Read Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany Online
Authors: Richard Lucas
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Bisac Code 1: BIO022000, #Biography, #History
Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany (38 page)
In June of 1950, Jail Superintendent Colonel Curtis Reid wrote to the Director of the DC Department of Corrections about one of his most troublesome prisoners. Despite his dislike of Axis Sally, her emotional instability was of great concern. James Laughlin tried for weeks to get her to sign the necessary papers to launch her appeal, but she refused. With the deadline approaching, the attorney begged Colonel Reid to intercede. She suddenly changed her mind and sent a flurry of notes to Reid demanding to know when the documents would arrive for her signature. Only days after Laughlin argued her case before the United States Court of Appeals (the prosecution had meantime dropped two counts against her), Mildred reported crippling digestive problems to the jail’s physician. Within a week, the doctor placed her on a strict diet of black coffee and buttered toast.
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Understandably fearful that the appeal was the last gasp of her legal hopes for freedom, Mildred sent several notes to Colonel Reid demanding a personal interview. On March 6, she “fainted” in front of the matron’s office while working on the laundry detail. An injury report stated that Mildred “suddenly threw her hands in the air and fell to the floor in a sitting position.”
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She was uninjured, but the disturbing incident recalled previous fainting spells, as in 1928, when she swooned in the Camden jail for the press, and in 1949, when she passed out in court after the jury heard her call American forces “murderers” in a recorded broadcast. When the going got tough, Axis Sally tended to pass out.
At her own request, she was transferred to the Women’s Division of the District of Columbia Workhouse at Occoquan, Virginia. But nine days later, she was returned without explanation to the District Jail at the request of authorities. Frustrated amid a seemingly endless wait for the decision of the Appeals Court, Mildred lashed out again. This time, she struck Edna Mae from her visitors list. Colonel Reid wrote a sympathetic note to Mrs. Herrick to inform her of Mildred’s decision and “save [her]… a trip to this city.”
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As the outlook for a favorable decision looked increasingly bleak, she cut her ties with her only living relatives. From late 1949 to the summer of 1950, Edna Mae kept in touch with Colonel Reid regularly. In one letter, she asked the superintendent if she could send shoes or a small chicken to Mildred for Christmas “if it wouldn’t cause too much dissension [
sic]
among the prisoners.”
On May 19, 1950, almost five months after Laughlin argued the case, the Court of Appeals upheld the jury’s decision and the judge’s conduct. Judge Charles Fahy wrote that the weight of the evidence was sufficient to convict her on the tenth count (participation in
Vision of Invasion
), even though she was found not guilty on the remaining seven. The three eyewitnesses who witnessed her actions (Ulrich Haupt, Georg Heinrich Schnell and Hans von Richter) were never challenged as to their competence in the original trial, so their testimony could not be disallowed.
The Best Years of Their Lives
In December 1949 at the request of the Office of Alien Property, the FBI dispatched agents to interview former German colleagues and friends of Max Otto Koischwitz. Their task was to determine whether the return of money and property belonging to the Koischwitz family and expropriated by the Federal government after their return to Germany in 1939 could be safely returned to the surviving daughters. Stella, the professor’s eldest, was living in New York City, and the FBI was especially interested in the role she had played as a radio announcer during the war. Following Koischwitz’s death, she worked as an announcer and news reader on Reichsradio to make ends meet, and the young girl’s political leanings had to be determined before the property was returned.
Ironically, the United States was, at the same time, welcoming dyed-in-the-wool Nazis—some with blood on their hands—into the country because they were perceived to be valuable assets in the struggle against Communism. To determine whether the return of the property would harm the national interest, agents interviewed Horst Cleinow (the once-feared radio manager who threatened Mildred after he discovered that she had been broadcasting without a censor), Adelbert Houben, Hans von Richter (her former friend and manager) and, most importantly, Gerd Wagner.
Wagner was the head of the News Division for the USA Zone and a personal friend of Max Otto Koischwitz. Wagner met him on his return from America at the outbreak of war in September 1939. A frequent visitor to the Koischwitz home, the Professor revealed to Wagner a crucial fact about his time in America; one that sheds light on his decision to take US citizenship in 1935:
MR WAGNER stated that he had talked with MAX OTTO KOISCHWITZ in Berlin, the exact date he could not recall, at which time KOISCHWITZ had stated to him that he, KOISCHWITZ, had been requested by the German government to secure his American citizenship for the purpose of carrying on German propaganda in the United States.… He advised that in conferences with MAX KOISCHWITZ, he was very anti-American in his views.
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As early as 1935, Max Otto Koischwitz took his orders from Berlin—and even assumed American citizenship so that his service to the Third Reich would not be interrupted. His yearly trips back to the Fatherland, dissatisfaction with the Hunter faculty’s refusal to grant him a full professorship, and anger at those students who resisted his attempts at Nazi indoctrination make sense in this light. Wagner’s revelation explains why the newly minted American was welcomed back to Germany with open arms and a Foreign Office job in September 1939. Moreover, it reveals a man capable of betraying those closest to him for the sake of the Reich, and shows how and why he pressured, cajoled and manipulated a lonely American to take actions that jeopardized her citizenship, her freedom, even her life.
Other former
Reichsradio
functionaries interviewed that December were not as forthcoming. Cleinow, von Richter and Houben portrayed Koischwitz as a dissenter, even anti-Nazi. Horst Cleinow was residing in Emmaus, Pennsylvania—another by-product of the treason trials, in which once-loyal minions of the Hitler regime were rewarded for their assistance to the Justice Department with new “temporary” homes in the United States. Despite his application for party membership in 1937, Cleinow denied ever being a Nazi:
[Cleinow] never received any indication that Koischwitz was a Nazi Party member. He said that the latter’s employment in the Foreign Office did not necessarily mean that he was a Party member, although it was quite possible that his Party membership may have been concealed. He did not believe that this was the case, however, since Koischwitz was one of the few people with whom Cleinow freely discussed and criticized the German political situation. In these discussions, Koischwitz indicated his very sharp criticism concerning matters initiated by the Nazi Party. He said that if Koischwitz was a Nazi Party member, he was not a fanatical one.
Cleinow believed that Koischwitz enjoyed life in the United States much better than in Germany and did not feel at home in Berlin. He said that Koischwitz never expressed any positive or negative political statement toward the United States but that he was generally regarded in Berlin as favoring the mentality of the Anglo-Saxons…. According to Cleinow; Koischwitz was cautioned by the members of the German Foreign Office to remain silent and to retain to himself his pro-American admiration.
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Incredibly, Cleinow told the FBI that he “knew of no contributions, literary or financial, by Koischwitz to the Nazi cause,” even as Mildred Gillars was beginning a ten- to thirty-year sentence for performing in one of his “literary contributions” to the cause.
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He went further:
Since Koischwitz was a German citizen and radio was considered essential by the German government during wartime, Koischwitz would not have had the opportunity to discontinue his broadcasts even if he desired to do so.
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Cleinow asserted that Koischwitz, as a German citizen, could not discontinue his broadcasts even if he had wanted, at the same time that the Justice Department refused to accept that a friendless American woman was unable to stop
her
broadcasts. More than a double-standard, it was the cornerstone of the government’s case against her. Cleinow addressed the case of the now-imprisoned American by further whitewashing his late colleague:
Koischwitz associated with Mildred Gillars (Axis Sally)… and he undoubtedly influenced her broadcasts. He said that Koischwitz entertained Gillars in his home and that she was very friendly with Koischwitz’s wife…. Cleinow said Koischwitz went completely to pieces after his wife’s death.
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With Axis Sally securely in jail, Cleinow’s rewritten history went unchallenged. He wasn’t a Nazi or even pro-Nazi, nor was Koischwitz. Instead, the two men were vocal critics of the party’s actions and could rely on the confidence of each other when voicing their dissent. In Cleinow’s fantastic telling, the Professor entertained Axis Sally in his home while his pregnant wife formed a warm friendship with the American.
Alderson
On August 10, 1950, a train stopped at daybreak in the small rural town of Alderson, West Virginia. Mildred Gillars and two other female prisoners emerged from a Pullman car into the bracing morning fog. For the first time in her long incarceration, no reporters or photographers awaited her arrival. An iron-barred prison wagon traversed the steep winding road that led from the train station to the main gate of the Federal Reformatory for Woman. As the sun rose over the mountains, a guard unlocked the gate. The three women were led to the Orientation Building, known to insiders as Cottage 26. Since the prison’s founding in 1927, the experimental nature of the facility was reflected in the language used to describe its “cottages,” “rooms” and the sprawling campus called the “Reservation.”
In Cottage 26, Mildred began a sentence that could last 30 years. She filled out a long questionnaire that asked a slew of personal questions, including “Are you a lesbian?” A similar questionnaire was sent to Edna Mae asking for details on her sister’s personality, preferences, character strengths and weaknesses. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a Communist jailed for violating the Smith Act, wrote a memoir of her Alderson prison experience. Gurley Flynn resented the questionnaires and called them “a despicable form of petty spying on a prisoner and her family [that] gave the authorities private and personal information about her which they had no right or need to secure. Since there was no psychiatric treatment or occupational therapy at Alderson, it was not designed to help the prisoners.”
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Nevertheless, family members dutifully answered the questions, some fearing that a refusal might lead to revocation of their visiting privileges.
After fingerprinting and a mug shot, Mildred was ordered to strip down to be examined by a nurse. An enema was administered to ensure that no narcotics were being smuggled in. After the medical exam, she was allowed to shower and changed into a rayon nightgown and housecoat. Every incoming prisoner was locked in quarantine for three days in a private room. Cottage rooms were equipped with a bed, toilet, washbasin and radiator. The inmates’ hair was dusted with DDT, for delousing, and prison officials ordered that the (now-outlawed) chemical not be washed out for 48 hours.
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For 72 hours, the new inmates were allowed no human contact except when jail guards brought in meals. In their solitude, they could hear the whistle blow at the start of the workday and again ten minutes before its end (the latter signal ordered all males in the area to leave so that the “girls” could be returned to their cottages—eliminating the possibility of fraternization). Every morning at 2 a.m., a guard (usually a local resident working the night shift) opened the door to the sleeping inmate’s room to shine a flashlight at the bed.
Alderson, the first Federal prison dedicated to housing female inmates, was an outgrowth of the woman’s suffrage movement. The brutal treatment of women convicted of federal crimes and then pushed into the state prison systems was the prime impetus for reform. Championed by Eleanor Roosevelt, Florence Harding (widow of President Warren G. Harding) and Mrs. Henry Morgenthau, Alderson was dedicated to rehabilitation rather than punishment. The 105-acre site looked more like a college than a prison. Inmates were assigned tasks designed to teach a trade or skill associated with the home, such as crafts, ceramics, laundry, sewing, photography and gardening. Prisoners came from all walks of life, convicted of crimes ranging from prostitution to forgery, theft and narcotics—even the production and sale of moonshine. Some were unfortunates—illiterate women of all races who were tempted or forced into a life of crime by a man or abject poverty or both. Others were hardened criminals—gangsters’ molls, grifters and murderers. A few were convicted of politically motivated crimes. Lolita Lebrón, the Puerto Rican nationalist who participated in a 1954 attack on the US House of Representatives, and Gurley Flynn were just a few of the prisoners serving sentences for politically-motivated crimes. In addition, Mildred’s wartime counterpart in Japan, Iva Toguri D’Aquino, known as “Tokyo Rose,” was resident in the prison.
On her fourth day at Alderson, Mildred was released from quarantine and allowed to join the population for three weeks of orientation. In orientation, the women memorized prison rules, received vaccinations and took intelligence and aptitude tests.
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The prison staff was leery of bad publicity, especially from Walter Winchell and the newspaper columnist Westbrook Pegler (Winchell once made an embarrassing reference in his broadcast to rampant lesbian activity at the prison).
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The new inmates washed and waxed the cottage floors on their hands and knees as part of their introduction to the prison’s 6 a.m.–9 p.m. workday. Racial prejudice was ever-present (the facility was not desegregated until 1955), as “about half [of the inmates] were Negroes; a few were Spanish-speaking.”
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African-American guards were posted only at the maximum security cottages. Inmates were allowed to attend religious services twice a week, and a movie once a week. A Roman Catholic priest was on staff to conduct Mass and had a reputation for being helpful and compassionate to prisoners of all or no faith. The orientation period ended with a graduation ceremony attended by the warden, Nina Kinsella.
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