Her equivocation that she signed the oath in order “to live” rather than to save her life undercut the direction of Laughlin’s argument. It was only the first of several missteps by the defendant in which she stubbornly stuck to her own version of events—whether or not they condemned her in the eyes of the law. Laughlin tried to portray the headstrong woman on the stand as a victim at the mercy of a totalitarian regime. At critical junctures, her words and manner belied that image. Her defense repeatedly seemed to be that it was not treason in her own mind or her German compatriots’—thus it was not treason. In Mildred’s own mind, she swore allegiance to the Reich to eat another day, to keep a roof above her head—and above all, to evade a concentration camp.

In the first few days of her testimony, Mildred’s dramatic tales of life in wartime Berlin garnered more headlines than her line of defense. In a tone reminiscent of a spy film, she told the court of her arrest by the Gestapo in the autumn of 1942. She had lost her food ration coupons while shopping at a Berlin department store. A Gestapo agent overheard her American accent as she spoke on a public telephone. He cried, “You can tell by her accent that she is American” as he forced the door of the phone booth open. With no
Fremdenpass
(identification papers for foreigners) and no US passport, she carried only her Reichsradio identification card.