The History Channel original podcast.
History This Week, March 10th, 1949.
I'm Sally Helm.
The jury did not reach a verdict last night and Mildred Gillers is hoping that's a good thing for her.
She arrives at the courthouse in Washington, D.C. on a bus packed together with other prisoners.
She's the last to step off.
Throughout the trial, she's gone to some lengths to maintain her glamorous look.
Her white hair is done up kind of in the style of the movie star Rita Hayworth.
A New Yorker magazine writer covering the trial said that to his eye, her whole outfit black heels, blue scarf, fake tan suggests that she is torn by an inner conflict.
But on this windy March morning, Gillers seems in good spirits.
She greets her half-sister who's been by her side throughout the trial.
Good morning, dear, she says.
She sounds hopeful.
Maybe the jury has managed to find some sympathy in their hearts for her, this former actress who is now on trial for treason.
To a lot of people watching this trial, Mildred Gillers is better known as Axis Sally.
The name comes from what she decided to do while living in Berlin during World War II.
She got a job with Reichsradio, an influential arm of the Nazi government.
And she broadcast propaganda.
Anti-Semitic, anti-American messages aimed at soldiers overseas.
An attempt to weaken their morale and help the Germans win the ever-important information war.
But throughout this trial, Gillers has been insisting that she's innocent.
She swears she loves her country. that she was forced to do what she did or die.
Today, the story of Axis Sally.
How did a struggling actress from Maine become a potent weapon of the Nazis?
And is there a way to understand the choices that she made?
That trial in 1949 is not the first time that Mildred Gillers has seen the inside of a courtroom.
She'd had a run-in with the law 20 years earlier, in 1928, for a very different, though not totally unrelated crime.
Richard Lucas is the author of the first complete biography of Gillers.
He told us what happened in 1928 was essentially a publicity stunt gone wrong.
Gillers was in her late 20s, trying to make it as an actress in New York City.
She had fallen on hard times.
She didn't have any work.
So she answered an ad for a film called Unwelcome Children.
The filmmakers promise Gillers 75, to go out into the world and play the role of pregnant woman abandoned by her lover.
And she really sells it.
In mock despair.
She goes to the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, which connects Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
And starts throwing her leg over the bridge.
And the cops have to come and drag her over.
She's crying.
She's wailing.
She says, I can't go on.
Gillers, of course, was never really going to jump.
She's just trying to drum up attention for the movie.
But the police and the public don't know that.
And for days...
The Camden, New Jersey newspapers, Philadelphia papers all the way up to New York had taken hold of the story in tabloid fashion.
There are headlines like, Deserted Bride Leaves Suicide Note.
Letter Discloses Tragedy of Love.
But parts of the story aren't adding up.
The press found eventually that she was an actress, and the whole thing to three months in the county jail in New Jersey.
But a judge ends up taking pity on her.
He suspends her sentence, blaming the film producers instead.
So at the end of the day, she barely had enough money for car fare back to New York.
But this is the kind of thing she would get into, because she was desperate to be famous, desperate to be noticed.
That seems to have been Gillers' core motivation in life.
Get famous and get noticed.
Though history professor Michael Flamm reminds us, it is hard to totally understand what was driving Mildred Gillers.
Probably impossible.
I often tell students that Mildred's story illustrates the limits of history.
You know, we can know what happened, but we can't really know why it happened or why she made the choices that she did.
Flam told us her childhood might provide some clues.
I don't think it's too much of an exaggeration to describe Mildred as a troubled soul.
She comes from a dysfunctional family.
She was, according to most accounts, a sort of shy and withdrawn child.
She and her mother flee her abusive, alcoholic father when she's just six years old.
Her stepfather was also an addict, and he was controlling, maybe even abusive.
Gillers escapes by going to college, where she cultivates a certain image.
She wants to come off as impressive, worldly.
A classmate later recalled always using words of which she had only the vaguest idea of the meaning.
But if they were unusual or highbrow, they were for her.
And Gillers loves being on stage.
But in fact all of the campus reviews of her acting focused on her dramatic tendencies, which suggests, at least to me, that she had a penchant for overacting.
He has used the school's archives to research the woman he calls its most notorious alum.
She had a remarkable fashion sense.
She was apparently the first female undergraduate to wear knickers and galoshes as a combination, sort of a bold fashion statement.
I think of knickers as being like underwear.
Like, what is the look?
I thought knickers were more like golf pants, but now you're really out of my range of expertise here.
I looked it up and yeah, they're like bloomers.
Baggy pants that gather at the knee or the calf.
So that with waterproof rubber galoshes.
Definitely a look.
Mildred was very popular with the young men but not particularly popular with her female counterparts.
She attracted the attention of the campus bohemian, who was supposedly the first male undergraduate to grow a beard.
And the two of them apparently cut class and hung out, you know, at the soda fountain where they recited poetry and stared into each other's eyes, befitting the campus bohemian exactly.
In college, things go well for gillers.
She's a member of the theatrical honors society, she's studying german and by her senior year she and the campus bohemian are engaged to be married.
And then she makes a dramatic decision.
She decides to blow up her life and leave Ohio Wesleyan, without her degree, without her fiancé, in the spring of 1922.
And this is only the first moment where we really don't know why.
Some suspect she's in a romantic relationship with her theater professor.
The two of them both moved to Cleveland, and Gillers tries to make it as an actress.
She has modest success.
But it is the eve of the Great Depression.
Tough time to land a big break.
When she didn't work, she didn't need.
Richard Lucas again.
By the early 1930s, Gillers seems unmoored.
She is a failed actress.
She's failed in her personal life.
She was involved with a British diplomat.
She follows him to Algeria in North Africa, but they grow apart.
And there she is in Algeria.
She has no place to go, no career, and no marriage.
Lucky for Gillers, her mother wants to visit Europe.
So the two of them set off on a trip all around the continent.
And on September 4th, 1934, they arrive in Berlin.
The United States at the time is still in the throes of the Depression.
But the German economy is coming back.
Mildred became so entranced with the German situation.
There was a feeling of positivity and there were jobs.
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Germany also has a new leader, Adolf Hitler.
Michael Flamm told us, when Gillers arrives in Berlin, the nightmare side of the Nazi regime is already emerging.
She can't help but notice that anti-Semitism has increased dramatically.
There are signs in shop windows.
There are posters on the streets blaming German Jews for all sorts of things.
In Germany, the brown shirts of Hitler's Nazi army command world attention by boycotting Germany's half-million Jews, prisoning thousands and impoverishing tens of thousands, and by reverting to medieval standards, burning books that conflict with Nazi ideals.
We don't have a record of Gillers' politics before she travels to Europe.
We do know that in 1934, Gillers' mother heads back to the United States.
There's opportunity within a year of arriving in Germany.
Mildred has a good job.
She's doing translations for UFA, which is the German Hollywood, the German film industry.
So she was right on the edge of becoming a success.
And then the war broke out.
In September 1939, Germany invades Poland.
Suddenly, Europe is outnumbered.
War, and increasingly an information war, particularly in Germany.
In regimenting German thought, all radio programs emanate from the Department of Propaganda.
Every newspaper prints only what the state wants its people to read.
And any letter in the German mails is subject to censorship.
The Nazis are attempting to dominate public opinion, trying to spread their genocidal ideology.
And radio is a big part of that.
I mean, the Nazis quickly consolidate and take control of the airwaves.
They insist that everyone in Germany have a radio and that it be tuned to official stations.
Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, is particularly obsessed with radio.
He even commissions a new, cheap, mass-produced radio set.
He wants one broadcasting in every German home and beyond.
He tells the public.
We want a radio that reaches across our borders to give the world a picture of our character, our life and our work.
First step to conquest in the Nazi scheme is to demoralize the enemy by propaganda.
The German broadcasting service Reichsradio starts targeting listeners abroad, taking the information war to countries that they see as potential threats.
In 1940, they decide we need to focus on North America.
The United States has not yet entered the war, and Germany doesn't want it to.
So they start a propaganda offensive aimed at American radio listeners.
But Richard Lucas says they soon realize they're going to have a problem pulling this off.
Because most of their English-speaking broadcasters have thick German accents.
They needed someone with an American accent who could have that colloquialism that they needed.
That's when Mildred Gillers gets a call.
Come audition for Reichsradio.
Reichsradio at that point was located in a huge, massive building near the Brandenburg Gate.
It was incredibly dense and just all stone.
We don't know what Gillers is thinking when she walks into that imposing building in May of 1940.
But whatever she does at the mic that day is enough to impress the station manager.
Because she was an actress, she sounded like what you would hear in an American film.
And they hired her right away.
At this point, her job is basically just to read station IDs and introduce music, normal DJ stuff.
She was spinning records.
She was playing American jazz, which was outlawed in Germany.
Pretty soon, she starts acting in radio dramas.
I do want to note that Milvert begins her career with Reichsradio as simply an entertainer.
So she doesn't begin as a propagandist or a political commentator.
Still, Michael Flamm told us she is an employee of the Nazi government, which is about to become a big problem.
It's the spring of 1941.
Gillers needs to visit the U.S.
Embassy in Berlin to renew her passport.
The US government is already skeptical of Reichsradio because it's been making broadcasts that are anti- allies.
And they're very aware that Reichsradio has been spreading the message of Hitler and the Nazis.
And the U.S.
Embassy wants Mildred to resign her position with Reichsradio and return to the United States.
Gillers loves her life in Berlin.
She has at last achieved her dream.
She is popular.
She is a celebrity.
She is earning a good salary.
She doesn't see a great future for herself back in the United States.
So she refuses to quit her job at Reichsradio. the U.S. government takes her passport away.
But and I think this is important for her later legal troubles.
The US government never formally or officially revokes her citizenship, and Mildred never renounces her US citizenship either.
Gillers leaves the embassy without a U.S. passport in a kind of legal gray area.
A few months later, that gets more complicated.
Sunday morning, December 7th, 1941.
Gillers is in the Reich's radio studio when she hears about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
It left her in a crisis.
Richard Lucas told us, Gillers can't control herself when she hears the news.
She had a huge outburst and they told her not to come back to work.
According to Gillers' later testimony, this is the moment she's forced down a path not entirely of her own making.
The radio station manager calls her into his office and says you need to sign a loyalty oath to the Nazi regime.
And she does.
She dashed off a note, she said, saying, I will be loyal to the Reich.
She leaves the note with the station manager on December 9th, two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Two days later, Hitler declares war on the U.S.
In some respects, Gillers is now a woman without a country.
She's sort of caught in this murky twilight zone.
She's not a German citizen.
She's still a U.S. citizen.
She does not have a passport.
She's really quite trapped.
But life for Gillers is not so bad.
She's gaining recognition in the kind of job she's always wanted.
And she is in love. with her producer, a man named Max Otto Koischwitz.
Max Otto Koischwitz is a fascinating figure.
He's a German scholar and academic who comes to the United States.
By the end of the 1930s however, he's developed a reputation as a rather outspoken anti-Semite and pro-Nazi figure.
And so he's sort of pressured to leave the United States in 1939.
Back in Berlin, he becomes a producer at Reichsradio.
And in 1942, he's promoted to manage political broadcasts aimed at the United States.
Listeners in the U.S. can tune in to Reichsradio broadcasts using shortwave radio receivers.
And Koischwitz wants Gillers' voice to be the one they hear.
He professionally takes Mildred under his wing, and he becomes the producer of her shows.
Hello, this is America.
We hope you've been enjoying this musical cocktail coming to you from Berlin in the German Overseas Service.
That is really her broadcasting popular music back to the States.
Koischwitz is married with a fourth child on the way.
But by Christmas of 1942, he and Gillers have embarked on an affair.
And it is around this time that Keuschwitz urges Gillers to branch out from playing music and begin hosting political shows that push the Nazi message overseas.
This is Berlin calling, and I'd just like to say that when Berlin calls, it pays to listen.
To what extent is Mildred a free agent?
To what extent is she a puppet?
Strings are being pulled by Koishwitz, the puppet master.
We really, really don't know.
But this is the moment when listeners meet the woman they will call Axis Sally, a radio host whose new assignment is to undermine American morale at every turn.
In 1942, Mildred Gillers begins her career as Axis Sally, a Nazi propagandist.
Richard Lucas told us some of her broadcasts are aimed at homesick American soldiers.
She did a show called Home, Sweet Home, which was basically vignettes about being at home with your wife, with your girlfriend, back at the farm, your mother cooking in the stove.
Basically designed to induce desire to come home for the servicemen.
Michael Flamm said she also spins computers.
Most of her commentary centers around the idea that the British and the Jews have tricked the United States into fighting against their true allies, the Germans.
On behalf of some.
Either British conspiracy or it's a Jewish, communist conspiracy.
As one American to another, do you love the British?
Well, of course the answer is no.
Do the British love us?
So the show sort of sprinkles, some music, some sort of personal appeals to these young men not to give up their lives.
In some of the broadcasts, she casually uses anti-Semitic slurs.
At other points, she asks why young American soldiers should give up their blood for the king.
Yeah.
Some of her content is aimed specifically at women on the American home front.
She'd taunt them, conjuring images of the men they missed fighting overseas.
Good evening, women of America.
When you know as time goes on, I think of you more and more.
I can't somehow seem to get you out of my head.
You women in America, waiting for the one you love.
She would do medical reports of captured servicemen who had been wounded.
And she would get very graphic about the nature of their wounds, how they looked.
And then she would say, women of America, you don't want your sons coming home crippled.
Useless for the rest of their lives.
For whom?
For Malcolm D. Roosevelt and Churchill and their Jewish cohorts.
She hated Roosevelt.
Part of the propaganda line of Germany was that Roosevelt was indeed a Jew, that he was in league with the international Jewish conspiracy and that this was a war between Germany and worldwide Jewry.
Sacrificed by Franklin D Roosevelt, perishing on the fringes.
These propaganda broadcasts are good for Gillers' career.
Very quickly, Mildred is Rikes Radio's highest paid performer.
So for the first time in her life, she achieves, you know, not just popularity, but also economic security.
She can finally support herself and live the lifestyle that she had always dreamed of having.
Gillers is certainly living put up in a fancy apartment, granted extra food rations.
And she gets other special privileges.
She can read American magazines, which are otherwise banned, to get information for her broadcasts.
And she's even given access to German intelligence so that she can taunt the soldiers in real time with real information about what they're facing in battle.
As soldiers later told interviewers with the Veterans History Project, She would tell us where we were going to go, where we were going to bomb.
She knew.
And where she got her information, I don't know, but she got it.
Then she sort of signed off saying well, we know where you're coming and we'll be there to greet you.
We'll see you tomorrow.
What was so bad about this was she was right so much of the time.
Some soldiers come to loathe this Axis Sally.
They called her the Berlin bitch.
Some of the stuff was really tough to listen to.
She would say tell Tom Jones, do you know that your best friend back home is fooling around with your wife?
That kind of stuff.
She would throw at the guys and it would tear them up.
Gillers keeps at it until the very end.
In 1944, the war is undeniably headed towards an Allied victory.
On the eve of the D-Day invasion in Normandy, France Reichsradio airs a radio drama with Gillers in the leading role.
We now present a special feature program, Vision of Invasion, produced by the radio player.
It was written by her lover, Max Otto Koischwitz, and she acted as the mother of a boy who was on a ship going from Britain to the D-Day invasion.
And the intent was to convince men that they were going to their deaths.
She played a mother back in the United States.
She dreams of the boy drowning after a German ship sinks his boat.
So most of it is her being hysterical at the death of her son.
There's something I don't understand.
Gillers and Koischwitz make what will be one of their last propaganda efforts.
They start visiting American prisoner of war camps in Germany to record interviews with injured troops.
What Koischwitz and Gillers were hoping was that they might be able to entice some soldiers to make anti-US statements to criticize the war.
That effort mostly fails.
Gillers is pretending to sympathize with the GIs, but a lot of them see right through her.
One even passes her a pack of Chesterfield cigarettes that is filled with horse manure.
During those visits to the POW camps, Mildred often poses as a Red Cross volunteer.
So she lies.
Yes, and that's going to be important later.
Very soon after that visit, Gillers suffers a personal tragedy.
Keuschwitz suddenly dies.
She's beside herself.
And also, anyone in Germany who's paying attention can see that the Allies are closing in.
In May of 1945, Berlin falls.
Russian troops enter Reichsradio, but Gillers manages to escape out the station's back door.
She dodges the city's occupying troops for some time.
But in 1946, American officials track her down.
She was hiding under an assumed name.
She has very few possessions, although she does have this photograph of Keuschwitz, her great love.
Gillers is brought back to the States and locked up in a U.S.
Army prison.
In 1949, she stands trial for treason.
By the time Gillers appears in the courtroom, public understanding of Nazi atrocities is widespread.
Americans have learned about the German concentration camps and the millions of Jewish people who died in them.
And so suddenly, what Mildred was saying during World War II, which may not have been that different from what people were hearing from friends or family or neighbors or at the country club, now it's really beyond the pale.
Mildred will always maintain that she had no idea about the fate of the Jews.
She had no idea, no understanding of the Holocaust, but certainly she had to know how difficult life was becoming in Nazi Germany for German Jews.
Right, you're saying she can't be living in Berlin for the years that she is and not see that playing out very publicly.
Not as a prominent member of Reich's radio and not as someone who is fluent in the German language.
There are no Jewish jurors at Gillers' trial.
The judge says he doesn't think they'd be able to be fair, and he dismisses them.
Gillers' defense lawyers argue that she hadn't acted against her country.
She just talked.
But the government says words have consequences.
Mildred's broadcasts did at least potentially affect public opinion in the United States, affect home front morale and possibly even affect the morale of US soldiers in the field.
Gillers' attorney says she had no choice but to obey.
If she'd refused to do those broadcasts, the Nazis would have thrown her in prison, or worse.
And anyway, Gillers insists, she's an artist and a performer, not a propagandist.
But the government prosecutor uses Gillers' own words against her.
He has a phonograph brought into the courtroom and 40 sets of headphones.
Jurors listen to recordings of Gillers on the radio urging American GIs to give up the fight, slinging anti-Semitic slurs denouncing President Roosevelt.
Those recordings are very damaging to Gillers' case.
But they are not enough to prove treason.
You must have two direct eyewitnesses.
It's in the Constitution.
You can look at a court of law.
Well, eyewitnesses.
That's tough when you have a lot of earwitnesses but you're alone in the studio.
That's exactly right.
You have earwitnesses, but no eyewitnesses.
But some people did see her.
Those prisoners of war.
Several of them testify about how Gillers posed as a Red Cross volunteer.
They even described that cigarette pack with the horse manure.
And the prosecution tracks down one person who was in the studio with Gillers, a fellow actor in that radio drama where Gillers played a grieving mom.
The jurors listen to that recording and hear evidence that the point of this broadcast was to try and thwart the American D-Day invasion.
In the end, that is enough.
And so here is the irony.
She is eventually convicted on her sole charge of treason for a radio drama in which she performed words that were written for her a scripted drama.
On that one charge, Gillers is found guilty.
On the others, which cover the many hours she spent speaking freely in favor of the Nazis, not reading a script On those charges, she is acquitted.
Gillers is sentenced to 10 to 30 years in a federal prison.
Not the worst one.
Sometimes described as club fed.
In fact, resembles a liberal arts college, although it has barbed wire around it on the outside.
She takes classes, converts to Catholicism, and after 12 years, she's released on parole.
She becomes a teacher at a convent in Ohio.
The condition of her parole is that she maintain a low profile.
She gives a few interviews, but she's very careful to comply with the terms.
I will say that in her few public statements she expresses no remorse, no regret for her actions, says that she would do again precisely what she had done.
But she does, at whatever personal cost, avoid her natural inclination to seek the limelight.
And instead, she complies with the government's requirements.
Gillers will die alone in 1988.
Biographer Richard Lucas told us You can't tell the story of Mildred Gillers without at least acknowledging the pressures that she faced.
She was alone.
She didn't have a lot of money.
She fell in love with Max Keuschwitz.
And she was corrupted by fame, by getting what she'd longed for since childhood the attention of an audience.
But Lucas also told us that after he'd published that biography he met a woman on his book tour who said she had spent a lot of time with Gillers in her final years.
And she told a story about the way that Gillers had revealed herself in an unguarded moment.
When she had visitors, she would bring out a teacup that she would serve her guests with.
And it was important to her because it was from a night that she had met Himmler, the head of the SS.
That story completely turned around my perspective of her.
I think I would have written the epilogue a little bit differently, about culpability and about what she knew and when she knew it.
Thanks for listening to History This Week.
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Special thanks to our guests.
Richard Lucas, author of Axis Sally, the American Voice of Nazi Germany.
And Michael Flamm, professor of history at Ohio Wesleyan University.
Thanks also to the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress, which supplied the interviews you heard from American troops recalling Axis Sally.
Those veterans were John A. Sarovich, Eli Drapkin, and Shields Wilson.
And thank you to Sydney Minix and to all the other listeners who voted in our pitch-a-thons.
Don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review History This Week wherever you get your podcasts.
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