Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany (25 page)

“This is quite a bombardment…. but I’m used to them, you know. I mean bombs during the war!”
—Mildred Gillars, August 20, 1948
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AUGUST–SEPTEMBER 1948

A swarm of news correspondents and photographers surrounded Axis Sally as she approached the C-54 transport that would take her to Washington, DC. Drinking in the attention that had eluded her for so long, she was finally, unquestionably, a celebrity. After almost seventeen months of uninterrupted imprisonment without trial or counsel, Mildred lingered in front of the news media—posing for photos and supplying reporters with snappy quotes. When one reporter inquired about her wartime activities, she gave the cryptic answer, “When in Germany, do as the Germans do!”

She wore a “flowing black fur cloak and black slacks,” supplied secondhand by the Army. Like an actress taking her final curtain call, Sally carried a bouquet of red roses—flowers reportedly sent from a mysterious friend residing in the French sector of Berlin. Enjoying her fame, the silver-haired, 47-year-old lady of the stage ignored her guard’s pleas to board the plane.

“Goodbye, Frankfurt!” Axis Sally shouted with a flourish of her arm. She bade farewell to the press and climbed the stairs into the waiting plane.
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Having survived rejection, failure, poverty and the hell of Germany’s collapse, Mildred had achieved the notoriety she had always sought. With the prisoner finally secured on the airplane, Warrant Officer Catherine Samaha and Lt. Franklin Davies signaled to the pilot, and the C-54 took off in a gray drizzle. Although she did not know it, Mildred was saying goodbye to her beloved Germany forever. She came to Berlin fourteen years before as a failed actress with almost nothing to her name. She left Germany with nothing but a name synonymous with treachery.

The repatriation of Axis Sally had been meticulously planned for weeks. The Justice Department wanted to avoid the confusion of December 1946, when the first accused “radio traitors” Douglas Chandler (a.k.a. “Paul Revere”) and Robert H. Best, had been flown back to America to stand trial. Federal law demands that an American citizen accused of committing a crime overseas must be tried in the Federal District where he first entered American territory.
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Oscar R. Ewing, Special Assistant to Attorney General Tom Clark, specifically requested that the plane fly directly up the Potomac River to land in Washington, DC. The Chandler and Best investigations were based in the District of Columbia and the Grand Jury had already heard witnesses. Ewing wanted to try the men there. Despite repeated requests to stick to the flight plan, the pilot put the plane down at Westover Field near Boston, Massachusetts. The flier claimed that he had to travel farther north because he could not get the aircraft’s wheels retracted. Ewing later discovered that the pilot had a girlfriend in Boston and decided to pay her a visit. While the plane was being examined for “mechanical trouble,” Chandler and Best spent almost three hours in the airport lounge. The pilot and his girl had a costly reunion at government expense.
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The mistake resulted in a legal and logistical nightmare for the Justice Department. Ewing recalled the snafu: “We had to re-indict him up there in Boston because of what this darn pilot had done… it cost the United States Government at least a hundred thousand dollars because of the expense of bringing the witnesses back again from Germany.”
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German witnesses, who had already testified in Washington, had to be recalled before a newly empanelled Grand Jury in Boston federal court. The pilot’s rendezvous also forced J. Edgar Hoover to move the entire FBI investigation to its Boston field office.

The FBI was determined that Axis Sally’s transfer would present no such problems. The moment the plane carrying Mildred Gillars was airborne, a telephone call was placed to Washington, where prosecutors immediately sought a warrant for her arrest. The course of the plane was predetermined with refueling stops in the Azores and Bermuda. The flight then traveled northwest over international waters until it traversed the Potomac River. Then, Mildred was to be taken into custody by military police, turned over to the FBI and arraigned by a United States Commissioner at Bolling Field in Washington.

The Justice Department prosecutor assigned to Mildred’s case, John M. Kelley, Jr. warned the FBI to “avoid any possible criticism growing out of alleged mistreatment of Miss Gillars, and to ensure that she was given breakfast and, if needed, supplied medical treatment prior to her arraignment.
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American public opinion had to be taken into consideration. Axis Sally would now be in the public eye, not hidden away in a military internment camp abroad. The government could not risk being accused of mistreating a defenseless woman, no matter how notorious her reputation.

Hitler’s Girlfriend

On perhaps the most unusual assignment of her military career, Warrant Officer Catherine Samaha settled into her seat next to Axis Sally. The Woman’s Army Corps (WAC) guard, wearing the drab brownish-green of Army issue, jumped when her prisoner pulled a jagged glass mirror and a comb from her handbag. Stunned that a potentially desperate traitor was allowed to board a military plane without a search for contraband, Samaha decided to let her prisoner go ahead and check her makeup.

Visibly exhilarated from the press attention, Mildred engaged the WAC in a long conversation. Catherine Samaha was, like Mildred Gillars, an Ohio native—a fact not lost on the Army commanders who assigned her to the task. In Washington, FBI agents were waiting to debrief the guard upon landing. The details of their conversation were well documented in a memorandum to FBI Director Hoover that was then forwarded on to prosecutors working the case. In her “just between us girls” style, Mildred opened up to the younger woman and provided damaging details about her life in Germany. Her words and actions on the flight to the United States shed light not only on her fragile state of mind that August day but also how American officials deceived a disoriented and isolated prisoner.

As the journey began, Mildred told Samaha that the American authorities in Germany assured her that she was only being taken to the United States for interrogation and that she was not under arrest.
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With typical bravado, the prisoner defiantly told her young companion that she “did not expect to be kicked around by anyone, especially her own country.”
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Mildred regaled her new friend with quotations from Shakespeare and her knowledge of astrology, noting “The study of the stars is one of my favorite hobbies.”
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Despite the risk of opening up to a representative of the US government, Mildred told the WAC that she had become quite fond of her and proposed that they meet socially in United States. Samaha cagily drew the lonely actress out. The WAC told her FBI debriefers, “I played on her ego and complimented her on her alertness, hair-do, etc.”
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Samaha was greatly amused that Mildred “accepted such flattery with a great deal of enthusiasm.”
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When the conversation turned to her work for the Germans, Mildred was equally forthcoming. “English was always my first love,” she told the guard, “I always made it a point to not acquire a foreign accent.” She prided herself on retaining her American manner of speaking. Mildred revealed intimate details of her day-to-day work as a radio broadcaster. She even described the technical processes of her work, describing how she recorded the majority of her broadcasts on what she termed “film rolls” (magnetic recording cylinders or bands). These cylinders were generally erased after transmission and then reused. Mildred doubted that many of them survived.

Samaha told the FBI that Axis Sally “could do anything she wanted in connection with her work; she had a free rein to travel and actually did travel to Holland, Paris, Belgium, Italy and other places and frequently used her recordings as an excuse for such travel.… She realized that she worked for the German government against the United States during the war, but made no direct statement acknowledging her guilt.… [Gillars] stated that she spent six months in Algiers during the war, and although she had never made a live broadcast from Algiers, the Germans probably used her recordings there.”
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These were dangerous half-truths that falsely gave the Americans the impression that she was an employee of unquestioned loyalty to the Nazi cause. Mildred was candid as she explained her escape in the face of the Soviet advance:

“I had slipped out the back door of the radio station in Berlin as the Russians were entering the front entrance.… The Russians were very, very anxious to get a hold of me.”
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Although the remark reveals Mildred’s egotism, her fears were reasonable considering the fate of her colleague Fred Kaltenbach (“Lord Hee Haw”) who fell into Soviet hands after the fall of Berlin. When an attempt to trade two captured SS officers for the radio announcer failed, the Soviets informed the American government in June 1946 that Kaltenbach died in custody, of “natural causes.”
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Mildred told the officer that she did not keep company with the highest of Nazi officials, but was disarmingly honest about her opinion of Hitler’s late wife, Eva Braun. “She severely criticized Eva Braun for her appearance, personality, etc….” Samaha said. “Her attitude showed marked jealousy.”
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This bit of gossip would prove to be of great interest to J. Edgar Hoover and his friend Walter Winchell.
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The newspaper columnist and radio broadcaster for the
New York Daily Mirror
was instrumental in inflaming public opinion against the defendants in the “radio traitor” trials, reserving special venom for the female propagandists. As early as 1947, Winchell repeatedly referred to Axis Sally in his radio show as “Hitler’s girlfriend.”

Mildred was becoming detached from reality, casting herself as the star with the guard playing the role of personal assistant. “From the beginning of the trip,” Samaha claimed, “she more or less took the attitude that I was sort of a personal companion rather than a bodyguard.”
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The prisoner even attempted to order her around on several occasions. She was living in a fantasy world, acting as though she were onstage. In her mind, Mildred was no longer the gofer who served the film star Brigitte Horney hand and foot.
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In her delusion, Axis Sally was the celebrity.

Although it may never be known if Mildred’s bizarre behavior ever led the Justice Department to question her fitness to stand trial, the week of psychological tests ordered by the Army Counter-Intelligence Corps were probably enough for both the G-men and the prosecutors. Nevertheless, Samaha’s encounter with Axis Sally reveals a woman with a tenuous grip on reality.

Mildred falsely boasted that she was the only broadcaster at the USA Zone who neither used a prepared manuscript nor was censored. Claiming that all of her broadcasts were “ad-libbed” was an extremely damaging admission. She could no longer hope to convince a jury that she was a mere pawn parroting the Propaganda Ministry’s line. Douglas Chandler’s conviction in June 1947 provided only a limited precedent for the coming trial of Axis Sally. Chandler was in every way an architect and refiner of the propaganda message that went out daily over the airwaves.

Every morning at 11 a.m. Joseph Goebbels met with his department heads to convey that day’s message, called the
Tagesparole
or “watchword.” The meetings consisted of one long monologue by the
Reichsminister
. The department heads (in the case of radio, Hans Fritzsche) then communicated the “watchword” to their staffs to discuss how to tailor the day’s message to their specific audience. Chandler (along with Best and several other Americans including Constance Drexel, Jane Anderson and Edward Delaney) actively participated in the planning meetings. The expatriates helped craft the uniquely American spin that would adorn Goebbels’ core message. An admission of responsibility for the authorship of her pro-Nazi screeds could send her to prison for life (as were Chandler and Best), or death in the electric chair.

“I have no one…”

It was 1:30 in the afternoon when the airplane touched down in Washington. A barrage of questions greeted Axis Sally as she descended the steps onto the tarmac. Posing for photographs, she waved off questions about her future, stating, “Those are very big questions and they require very big answers and I can’t say now.”

A “lonely and dispirited” figure, she told her story to reporters. “I went to work for Radio Berlin because I am an actress,” she explained. “It is very difficult to return under such circumstances, of course. I have been living in a country subject to a great deal of tragedy for the last nine years.”
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To the mothers and fathers of America who had buried their sons as a result of Hitler’s aggression, Axis Sally’s tears over Germany’s nine years of tragedy must have rung hollow. Her first meeting with the press that Saturday afternoon in August 1948 set the tone for how the public and the press would look at the friendless woman over the ensuing months.

She reminisced about her last visit to Washington, DC. Sixteen years earlier she had performed at the National Theater in a play whose name she could not recall. Now she would play the most serious role of her life: defendant. Flanked by Federal agents and military police, US Commissioner Cyril S. Lawrence approached and read out the warrant for her arrest, stating that between December 11, 1941 and May 6, 1945 she “unlawfully, willfully, and treasonably adhered to the government of the German Reich, an enemy of the United States, and did give the said enemy… aid and comfort.”
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