Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany (36 page)

Either way, the
intent
of the accused was central to determining her guilt or innocence. Laughlin provided multiple witnesses who made it quite clear that she was never in a position to refuse her hosts. Ulrich Haupt, Emil Beckman and Erwin Christiani did everything possible to express the terror they had faced at the hands of a ruthless police state. Laughlin constantly tried to remind the jury that those dangers applied to Mildred Gillars as well. Daily survival depended on collaboration. If, for instance, she had the option that Georgia von Richter had—to either broadcast for Berlin Radio or work in a munitions factory—would one job be any less a form of treason than the other?

Laughlin insisted that Mildred had remained steadfastly loyal to America (notwithstanding her hatred and distrust of President Roosevelt) through the darkest days of the war, and never, at any time, intended to betray her nation. He pointed to her insistence on visiting the prisoner of war camps, her requests to American listeners that they inform the friends and families of the POWs about their safety, and her refusal to speak to the convicted traitor Martin James Monti as proof of her patriotism.

The clarity of these explanations was muddied by Axis Sally’s adulterous affair with Koischwitz and her unapologetic love for the man. Laughlin’s depiction of the Professor as a Svengali leading an American girl to ruin did not conform to the history and attitude of the worldly woman on the stand. She simply did not want to leave her man—even in 1944 as Allied armies closed in on Paris. She did not abandon him in the midst of Germany’s defeat—not to save her own skin nor to plead her innocence before the Americans authorities. As she told John Kelley on the stand, no army would separate them—even unto death.

“Heavy hangs the head that plays the role of a traitor.”
—John M. Kelley
⁴⁴⁷

MARCH 1949–JUNE 1961

The first week of March 1949 brought the latest in a series of shocking Soviet espionage cases. Judith Coplon, a Justice Department analyst, was charged with providing classified national security documents to her Russian lover, an employee of the United Nations. Coplon was accused of providing the Soviets with FBI files detailing the investigation of possible Communist agents in the Federal government. As another lovestruck American woman took center stage, the trial of Axis Sally slowly ground to a close. The scores being settled in Mildred Gillars’ Washington courtroom seemed out of sync with the times as the American public turned its attention to new dangers of subversion from within. In a matter of months, John Kelley would be tapped to lead the prosecutorial charge against Judith Coplon, but on March 8, 1949, the rising star in Attorney General Tom Clark’s Justice Department began his closing argument for the conviction of Axis Sally.
²⁴

In a ninety-minute statement laced with bitter sarcasm, Kelley depicted the defendant as one of the most morally bankrupt characters in American history. Like a firebrand evangelist condemning the evils of sinful flesh, he lashed out at the “unholy traitor” who cast her lot with the Nazis. Calling her “a stupid woman” with “lovers aplenty,” Kelley claimed that Axis Sally happily shared the exultation of Hitler’s early wartime victories. Reminding the jury of the Führer clicking his heels in triumph at the French surrender, he drew a direct connection between Adolf Hitler and Axis Sally:

Kelley resisted any effort to define Axis Sally as the innocent victim of a manipulative and controlling lover. He depicted Koischwitz not as a lonely matron’s man of destiny, but a despicable adulterer who shamelessly carried on with the defendant while his doomed wife carried his child:

Reading from one of Midge’s
Medical Reports
, the prosecutor depicted Axis Sally as being as depraved and sadistic as any death camp guard:

Although Kelley admitted that Midge’s prisoner-of-war interviews were propaganda-free, he maintained that she slyly waited for her moment to put the poison in:

Mildred sat unmoving, her eyes darting about as Kelley’s barrage went on. The prosecutor sat down and yielded the floor to James Laughlin. The urbane, silver-haired attorney rose and approached the jury box. Like an indulgent father defending the good intentions of a wayward daughter, he called his client “unjustly maligned and accused.” “Horse manure about sums up the government’s case,” Laughlin said. “This lady never wanted to do anything against the United States [and] never wanted to betray her country.”
⁴⁵⁶
The Government’s response to her wartime activities was a gross overreaction. “Not a life was lost as a result of her broadcasts,” Laughlin emphasized. “On the other hand, you can infer that many an American mother got comfort from the news of her son’s whereabouts which came to her on those broadcasts.”
⁴⁵⁷

Ignoring the hours of testimony from former POWs, Laughlin insisted that there was “no evidence that the broadcasts were harmful to the country, or that they tended to undermine the morale of the armed forces.”
⁴⁵⁸

In the face of the mountain of damning evidence, Laughlin tried to exploit the racial composition of the jury. He pointed to the Justice Department’s enthusiasm for prosecuting dangerous characters like Miss Gillars with a heavy hand, all the time refusing to lift a finger against lynch mobs and “those who persecute the Negro in the South”:

Laughlin took aim at the questionable motives of the prosecution witnesses, condemning the government’s slavish willingness to take the testimony of former Nazis at face value. The perks and advantages available to cooperating Germans should cast doubt on their testimony, he said. “The word of a Nazi should never be taken over that of an American citizen. Everyone knows that.” He compared the meager five dollars per day that the jury received to the ten dollars a day stipend that former Nazi functionaries were paid for their cooperation. Moreover, the witnesses were given employment opportunities unheard of in war-wrecked Germany.

No matter how he tried to distract the jury from the facts of the case, Laughlin had to address his client’s unsavory relationship with Koischwitz. “From the time of Sodom and Gomorrah,” he told the jury, “married men have been carrying on affairs with women. That’s wrong—but we are dealing with human beings.” Testing the credulity of every person in the room, Laughlin inferred that the affair was not wholly consensual. “She didn’t know his wife was pregnant,” the attorney insisted. “Our laws allow females—in order to save their lives, to allow their bodies to be violated.”
⁴⁶¹
Despite his client’s clear adoration of the Professor in her own sworn testimony, the defense blamed “coercion and enemy compulsion” in the figure of Otto Koischwitz as the main reason she remained on the Berlin airwaves:

Not just a victim, a martyr; “Here is this lady—taking her chances with the bombs falling,” ensuring that the soldiers’ messages home get through to their families. She walked a tightrope between her desire to help the GIs and to meet the expectations of the dreaded Horst Cleinow. “Refusal meant death. Cleinow with a wave of his finger could have sent her to a concentration camp and death—not immediate perhaps—but slowly of starvation.”
⁴⁶²

Laughlin saved his most powerful assault for the United States government’s violation of Mildred Gillars’ constitutional rights. Arrested, released and rearrested without charges in a foreign land; imprisoned without a hearing or a speedy trial, her rights as an American citizen were trampled upon. The same American government that denied her those rights hypocritically sought to convict her subject to that very same Constitution. Laughlin charged that Mildred and the other radio traitors were all being held to a new and dangerous redefinition of the crime of treason. For over a hundred years, “mere words” were not enough to constitute treason, but this new conception of the crime made the speaking of words into a microphone a capital crime. Sidestepping the fact that the words were spoken on enemy territory, Laughlin charged ahead, warning that this redefinition could undermine the First Amendment and have a “destructive effect on free speech and thought” at home: