Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany (39 page)
Read Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany Online
Authors: Richard Lucas
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Bisac Code 1: BIO022000, #Biography, #History
Throughout orientation, Mildred’s difficult manner was a matter of concern to prison officials. Her first days at Alderson are summed up in an October 1950 evaluation:
She had a superior manner, was abrupt with the receiving officer and rude to the two girls admitted with her. She objected loudly to being committed under the name of Sisk rather than Gillars, was alert and observant but very uncooperative…
At first she was annoyed at everything, carried a chip on her shoulder, could not be reasoned with, felt persecuted, and expected bad treatment. She smoked alone, retired to her room to read during all spare time rather than join the group, and at the table seldom said much [and] appeared to be day dreaming. She was annoyed because girls urged her to attend a ball game so that others could go. She consented reluctantly and sat with her back to the field.
Constant complaints were received because she could not get cascara (
an herbal laxative
)… then complained because the order for cascara was not large enough. More and more was requested until she was called to the clinic for special attention and special medicine.During the second week, she joined the group in the living room but declined to participate in activities, preferring to sew on her clothing, which she altered well but reluctantly. In some ways, she was most pleasant and interesting but, at times, was selfish, greedy, grasping, and asked for favors or disregarded regulations to suit her convenience. When annoyed, she always felt bad and retired to her room sometimes, requiring insistence to get her to meals which she ate heartily. She spoke appreciatively of the food and resisted any insinuations of insufficiency or quality from others—impressing upon them the suffering she had witnessed from “sheer starvation.”
Other girls did not usually attempt to argue with her, were pleasant in her path, and did not impose themselves upon her. She declined to attend religious services and movies and was clever enough to avoid loss of privileges.
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One reason that other inmates avoided the aloof and condescending Axis Sally came from the Alderson gossip mill. Rumors swirled around the silent, silver-haired woman about her wartime activities. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn wrote that, as late as 1955, Axis Sally had a frightening reputation. “You know what she did?… Made lampshades out of the skins of our soldiers,” was only a sample of the gossip surrounding her.
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Gurley Flynn politely informed the others that they had confused Mildred with “The Bitch of Buchenwald”—Ilse Koch. Koch (1906–1967) had been the wife of an SS camp commandant accused of collecting the tattooed skins of Jews and ordering inmates to participate in rapes and other sadistic sexual acts. Released by the American military, Koch was retried by a German court and sentenced to life in prison—a fate she avoided by hanging herself in 1967.
As Mildred entered the general population, she was transferred to Cottage 23, a maximum security facility. Political criminals were typically assigned to maximum security areas, whether or not the offense was violent in nature. Women convicted for treason, violation of the Smith Act (advocating the violent overthrow of the government), espionage or other politically motivated crimes were thoroughly monitored. Books and other reading material was evaluated for “subversive” content, and letters to and from inmates were opened and read by the FBI. It was not uncommon for the recipient of a letter from one of these prisoners to be visited by Federal agents and interrogated.
Clearly embarrassed by her sister’s refusal to write or speak to her, Edna Mae nevertheless held out hope for reconciliation as she wrote to prison officials in October 1950:
You may think it strange if she doesn’t correspond with me. For some reason, she thinks I have failed her. But if the time comes she thinks she would like to write me again, I hope you might assure her I’ll always want to hear from her. Our home and heart will always be open for her. We are building a fine big twelve roomed home on two acres of land and it is her home. What she doesn’t know is that we have changed our building plans so we might build rooms just for her. There will even be a private entrance for her, if she prefers privacy.
She knows she is innocent and I know it, but what I don’t believe she realized is how cruel the people might be to her when she gets out, unless she has a sheltered home to come to and until she has time to prove her innocence.
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Loneliness and isolation characterized Mildred’s first years in West Virginia. Assigned to Cottage 23, she never spoke to other inmates unless spoken to first. Moreover, she carried an unrelenting bitterness from her long incarceration and trial. Mildred’s annual review for 1953 spoke plainly about her initial resistance: “Somehow she felt herself to be a martyr and was never able to take any of the blame for her incarceration. Instead, she seemed to enjoy being bitter, and unwilling to conform to the usually accepted loyalties.”
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She was uniformly disliked by other inmates—a dangerous position considering the number of violent and/or mentally ill or retarded women relegated to the prison.
“Most of the cottage members disliked Mildred because of her condescending manner, her greediness about food, and her general tactlessness,” the report continued. “Usually, she managed to get along with the group by not mixing much, but there was some friction when she disagreed with others as of positive opinions as her own.”
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Slowly, she warmed to her cottagemates. Assigned to the craft room, Mildred became a skilled weaver and seamstress. The craft area housed a kiln for ceramics, looms and an array of sewing tables. Inmates assembled bedspreads and quilts, dresses and nightgowns for fellow prisoners. They knitted sweaters, hats and scarves to be put on sale for visitors to purchase. Her room, filled with various projects, won the admiration of her guards. Eventually, she began to attend Roman Catholic mass. Her accomplishments in the craft room led her to teach her skills to the other “girls.”
In January, 1952 she moved to Cottage 7, where she would spend the rest of her prison term. Although her housemates found her to be “pleasant, courteous, sometimes officious,” she remained difficult and remote. She “wears an arrogant, superior manner like a cloak, is lonely and aloof… bitter and sarcastic at times.… Her attitude was hostile and uncooperative. She always upheld girls against officers, no matter how bad their behavior.”
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In her new home, she tended to the garden at the rear of the building. Fanatical in her maintenance of the flowers and plants, she was widely suspected of hoarding garden implements for her own use and “continually looking about the grounds for plants she could appropriate.”
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Locked into her room at the end of the workday, her nights were filled with reading and, eventually, she was allowed to practice the piano. Eventually, her cloak of self-imposed isolation gradually slipped away as she joined her cottage mates at occasional parties and get-togethers.
Mildred’s isolation from her family ended in June 1952, when Edna Mae and her young son Thomas made the long trip from Ashtabula, Ohio to the West Virginia hills. The silence ended when Mildred sent a Christmas wire to the Herrick family in December 1951, followed by another in March 1952. Inmate visits were held in a separate cottage fitted with comfortable armchairs and tables designed to evoke a living room atmosphere. Relatives had a difficult time finding suitable accommodations in Alderson proper. Boarding houses were few, usually “whites only” establishments that tended to be unclean and unfriendly to prisoners’ kin. The families of “colored” inmates were forced to find lodging in nearby towns.
The warden, Nina Kinsella, granted a two-hour extension to the visit. Kinsella hoped that Mildred’s reunion with her only living relative would help her cope with prison life and relieve her isolation. In the 1950s, mental health professionals in prisons were few and far between, and Axis Sally’s clear psychological disintegration continued to trouble Alderson officials: “She can be charming and gracious if she puts her mind to it.… She is not a leader for her manner repels, her opinions often are biased, and she has no interest or sympathy for, in her judgment, the common, ordinary inmate.… [She] seemed to feel far superior to other inmates and to officers.”
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Her air of superiority extended to her assignments, where she rejected all criticism and considered herself “infallible in her work, thinking, ideas and opinions.”
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At times, her behavior bordered on the bizarre. When a German doctor visited Alderson for a tour of the facility, Mildred told the guard that someone of her status could not be seen performing “menial work” for it would make a “very bad impression” of the prison.
Edna Mae visited once a year, usually in the summer months. The relationship, as always, was rocky. Guards noted in a report to the warden that a July 1956 visit was almost cut short by an argument shortly after Mildred arrived in the visiting area. Mrs. Herrick was “indignant” about the long delay she experienced waiting for her sister. “Immediately after Mildred came,” an account of the visit noted, “they became involved in an argument and Mrs. Herrick refused to speak for about 20 minutes. From then on, most of the visit was pleasant, but frequently there were harsh words and injured feelings between them.”
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“Accept your fate for it is sealed”
The years of bitterness and anger slowly gave way to acceptance. By 1953, authorities noticed a pronounced change in the attitude of their difficult prisoner. Mildred slowly adapted to the reformatory’s lifestyle and became a productive member of the population, but more than that, discovered some fulfillment and spiritual peace in Catholicism. A discontented life filled with great disappointment evolved into one determined to serve God and others in the time left to her. She began to direct the Protestant choir in 1957 and was responsible for assembling the music for the Catholic Mass. In the absence of a “civilian” music teacher, she enthusiastically coached the singers and sought to teach them the meaning of the lyrics. Although some found her imperious attitude grating, other inmates benefited from her contagious commitment to the sacred music. Her 1957–58 progress report stated:
She makes a real effort to show the choir members the meaning of music in worship and the necessity for it being welldone.… Although she has some difficulty with the Latin, she studies it diligently and tries very hard to have the members of the Catholic Choir pronounce it correctly. She also interprets to the best of her ability, so that they may appreciate the meanings involved.
Proving to be a talented teacher with a broad background of experience and knowledge, Mildred earned the admiration and respect of the Catholic Chaplain, Father Thomas Kerrigan, and prison officers. Befriended by the priest, she became deeply attached to the Church and its liturgy. She found some measure of solace in the deep meaning of its rituals and, although Episcopalian by birth, she eventually converted to Roman Catholicism. In 1960, she was baptized and confirmed in the Church by the Coadjutor Bishop Thomas J. McDonnell in Wheeling.
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Assigned to work in the craft room, she was also responsible for the management of the ceramics kiln. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn warmly recalled the beautiful blue Bavarian beer steins that Mildred made, emblazoned with words in German that translated to
“Accept your fate, for it is sealed.”
In reality, Axis Sally had accepted her fate. As early as 1956, her fellow prisoners encouraged her to seek a pardon or commutation. Mildred was not eligible for parole until 1959, but the release of several other Nazi-era prisoners—some convicted of the bloodiest of crimes—caught the attention of the other inmates. Gurley Flynn wrote:
I showed her news of similar cases. Constance Drexel, a Philadelphia socialite, was held on the same charge but never brought to trial. I told her of Ezra Pound, who was then held without trial at St. Elizabeth’s. I called her attention to cases of German war criminals who were being released. One, Joachim Peiper, commander of the Nazi Elite Guardsmen, had been found guilty of responsibility for the Malamedy forest massacre of Christmas 1944, when 142 Americans were killed. His sentence of 35 years was commuted in December 1956. He had served less than one-third of it. This was by order of the Parole and Clemency Board of six—American, British, French and West German. Reading all this, I could not be enthusiastic about keeping this woman in jail.
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When Iva Toguri D’Aquino was freed from Alderson in January 1956, it was evident to all that American public opinion was moving ever so slowly toward tolerance, if not forgiveness of former collaborators. Fearing the bitterness and reproach of the outside world, Axis Sally was not eager to leave the confinement of prison. Iva had been hounded by immigration authorities upon her release, and a similar deportation order was waiting for Axis Sally. The Justice Department was determined to send the two women back to the country where they committed their crimes. If that were to occur, Mildred would be forsaken in her own land and probably unwanted in the new Federal Republic of Germany.
In March 1959 she waived her right to apply for parole. Fifty-eight years old and looking at least ten years older, she could not face the prospect of survival in the outside world. The circumstances of her last release in Christmas 1946 were still fresh in her memory. Penniless, homeless and totally dependent on the good graces of friends for survival, she was rearrested within a month to be sent to America for trial. She certainly did not want to go through it all again at almost sixty years of age.