Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany (29 page)
Read Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany Online
Authors: Richard Lucas
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Bisac Code 1: BIO022000, #Biography, #History
JANUARY–MARCH 1949
As Mildred Gillars languished in the District Jail, it must have seemed that the predictions she made five years earlier over a German microphone were coming to pass. The Nazis’ post-Normandy propaganda line warned daily of the “Red World” that would inevitably result from an Allied victory. By 1948, half of Germany and practically all Eastern Europe were firmly in the Soviet grip. President Harry S. Truman countered a Communist threat to Greece and Turkey with massive economic aid. Two brutal winters exacerbated the hunger and poverty of Occupied Germany under the Morgenthau Plan. Economic and political turmoil was spreading to the rest of war-ravaged Europe. Not until the proposal of the Marshall Plan in March 1947 did the United States abandon its putative policy against its former enemy and move to rebuild its economy. The geopolitical reality that only Germany could act as a counterweight to Soviet influence in Europe was finally dawning on American policymakers. Those men in the Nazi leadership who believed that Germany’s strategic position would ultimately save their skins miscalculated, for it took a crushing Allied victory to launch the chain of events leading to the Cold War.
Galvanized by the new Soviet threat, the US government’s efforts to tie up loose ends from the last war were haphazard at best. From September 1945, the Allies actively pursued war criminals and former high-ranking officials responsible for implementing Hitler’s policies. The Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal held surviving members of the party leadership accountable for their crimes against humanity and military aggression. At the same time, the Occupying Powers hoped to address the guilt of mid-level Party functionaries, civil servants,
SS, SA
and
Gestapo
. In the immediate aftermath of the war, almost two million men were forbidden to hold any job above the level of manual laborer—a policy that left West German society without essential technocrats and skilled workers. The creation of
Spruchkammern
, or civilian de-nazification courts, established a mechanism to determine a defendant’s political culpability, wartime conduct and fitness to function in the new democracy.
The de-nazification courts were administered by German citizens, many of whom were politically reliable members of Weimar-era parties such as the Social Democratic (SPD) and Catholic Centre (Zentrum) parties. The former Director of the RRG, Hans Fritzsche, was sentenced to nine years at hard labor by one of these courts—despite his acquittal at Nuremberg for war crimes. By 1948, the necessity of rebuilding the defeated nation with knowledgeable and competent officials, industrialists and financiers had taken precedence over the effort to wipe away the stain of Hitlerism.
In time, “de-nazification” became a mere formality. The very week that Axis Sally went on trial in Washington, DC, a German court ordered Hitler’s diplomat Franz von Papen to pay a substantial fine. In return, von Papen was granted a clean bill of political health. Even Otto Skorzeny, the legendary commando who, on the Führer’s orders, engineered the daring rescue of Mussolini and facilitated the escape of war criminals to Spain and Latin America, was de-nazified
in absentia
in 1952.
In reality, the whitewashing of Nazi pasts began much earlier. As early as September 1945, the American OSS (Office of Strategic Services) was secreting German rocket scientists, weapons experts and intelligence agents out of the former Reich. Given employment and new lives in the United States, the beneficiaries of
Project Paperclip
lived in relative obscurity, safe from Soviet hands. One of
Paperclip’s
most illustrious alumni was Dr. Werner von Braun, the rocket scientist who would become the architect of the American space and missile program. Another, Arthur Rudolph, played a central role in the development of the Saturn V rocket that took man to the moon. During the war, Rudolph was responsible for the deaths of thousands of slave laborers at the
Mittelbau-Dora
V-2 rocket plant. Hubertus Strughold was dubbed the “father of US Space Medicine,” though he performed medical experiments on prisoners at Dachau.
As American intelligence quietly rehabilitated the political pedigrees of former Nazis and war criminals, a penniless American arrived at the Federal District courthouse in Washington, DC. It was January 24, 1949, and a rush of curious onlookers followed the woman with shoulder-length silver hair as she emerged from a caged prison van. Inside, 105 prospective jurors filled the courtroom. Technicians worked feverishly, stringing the wires of 40 headsets along the expanse of the jury box, judge’s bench and attorney’s tables. The electronic equipment was to be used to listen to the defendant’s wartime handiwork.
Mildred strode into the courtroom and took up her position at the defense table. Her attorney, James Laughlin, greeted her with a long, deep bow. Eight US Marshalls guarded the courtroom’s door and windows while a ninth sat only inches behind the accused. Mildred slipped off her black fur-trimmed coat, and quickly turned and smiled at her stepsister, who was sitting in the front row. Her skin, caked with heavy makeup, had an orange tone.
The New Yorker
columnist Richard H. Rovere gave his impression of Axis Sally:
She has the hair of Mother Machree, and she wears it in the style of Rita Hayworth. At forty-eight, she has the figure of a woman of forty-eight who has worked hard and sacrificed much to keep the figure she had at twenty-four. You wouldn‘t take her for forty-eight and you wouldn’t mistake her for twenty-four. Although she has been in jail for many months, she has a Miami Beach tan, the cosmetic nature of which is given away by the prison pallor of her hands. Her entire getup—the black dress, the black spiked-heeled shoes, the indigo scarf that she uses for gesturing, the generous applications of lipstick and nail polish—suggests that she is torn by an inner conflict: Although desperately trying to avoid conviction, she is at the same time determined not to destroy the illusion of herself as a woman of mystery, glamour and intrigue.
By all the rules of the game, a woman in Miss Gillars’ fix, on trial for her life before a jury that includes five proper-looking members of her own sex, should not be getting herself up like this, but Miss Gillars is following her own course. It is doubtful, however, whether she stands to lose much by this, for the notion of Miss Gillars as a woman of glamour, either sinister or otherwise, is one that—at this stage of the game anyway—only Miss Gillars herself can harbor. The total impression that she makes is not that she is a woman who has spent years in the service of the mighty war machine of the state that was going to endure for a millennium, but that she is a woman who has been fighting an uphill battle to make a living from a dress shop in Queens or a millinery shop in Staten Island.
375
The strain of the past five years was visible to all. Her fall had been fast and brutal and it showed. Observers marveled at the stark contrast between the aging defendant and the fantasies her voice conjured up among the GIs. One reporter, Andrew Tully, compared her to:
The kind of girl you’d run into in a second-rate tavern on pay night in most any factory town. She is 48 years old, and she looked like any woman of 48 who wants to put it off. Axis Sally’s face probably was pretty once, but it obviously had many good times. Somewhere she’d picked up a tan and that helped, but it couldn’t hide some sad little wrinkles and that swollen hardness at the cheekbones. And when she tried to put life into her smile, her eyes seemed to protest.
376
The Curtain Rises
“Now, ladies and gentlemen,” Judge Edward M. Curran announced to the court, “this is an important case. This woman is entitled to a fair and impartial jury. Are any of the prospective jurors members of the Jewish race?”
377
Seven were dismissed.
“Do any of you entertain any prejudice either for or against the policies adopted by Franklin D. Roosevelt or Winston Churchill or any prejudice against Englishmen themselves?”
378
No one rose. Seven more had already formulated an opinion about the defendant’s guilt. Three others were dismissed because they could write, read or speak the German language.
379
Judge Curran then asked if they had ever been a member of any organization that could be described as “German-American.” As the judge asked the jury pool to acknowledge any possible bias for or against the woman on trial, he did not reveal his own.
In 1943, Assistant Attorney General Edward Curran had signed the Justice Department’s indictment of Max Otto Koischwitz for treason—a name certain to come up in Mildred’s case and sufficient reason for his recusal from the case. The jurors did not know that the FBI had thoroughly checked their backgrounds to ensure that they held no politically undesirable views that might favorably affect their opinion of Axis Sally. In his own attempt to weed out biased jurors, James Laughlin asked the judge to include questions that would divine their political and religious attitudes:
Did you contribute to bundles of aid to Britain?
Have you ever belonged to B’nai B’rith or any other Jewish organization?
Have you ever written anything about the war crimes trial at Nuremberg?
Do you have any opinion on the Morgenthau Plan for Germany?
Do you have any connection to the new Israeli government?
380
Five hours later, a jury of seven men and five women with two alternates of each sex was seated. Although nearly equally divided by gender, no one could say that there was a diversity of political opinion on the panel. A jury pool pre-evaluated by the FBI for unorthodox opinions was one subjected to a political litmus test—not an evaluation of its impartiality.
It was almost four in the afternoon when Mildred stepped back into the prison van to return to her eight-by-ten-foot cell. That evening, her stepsister Edna Mae Herrick dined with the journalist John Bartlow Martin. Martin, on assignment for
McCall’s
, was covering the trial for the popular women’s magazine. The Justice Department refused his request to interview Axis Sally so he sat down with Edna Mae, who had become a
de facto
spokesman for her sister since her arrival in the United States.
In the restaurant, Martin took copious handwritten notes as she described her sister’s formative years—her popularity in school, her close relationship with their mother, and her miserable relationship with her alcoholic stepfather. As she told Martin of her family’s troubled history, the restaurant’s cashier read aloud from an inaccurate gossip column in a Hearst newspaper.
“It says she did it because she was afraid. She is out on bond. She’s walking the streets right now!” the cashier yelled across the room.
“Is that the great American public?” Edna Mae wondered aloud and then fell into a deep silence.
After a few moments, she said, “People used to turn and stare at my sister on the street. I was always so thrilled that she was my sister. She was so wonderful.”
381
Moved by her story, Martin wrote in his notes of Axis Sally’s dysfunctional relationship with her stepfather—and Edna Mae’s claim that Mildred was “hurt” by him. After hours of conversation with Mrs. Herrick, Martin had no clear answer to the question of how Mildred Gillars became a woman capable of treason, but his conversation with Edna Mae seemed to provide some clues:
Why did she need success so desperately? We do not know. We return to her childhood, when a loathing for her stepfather may have driven her from home as forcefully as did ambition. But the truth seems to be buried too deep to resurrect: one doubts she herself knows it.
382
The details of Mildred’s youth were there for a reporter to hear, but they would see neither the printed page nor the open air of court. Words that may have painted a fuller, more sympathetic picture of Axis Sally would sit in a journalist’s files—unread and unexamined—for almost sixty years.
Sugarcoated Pills
With cool, methodical certainty, Assistant Attorney General John M. Kelley, Jr. laid out the Government’s case against Axis Sally. In 1947, Kelley had won the conviction of Boston Mayor James Curley on mail fraud charges, and quickly established a reputation as one of the Justice Department’s top young prosecutors. With a flair for mixed metaphor, Kelley compared the defendant’s radio work to “sugarcoated pills of propaganda” scattered far and wide to sow “seeds of suspicion and discontent” on the American home front and on the battlefield.
383
Axis Sally denounced “members of the Jewish race, the then-President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill and the British people” for fame and profit.
384
A failure in show business, Kelley claimed that she coldly sold her birthright to become a well-paid and well-known celebrity. The prosecutor described her meteoric rise in sordid terms. Driven by ambition and greed, she indulged in an affair with a fanatical Nazi—a man with three children and one on the way—to pave her road to the top. She was so successful that, by 1944, Mildred Gillars was the highest paid radio announcer at the broadcasting service.