Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany (42 page)
Read Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany Online
Authors: Richard Lucas
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Bisac Code 1: BIO022000, #Biography, #History
At 3 a.m. on June 25, 1988, Mildred Gillars passed away. Her death certificate listed her occupation simply as “Teacher.”
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A friend, James Sauer, announced that there would be no public funeral service for the woman the world knew as Axis Sally. On June 28, a small group of friends attended her burial at St. Joseph’s Cemetery. “She was a charity case,” the cemetery caretaker recalled.
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Impoverished most of her life, she remained so at its end. All of her earthly possessions (furniture, clothes, books, etc.) amounted to an estate worth only $3,194.16. All money from the estate was used to pay for her eight doctors, rent and hospital care.
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To this day, no head or footstone marks her grave. Even in death, the woman who drank from fame’s bitterest cup demanded privacy.
A week after Mildred’s death, her obituary appeared in
The New York Times,
the
Washington Post
, and on the wire services. After the turmoil of the Vietnam War, Jane Fonda’s 1972 propaganda broadcasts from Hanoi, and the student movement’s overt support of the Viet Cong as American forces fought, the crime and punishment meted out to Axis Sally seemed like a quaint relic of a bygone national morality. The
Times
chose to focus on the style of the woman rather than the substance of her crimes:
Her 1949 trial attracted enormous public attention as much for the soap opera quality of Miss Gillars’ life as for her crime. At her trial, Miss Gillars fascinated the public and the press with her flamboyance and cool self-possession. She cut a theatrical figure in tight fitting black dress, long silver hair and a deep tan. She had scarlet lips and nails.… She sent a frisson through the trial when she described her obsessive love with Mr. Koischwitz, who was married.
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The “newspaper of record” repeated the false assertion that Mildred moved to Berlin “to marry a German citizen,” who it misidentified as Otto Koischwitz, “a former professor at Hunter College in New York.”
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Back in Ohio, Colleen and Iris Wiley were shocked to learn that their elderly neighbor was one of the most infamous women of World War II. Interviewed by the
Columbus Dispatch
shortly after Mildred’s death, Mrs. Wiley was effusive about her friend. “She was brilliant. She spoke and taught French and German. She was a great reader. She loved to go to the Ohio Theatre and see the old movies. She was interested in about everything. We thought the world of her.”
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In Ashtabula, another woman who thought the world of Mildred Gillars opened the local newspaper to discover that her half-sister had died. Edna Mae had neither seen nor heard from Mildred since 1961.
In 1995, Edna Mae gave an interview to Carl Feather of the Ashtabula
Star-Beacon.
The still mentally agile former dance teacher had not come to terms with the passing of her sister: “It doesn’t seem possible that she could be dead,” she told Feather. One final time, the elderly woman came to Mildred’s defense and tried to explain why the government, the judge, the jury and the press treated her with so much malice compared to other “radio traitors” of the day: “I think perhaps it could have been the hotsy-totsy air she had. She just thought she was a perfect person.”
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“The story should be told…”
Within weeks, former students and friends of Axis Sally began to share their memories and reveal what they were told about her days in Hitler’s Germany. Most friends and acquaintances did not pry into her past, but over the years, a story emerged that was part fact, part fiction, and tailor-made for American consumption. A letter to the editors of the
Columbus Dispatch
from Mary M. Badders of Lawrence, Ohio shed some light on the tale she told. Starkly different from a trial testimony that few were likely to research and even more unlikely to find, the story tied up the loose, embarrassing ends of her life; and made her past actions and beliefs somewhat palatable to those who discovered or knew about her past. Collaborationists in Vichy France, the Nazi conquered lands of Eastern Europe, and German war criminals constructed such exculpatory stories to argue their innocence or ignorance, insist on their doubts and even opposition to Hitlerism, in an attempt to make each day “livable” in a world haunted by the deaths of six million Jews and countless dead and wounded. Mrs. Badders’ letter gives a summary of Axis Sally’s story:
Recently, Mildred Gillars, aka Axis Sally, died. As one who knew her, I would like to share a brief portion of her story.
When World War II broke out in Europe, Gillars had been living in Europe for a number of years and was engaged to be married to an officer in the German army. This man opposed Adolf Hitler and was imprisoned. Gillars was also arrested and instructed that unless she cooperated with the Nazis, her fiancé would be shot. Unknown to her, he had already been killed.
Thinking she was buying his life, she did as she was told. I am not trying to justify what she did. It was terribly wrong. But it does point out, though, that without absolutes of right and wrong firmly established in our minds, we listen to our hearts, we practice situational ethics and we make horrible mistakes.
The beautiful part of this story, however, is that during the same time in Germany, there was an order of Catholic nuns who were also persecuted by the Nazis. Some of the nuns escaped to France. From there, they traveled to England and later to the United States. When Gillars was in prison, these same nuns, who should have hated anyone associated with the Nazis, faithfully visited her and prayed for her.
When she was released from prison, they gave her a job at their convent school (I was a student at that school). Through their efforts, she was converted to Christ because they loved their Lord enough to forgive, to pray for an enemy, and to do good to those who persecuted them.
I do not justify Gillars’ actions, but I do feel the story should be told.
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Robert Boyer spent many hours with Mildred in the last years of her life. He recalled one instance where the subject of the extermination of Europe’s Jews came up. It was met with an uncharacteristic and uncomfortable defensiveness:
I can only remember one occasion in which we were riding in the car and the radio was on and there must have been something about the Holocaust or the Nazi period on and she turned to me and rather emphatically said, “You know, we didn’t know about all of that,” meaning apparently the destruction of the Jews and the extermination camps and so forth. And I was rather taken aback by it, and she went on to say, “When the news is controlled you don’t know what’s really going on.” Now I don’t particularly buy that argument—but that’s the only time I heard her give a defense for what she had done.
It’s the excuse that I have heard from many, many Germans who lived through that period in Germany and that is they claim not to have known it is difficult to understand how they could not know just from the evidence of their eyes, when all the Jews disappear from your town you must make certain conclusions, but I’m sure there was a certain amount of intentional blindness.
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Nevertheless, Robert Boyer explained that his friend displayed a certain pride in surviving the many misfortunes of her life and took comfort in friends and faith:
She lived a simple life, but a good life. She had many friends, I think, all of whom knew her situation and I think she was quite proud of the fact that she had come through it all—and was not broken.
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Epilogue
MAY 2010
On a grassy hillside in Lockbourne, Ohio is the unmarked grave of one of the most reviled names in American history. Surrounded by veterans of that struggle, she maintains her privacy in death. Not even a simple number marks the lot where she lies. Only a gusting wind breaks the silence of that common ground where a statue of the Holy Family keeps watch over the victors and the vanquished. In Ohio, Mildred Gillars came full circle—back to the land where her rootless childhood finally settled into a few happy, hopeful years. As a young lady, her thirst for notoriety and the stage set her on a path that led to desperation and poverty.
In Berlin, she finally found rewarding employment—first, as a film critic and then as a radio announcer for the Nazi state. Willfully blind to the suffering of Berlin’s Jews and the approaching clouds of war, she chose to remain in Germany. When she experienced success unlike anything she had ever known in America, that good fortune reinforced her belief in the wisdom of her decision to stay. When the war claimed the life of her German fiancé, she descended into an adulterous affair with her radio manager—a naturalized American indicted for treason. His death in 1944 snuffed out her last chance to become a German citizen by marriage. At the war’s end, she was unmarried, impoverished, alone and without a country.
With most of her adult life spent either under Nazi rule, in Allied prison camps or US jails, her insatiable desire for fame was supplanted by the desire to live out her life in peaceful obscurity. Always seeking to avoid the inevitable, unanswerable questions about her personal racial and political beliefs, Mildred Gillars kept her views to herself. Axis Sally was on the run long after leaving prison. Nevertheless, close friends like Robert Boyer, as well as acquaintances such as Jim Dury, eventually posed the most difficult question: How could she and her German friends and colleagues not have known what was happening to the Jews? Thousands of Berlin’s men, women and children were rounded up and transported to the East during the eleven years she lived there. Her paramour, a Foreign Office official welcomed as Ribbentrop’s guest to the
Wolfsschanze
, had to be aware of the rumors that came back from Poland and the Reich’s other occupied territories. It was
that
question, always answered with an insistent and final “we just didn’t know,” that would always keep Mildred Gillars at an uncomfortable distance from her fellow Americans.
She left America for Europe in 1934 when isolationism was still in vogue, and repeated those beliefs in her broadcasts as an employee of Berlin Radio. By the late 1930s, isolationist policy was challenged by FDR’s desire to take action against the Fascist dictatorships; but Mildred had been away too long to sense the changing temper of the times in the United States. Unaware of the signal change in American public opinion after Hitler’s broken agreements, and disinterested in politics, she became the mouthpiece for the beliefs of a man she admired, respected and loved. When the worm turned on December 7, 1941, there was no going back.
Axis Sally believed that she could love America and still do her job for Reichsradio. It was that belief that went to the question of intent, and played a central role in the jury’s decision to convict her on only one count: participation in
Vision of Invasion
. The only charge that specifically accused her of directly subverting the war aims of the United States, it was at the same time the work of an actress who neither wrote nor edited the material. The rest of the Justice Department’s charges—the interviews with prisoners of war, the medical reports on wounded soldiers,
et al.
—could be construed as the actions of a woman behind enemy lines doing what she could do to help imprisoned American servicemen. It was
Vision of Invasion
—an overacted, overwrought, barely audible radio play—that tipped the scales toward treason. Clearly, its only aim was to sow doubt and despair among soldiers slated to fight and die on the beaches of France.
Mildred’s inability to admit her own errors of judgment, her stubborn insistence on remaining in the limelight, and her enthusiastic parroting of the Nazi propaganda line long after Germany’s defeat, were all factors that led to her tragic end. Long after it was clear that the Nazi experiment led only to war and starvation, Mildred still could enthusiastically lecture newsmen on the “correctness” of Hitler’s ideas regarding Communism, and tell her CIC interrogators that the war for her was against England and the International Jewry (“I just couldn’t get the Jews out of my mind…”, she claimed in one memorable statement). She accepted the Nazi worldview, believed her own propaganda, and paid a heavy price for that delusion.