Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany (34 page)

Panicked, she told the agent that she was late for work, exclaiming, “If I don’t get to the station, that’ll be sabotage”—an offence that would inevitably land her in a concentration camp. After her manager Johannes Schmidt-Hansen intervened, the Gestapo agent apologized for the misunderstanding and she returned to the studio. The story provided a terrifying illustration of her fragile existence in Germany and her dependence on the good graces of her Nazi masters.

Her assertion that German officials tried to recruit her to provide information on the Wright Airplane Works in Dayton, Ohio and promised her “any kind of passport” in return for espionage and sabotage work stunned the assembled press. Despite Mildred’s self-serving monologues, her tale of a second run-in with the Gestapo was gripping.

She described a “charming” agent named Denner who pointed out to the expatriate that she did not have a US passport, and remarked that the German government was “rather generous” by letting an enemy national “run around” Berlin without papers. He offered her a passport in return for espionage work. The revelation made headlines, even in
The New York Times
, as did her flag-waving response: “I want you to know that even though I am working for the German Broadcasting Company I would never, under any circumstances whatsoever, not even if it were to mean my death, do anything against my country.”
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Assuming the mantle of a female Nathan Hale, she turned down the offer. The story emphasized the compartmentalization in her own mind between entertaining and “idealistic” radio work and overt acts destructive to the United States and its armed forces. In her mind, she performed radio work “to live” and “to survive”—to remain employed and avoid deportation.

The following day (February 24), Laughlin turned his attention to the man most responsible for the creation of Axis Sally—the charismatic Otto Koischwitz. The silver-haired Laughlin asked his visibly distressed client to describe the beginning of her affair with the married father of three. Again, he faced resistance in his attempt to portray her as the lovesick victim of a scheming Lothario.

“When did you first keep company with Professor Koischwitz?” he asked.

“Well, to keep company seems like a strange expression,” she said, followed by a long silence. Finally she took a deep breath. “He just grew into my life. It’s not always so easy to draw a line of demarcation between admiration, compatibility and love, especially under the circumstances as they were at that time.”

Laughlin pressed for a more revealing answer. “When did you first speak words of love?”

Mildred stiffened and protested, “Mr. Laughlin, I wonder if it is necessary to go into all of this. You see, there is such a thing as a person waiting all his life to find another.”

When Kelley objected to her non-responsiveness, she snapped back at the prosecutor, “Words of love were not spoken, Mr. Kelley. They were written from Silesia in the spring of ’43.”

Clearly in love with the dead professor’s memory, she waxed poetically about Koischwitz’s innate love for the idyllic Silesian countryside and his yearly visits to a mountain he called his “Mount Olympus.” Like his Führer’s habit of retreating to the “Eagle’s Nest,” the professor went to his mountain hideaway to commune with nature and contemplate life’s mysteries.

Prosecutor Kelley strenuously objected to this hagiography of a dead traitor, and Judge Curran asked Mildred to keep it short. She explained that Koischwitz wrote two letters to her from Silesia that confessed his confusion about their emotional attachment. “He realized in the spring of ’43 what was happening and he reverted back to his boyhood habit of going to his Mount Olympus—he got the answer that God favored his love.”
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Laughlin valiantly fought on against Mildred’s frustrating evasiveness. Her refusals clearly annoyed the lawyer when he had to demand an answer from his own client:

Even after Germany declared war on the United States, Mildred insisted that she remained a simple announcer. Not until Koischwitz witnessed the extent of her talents and realized that he could put her popularity to use did she encounter pressure to perform propaganda. She broadcast chiefly for
Sender Bremen
to Europe and the United Kingdom until the professor took over the USA Zone from the imprisoned Schotte. She “pleaded and begged of Koischwitz to do nothing about [a transfer].” “Please let me stay at the Sender Bremen station,” she asked, but Koischwitz would hear none of it.
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Finally she relented: “I suppose it is very difficult for a person who has never been in that position [in a dictatorial state] to be able to appreciate my position. You could not just go around saying, ‘I don’t want to do this’ and ‘I don’t want to do that.’”
⁴²⁹

When she protested to Koischwitz, he slyly appealed to her artistic sensibilities. “Even Shakespeare and Sophocles could be taken as propaganda,” he told his wary accomplice.
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A difficult day on the stand ended with a crippling admission. As Mildred effusively extolled the professor’s life and work, she drew a direct connection between Koischwitz and Hitler’s Foreign Minister. Exaggerating her lover’s role, she told the jury that her beloved served as a liaison for Joachim von Ribbentrop.

“He was the go-between for von Ribbentrop and the broadcasting to the American zone. I knew he was in contact with Ribbentrop because he once left me in France to drive to Adolf Hitler’s headquarters and meet Ribbentrop.”
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No one could have been more surprised by her statement than her own attorney who, less than a month before, told the jury that his client never had any association with the “unholy lot” that led the world to slaughter. Instead, she revealed that she intimately loved a man who was welcomed to the Führer’s lair.

On the final day of her testimony, John Kelley grabbed his stack of transcripts and read excerpts from Axis Sally’s broadcasts. With his voice full of contempt, he read the words “She’ll never surrender until you boys surrender.… How ’bout it?” The prosecutor asked, “Did you think that was going to entertain your countrymen in the foxholes?”

Mildred grew combative. “I knew that they were not taking that seriously. I had many written reports on it, and Professor Koischwitz knew it too.”

Undeterred, Kelley read from the transcript where Midge wondered if the GIs wives and girlfriends were not “sort of running around with one of the 4-Fs back home.” Kelley spat out, “Did you think
that
was going to entertain them?”

She denied ever posing as a Red Cross worker to deceive wounded men to obtain interviews. She insisted that if any of her group had said he or she represented the Red Cross, there would have been no recording, “concentration camp or no concentration camp.”
⁴³²
Too many men had testified to the contrary. In the days following the June 1944 invasion of France, Allied forces moved so rapidly that many hoped and some believed that the war would be over by Christmas. German armies were in rapid retreat and it only made sense that Axis Sally would have trouble finding willing participants. In the face of so much prisoner testimony, Mildred’s heated denials devastated the credibility of her entire testimony.

She denied that she exposed herself to Michael Evanick and she denied that she ever threatened the men of
Stalag IIB
with retaliation for the horse manure incident. In order to believe the defendant, the jury would have to believe that every former prisoner who took the stand against her had lied. John Bartlow Martin wrote in his private notes as he observed her days on the stand that “her aplomb is keener at the start of the day.… It wears down to where she almost stops lying at the end of hard days on the stand.”
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Her power of self-delusion was evident, no more so than when she described her visits to the prisoner-of-war camps. None of the cruelty and hardship experienced by the prisoners appeared in her recollections. She called one “very picturesque, their washing on the line, so very Bohemian”—a world where the inmates peacefully strummed on guitars and mandolins, asked for her autograph and excitedly lined up to be interviewed.
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The more she spoke the more divorced from reality she seemed. In one instance, she thanked the Irish “who have suffered for over 900 years” for giving her the strength to face her persecutors. In another, she told the court that
Sender Bremen
owed her hundreds of Reich Marks, and the USA Zone owed her thousands, though the broadcasting company and the regime that created it was ground to dust. Her capacity for self-deception had its limits. When the jury listened to a particularly damaging broadcast where she referred to American pilots as “murderers,” Axis Sally fell to the floor unconscious. The judge quickly called a recess and an ambulance rushed her to the jail infirmary. Edna Mae attributed it to a pork chop her sister had eaten for lunch but the attending press drew a direct connection between her illness and the words on the recording.

When Mildred returned to the stand the following day, the shaky witness testified that she became increasingly uncomfortable with her role at the radio station. As the Allies pushed through North Africa and Italy in 1943, she decided to do something for the American boys in captivity. “I begged to be allowed to enter the prisoner of war camps because I wanted to see how the American boys were getting along,” she insisted. “The only thing that could bring me a little happiness in the chaos of war was the feeling that I could be of some service to the people of my own country. I told Professor Koischwitz that my only reason for being was to go the prisoner-of-war camps. He knew I was not a propagandist.”
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The Other Sally

Laughlin introduced the existence of the Rome Axis Sally to the court, and Mildred explained the reasons for her fury at discovering the existence of the other broadcaster. The woman used the name Sally repeatedly in propaganda broadcasts directly aimed at advancing American troops in the field, and designed to confuse and break their will. She told the court that she was enraged that another woman would usurp her notoriety, but the nameless woman’s ability to violate the fine line she had established in her own mind between entertainment and treachery was intolerable.