Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany (28 page)

“A stranger in my own country”

The Axis Sally case was sure to dominate the newspapers and radio for months. It was the kind of case that could propel an aggressive, attention-seeking attorney to national prominence. On her second day in the United States, Washington lawyer John M. Holzworth visited Mildred to offer his services. Holzworth presented the jail’s superintendent with his card, along with a letter of recommendation on American Civil Liberties Union stationery. The superintendent, Colonel Curtis Reid, kept the FBI informed of all visitors and correspondence to Axis Sally’s cell. As a result, a declassified documentary record of the preparations for her defense exists.
³⁵⁴
Holzworth told the quiet, somber prisoner that he represented a “New York organization” willing to pay for her defense. Never disclosing to her the name of the organization, he left the jail and announced to the waiting press that he had been selected to represent Axis Sally at her upcoming trial.

Holzworth was a flamboyant character with a hunger for publicity. A trial lawyer with a reputation as a big-game hunter, he wrote a seminal book on wildlife in 1930 called
The Wild Grizzlies of Alaska,
chronicling his observations of the bears over three summers at Alaska’s Glacier Bay. As the Chairman of the National Committee on Protection and Preservation of Wild Life, Holzworth was mentioned in
Time
magazine in 1932 when he chided President Herbert Hoover for taking his grandchildren to visit the bears at the Washington Zoo.
³⁵⁵
A lifelong naturalist in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt, the attorney was the driving force in the bid to make Alaska’s Admiralty Island a nature preserve and part of the National Park system.
³⁵⁶
Embarrassingly, he was arrested in 1947 for passing phony checks after he bid $12,500 for the collected oil paintings of the nineteenth-century illustrator Gustave Doré. Holzworth made the newspapers and
Time
magazine again when his dramatic but ill-starred bid beat a genuine bid of over $10,000, but the check bounced.
³⁵⁷

Back in the spotlight, Holzworth told the press that Axis Sally was “without a cent,” and disclosed that he would immediately file for a writ of
habeas corpus.
³⁵⁸
Holzworth maintained before the Federal District Court that his client became a German citizen by marriage in 1940 and that she no longer owed allegiance to the United States. As a German citizen, Mildred was being illegally held. Holzworth demanded a written justification for her continued imprisonment by September 9, 1948. The attorney also wrote a telegram to Attorney General Clark claiming that a “very long and costly trial” could be avoided by allowing his client to testify before the grand jury deliberating her fate.

Holzworth also made the curious claim that Army Intelligence had promised Mildred a “clean bill of health” in return for information on Communist espionage activity in the United States. High-ranking German officials had allegedly supplied valuable intelligence to Axis Sally, which she then passed on to CIC. Therefore, her arrest for treason came as a “complete and utter surprise” to his client.
³⁵⁹
These statements would explain Mildred’s jaunty claims to her guard that she was not under arrest because the Army had informed her that she was being transported to the US for further interrogation.

Prosecutor Kelley responded that Holzworth was ineligible to request relief because he had not been admitted to practice before the court. Kelley also noted that earlier that same day a “Negro attorney” named Richard W. Tompkins had filed the same request for a writ of
habeas corpus.
³⁶⁰
When word of the confusion reached the jail, Mildred was incensed. Whether her anger came from the rumors of Holzworth’s connections to the ACLU (an organization known for its defense of Communists and African-Americans) or his assertion that she had been married in Germany, she was determined to renounce the lawyer to all and anyone who would hear. Moreover, she was extremely angry about Holzworth’s claim that she married a German citizen in 1940. “Why should I lie?” Edna Mae quoted her sister when she appeared before reporters in front of the courthouse, stating that the idea was “cooked up” by the lawyer.
³⁶¹

“If Mr. Holzworth should call again, please notify him that I do not care to have any further interviews with him,” the angry prisoner told the jail superintendent.
³⁶²
Despite the rebuke, Holzworth continued to pursue her. Finally, on August 26, Mildred typed out a letter to the Chief Justice of the District Court requesting assistance in finding competent legal counsel:

Her refusal of Holzworth’s services damaged any remaining chance that the charges against her might be dropped. As the obstinate prisoner sat in jail without counsel, the prosecutor John Kelley was presenting his case for Mildred Gillars’ indictment to the Grand Jury. Time was of the essence. If her defense strategy included the claim that she did not owe allegiance to the United States at the time of her alleged crimes, her written statement to an officer of the court that she was “a stranger in [her] own country” could sabotage that effort and affirm that she was conscious of her obligations to the United States.

As the days passed, her mood worsened. Edna Mae came to visit every day, but they did not discuss her activities in Germany. “I didn’t ask any questions. I was not interested. I just wanted to get it over with and get home,” she recalled.
³⁶⁴
On August 30, Edna Mae arrived at the District Jail accompanied by attorney Daniel Boone, an associate of Washington attorney James J. Laughlin. Laughlin was one of several court-appointed lawyers in the Sedition Trial of 1944. In that mass trial, vocal opponents of American involvement in World War II on both the Left and the Right had been charged with conspiracy against the United States. Laughlin was assigned to represent one of the thirty men and women named in a mass indictment for conspiracy to demoralize the armed forces and overthrow the United States government.

After a chaotic 102-day trial that ended only after the judge died of a heart attack, the Sedition Trial was the American equivalent of a show trial.
³⁶⁵
Laughlin brought the trial to a standstill when, claiming collusion between the Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith and the Justice Department, he entered a motion to subpoena all of the ADL’s files regarding the sedition cases. Although the judge attempted to ignore Laughlin’s request, the attorney commanded headlines when he issued a copy of the motion to the press—placing the focus squarely on the issue of the ADL’s role in providing information to the government on which to base the prosecutions.

On paper, Laughlin seemed like the ideal attorney to represent Mildred Gillars: energetic, fearless and brazen in manipulating the media to his client’s advantage. While the Sedition Trial proceeded in disarray, only to end with a whimper, the Axis Sally trial was a capital case with an unpopular defendant and a determined prosecutor. The core issues of the case were not the ability of American citizens to voice unpopular viewpoints during wartime, but the responsibilities of a citizen while abroad in the midst of hostilities and the possibility of imprisonment in a concentration camp (and the threat of death that such imprisonment implied). Her case required a sharp legal mind with thorough knowledge of the precedents surrounding the crime of “aid and comfort.”

A public defender with a mediocre reputation and a penchant for conspiracy theories was not the best choice for a defendant whose life hung in the balance. Moreover, it would be impossible for any attorney to focus blame on the Anti-Defamation League or any Jewish organization three years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Belsen and Treblinka.

The reunion of the Gillars sisters was marred by the news of their mother’s death. It was especially bitter for Mildred to realize that her mother died with the knowledge of her imprisonment as a traitor. Grieving and emotionally drained, she was also troubled by Holzworth’s continuing attempts to garner publicity from her case. Holzworth had gone to incredible lengths to get in contact with Edna Mae after Mildred repeatedly refused his visits. When she changed hotels to avoid his pursuit, he reported her missing to the police and sent an alarming telegram to her husband in Ohio stating that she could not be located.

From jail, Mildred angrily dashed off two typewritten letters—one to Holzworth and another to Associate Justice Richmond B. Keech, whom Holzworth had petitioned for the writ of
habeas corpus
only days earlier. She told Keech: “Holzworth has undertaken to appear in your court as my attorney. He is not my lawyer; I have not retained him, and he has so been notified.” She further told the judge:

Her letter to Holzworth was caustic and accusing; charging that his “unwarranted and unsolicited efforts have inflicted an immeasurable damage to me in prejudicing my rights prior to my defense.”
³⁶⁷
Keech requested that the District Jail provide her with a complete medical examination.

On August 31, Justice Keech informed Holzworth that the court no longer recognized him as Mildred’s attorney. Within minutes of Keech’s order, she was brought before Commissioner Cyril Lawrence who informed her that her hearing would be postponed for two weeks so she could enter the hospital for medical treatment. Lawrence reassured her, “You will not be railroaded. I can assure you, we have in America a system of justice that does not permit anyone to be ‘railroaded’.”
³⁶⁸
When the Commissioner reread the charges against her, Mildred testily replied, “I told you that I didn’t agree with you.”
³⁶⁹

The Grand Jury returned an indictment on ten counts of treason against Axis Sally on Friday, September 10, 1948. After a week of daily visits to her sister’s cell and testimony before the Grand Jury, Edna Mae Herrick was ready to go home. As she left for Ohio, she spoke to the press. With tears in her eyes, she spoke on behalf of the imprisoned Axis Sally.

“Mildred firmly denies ever having been anything but an American. I know she is innocent.” Quoting her stepsister, she relayed Mildred’s position to the assembled reporters, saying: “I never talked politics. I never told those boys to throw down their arms or that their wives or sweethearts were unfaithful.… I never once let them think I was from the Red Cross. I always said I was with Berlin Broadcasting Company’.”
³⁷⁰

Edna Mae took Mildred’s denials at face value and explained her motivations for remaining in Germany: “Now I think I understand how she felt. She loved the German people. When hoodlums come in and take over—that’s no time to run away.”
³⁷¹
Mildred looked upon the Nazis as “we do Al Capone and his gangsters.”
³⁷²
Departing Washington, Edna Mae announced to the world: “I am going to stand by her side. I want the world to know that’s my stand.”
³⁷³

It would be an increasingly difficult stand to take as the trial of Axis Sally drew near.