Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany (12 page)
Read Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany Online
Authors: Richard Lucas
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Bisac Code 1: BIO022000, #Biography, #History
Despite her willingness to remain and witness the repression, Mildred was not immune from the suspicion of the German authorities. Shortly after the confiscation of her papers, an acquaintance mentioned that the Gestapo was investigating her presence in Berlin:
I was told by someone that I’d come to the attention of the secret service… this woman told me I must never breathe it to anyone… she told me to see a certain Major Denner at a certain address—that he would see me privately. [The woman] said that he would give any kind of passport if you will do espionage work.
When I met him he was very charming. He said, “What kind of papers have you?” I said, “Well, I have none.” He asked, “Don’t you think we’re rather generous to let you run around without papers?” I told him “yes.” He asked me if I didn’t realize the danger I was in. I said “yes.”
Denner made her an offer. She would be given a passport and funds if she would agree to participate in an effort to land German agents on American shores for the purpose of sabotage. Denner questioned her knowledge of American defense industries and, noting that she came from Ohio, wanted to know about the Wright Airplane Works in Dayton. She refused, telling Denner “I want you know that though I work for the German radio, I would not—even if it meant my death—do anything against my country.”
149
Still under the delusion that her function as an announcer was not a compromising or disloyal act, she remained adamant that there was a distinct difference between being a performer and being a traitor.
150
Although Mildred would later insist that she had no money at the time to return to the US, and claimed that she would face certain poverty in America, her friend Erwin Christiani told American interrogators of another reason for her stubborn insistence on remaining in Germany:
At the time, as the USA were going to come into the war, there was given occasion to all American citizens living in Berlin to leave Germany. Miss Gillars was, at that time, in full desperation because she wanted to return to her home country, and on the other hand, she could not. She had a big confidence in me, so she told me private things, which she will never tell to the Court.
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By late 1941, Mildred had become involved with Dr. Paul Karlson, an Estonia-born physicist and chemist:
The main reason was that she was in love [with] a certain German Natural Philosopher, who had declared that he wanted to marry her. This man told her that if she would return to America, he would never marry her.
152
Karlson, who had become a German citizen, was not about to abandon his adopted home to go to America with the 39-year-old exactress. Christiani, a radio technician who befriended Mildred when she began working at
Sender Bremen
, was asked for his advice. He told US military interrogators, “I said to her that if she were really sure her friend would marry her, it would be better for her future if she would remain in Germany, as she had no relations in the USA.”
153
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4
Christiani pointed out that her advanced age and diminishing marriage prospects played a central role in her decision rather than political conviction.
As the final boats boarded to evacuate Americans from Nazi Germany, Mildred chose to remain in the hope of a marriage proposal that would never come. Karlson had reportedly been conscripted and sent to the Eastern Front, leaving without asking her to marry. She would become increasingly dependent on her employers at the broadcasting house and especially on Otto Koischwitz—a dependence that would become total on December 7, 1941.
Pearl Harbor
Mildred was working in the studio when the news was broadcast that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor. America’s entry into the war was imminent. Stunned, she broke down in front of her colleagues. She loudly denounced the Japanese and became hysterical. “I told them what I thought about Japan and that the Germans would soon find out about them,” she recalled. “The shock was terrific. I lost all discretion and I went back to my apartment.”
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Angered by the turn of events and trapped in a situation that she could not escape, she committed an offense that could have resulted in immediate arrest and deportation to a concentration camp. Her situation had changed dramatically. She was no longer the representative of a neutral power whose sympathies were merely questionable, but an enemy national. At her apartment that evening, she received a phone call from a monitor at the station who told her not to report to work the next day and advised, “You had better stay in bed.”
156
Her outburst did not go unnoticed by the management of Reichs radio. Johannes Schmidt-Hansen called her into his office to discipline her for her remarks about Germany’s ally in the Far East. What happened next would become an object of controversy. According to Mildred, Schmidt-Hansen demanded that she sign an oath of allegiance to the German Reich. Faced with the prospect of joblessness or possible deportation to a prison camp, she felt that she had no choice but to produce an oath.
“I knew what the results would have to be,” she said later, “and I could see by the hardness in his flinty eyes at that moment that it would be best of all to leave and make my decision somewhere else, and I did leave his office.”
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It was clear from their conversation that she could not return to work without her signature on an oath of allegiance. She phoned Karlson and explained her plight:
I phoned him and went, having said I have something very serious to discuss with him, which I did not care to discuss on the phone, because you could not know if your phone was being watched. I talked to him and his mother and one of his sisters who was there, and then they retired after we had a cup of tea, and we went into the library, and he sat down at the typewriter and wrote in German what I submitted then the next day to Mr. Schmidt-Hansen… something to the effect that: I swear my allegiance to Germany, and signed Mildred Gillars.
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She dropped the document off at Schmidt-Hansen’s office on December 9 and returned to work. One day later, Hitler declared war on the United States.
Mildred cited the signing of the oath as a pivotal event in her transition from radio announcer to propagandist. Until then, she maintained that she had “not done anything in the least bit propagandistic.”
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In her portrayal of events, she rose to the defense of her beloved America when it was under attack. Risking her job and freedom, she advised her German bosses not to trust the Japanese. Her account casts her as the valiant defender of the United States who relented only to save her life and job. It was the first of a series of selfserving rationalizations that she would later use throughout her life to justify her actions. Each explanation would emphasize her “love for America,” her opposition to the war, her hatred of Roosevelt, and her assertion that it was the United States that abandoned her as war approached—not the other way around.
CHAPTER 5
Smiling Through
“Between the two wars, Fascism and Nazism attracted human derelicts as a flame attracts a moth. Most of the Nazi hierarchy consisted of derelicts from the First War, who could not find a place in the Germany of the Republic. Nazism offered them, as it offered our American traitors, a chance to become somebody. It offered them a career and it offered them something ready-made on which to vent their hates.”
—William L. Shirer
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DECEMBER 1942–AUGUST 1943
Even before the United States entered the war, Max Otto Koischwitz was a rising star at the German Foreign Office. He left behind a stalled academic career in the United States to become an important player on the periphery of the Third Reich’s inner circle. It was not uncommon for the former professor to fly to Hitler’s headquarters to discuss radio content with Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. Although Koischwitz held several different titles within the organizational maze of the radio corporation, he was the
de facto
liaison between the Foreign Office and Reichsradio. He was, as Mildred proudly boasted, “the man who interviewed Ribbentrop personally on matters concerning the broadcasting company which displeased him or pleased him, as the case may be.”
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On February 23, 1942 he was promoted to manager for political broadcasting to the USA Zone.
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His mission was to improve the shortwave broadcasts and increase their appeal to American GIs and their families back home. Although the other American commentators (Kaltenbach, Chandler, et al.) were effective broadcasters, Koischwitz sought to bring a voice to the mix that would attract the lonely soldier far from home. He hoped to make Mildred his spokeswoman for that purpose but he would first have to persuade her to abandon her reluctance to broadcast propaganda to her native land. There were also bureaucratic obstacles to overcome. Johannes Schmidt-Hansen, her manager at
Sender Bremen
, did not want to give up one of the European Service’s most talented broadcasters to another department without a fight.
During 1942, Mildred became Mistress of Ceremonies (the title then used for the host of a show) for an increasing number of programs.
Club of Notions
was replaced by the war-focused music/variety show
Smiling Through
. Aimed at the ladies in the audience, it dealt with cultural events in Germany, and entertainment. Political content was minimal until December 1942, when Koischwitz came on board as producer and changed the format. Renamed
Home Sweet Home,
“O.K.” took the show in a decidedly propagandistic direction.
As American men faced fierce battles in the deserts of North Africa,
Home Sweet Home
was designed to arouse homesickness in the soldiers. Opening with a quintessentially American sound—the moaning of a lonely train whistle—
Home Sweet Home
was a tug on the heartstrings that played on the desires, fears and jealousies of the fighting men. Jazz and swing, while outlawed by the Nazi regime as a “degenerate” art form, were a staple (albeit in an “Aryanized” incarnation) on
Home Sweet Home
. Speaking in a breathless voice, Midge portrayed herself as a much younger but experienced woman. She played the vixen behind the microphone, taunting the men on the front lines and casting doubt in their minds about their mission, their wives and girlfriends, and their prospects after the war. In one early broadcast, she told the GIs:
Hello, Gang. This is Midge, calling the American Expeditionary Forces in the four corners of the world tonight with their little “Home Sweet Home” program. Well, kids, you know I’d like to say to you “Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kit Bag,” but I know that that little old kit bag is much too small to hold all the trouble you kids have got…
Well I’m afraid that [your girl] will never surrender till you kids surrender. How about it? There’s no getting the Germans down. You’ve been trying for a long time now; and you remember what was told to you before you went to Africa—that it would be a walk away for you boys. Well, was it?… Well, if we women had our way, there would be no wars anyhow… I just wonder if [she] isn’t sort of running away with one of the 4-Fs back home and you know just as well as I do that if the cases were reversed you wouldn’t go on waiting year after year either, would you?
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Complete with a live orchestra,
Home Sweet Home
marked the culmination of Mildred Gillars’ transformation from down-on-her-luck actress to the woman known to the world as Axis Sally—the insidious, hateful, anti-Semitic golden girl of Nazism. On one show in early 1943, she treated Dick, her bandleader, to her particular brand of pacifism and defeatism:
Gee, Dick, I’m afraid, you’ll be giving them… some very bad ideas. They’ll just get all kind of woozy and would like to throw down those little old guns and toddle off home. Well, that would be the right thing for them to do after all, because they’re certainly not making any headway here in the sector right now.… Gee, I’d never have a war if I could do anything to prevent it and I think most women are like that.
164
It was during Christmas 1942 when her conversion to propagandist became complete, that the romantic relationship between the lonely announcer and her married mentor caught fire. She was a solitary figure in the studio. “As I was unmarried and had no home,” she remembered, “I was free to work on Christmas Day and give the other girls a chance to be with their families.”
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The romance blossomed quickly as the two met frequently at the coffee house located near the Deutschland House in the broadcasting complex. Eventually the two became inseparable. They dined together at the Hotel Adlon, a favorite haunt of the Nazi elite and the foreign diplomatic corps on Unter den Linden near the Brandenburg Gate. He personally directed her broadcasts and soon expanded her role to become the host of
Morocco Sendung
(Morocco Calling), another offering for the troops in North Africa. The Professor worked overtime attempting to wrest his prize announcer from the European Service.