Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany

by Richard Lucas

  Mildred cited the signing of the oath as a pivotal event in her transition from radio announcer to propagandist. Until then, she maintained that she had “not done anything in the least bit propagandistic.”159 In her portrayal of events, she rose to the defense of her beloved America when it was under attack. Risking her job and freedom, she advised her German bosses not to trust the Japanese. Her account casts her as the valiant defender of the United States who relented only to save her life and job. It was the first of a series of selfserving rationalizations that she would later use throughout her life to justify her actions. Each explanation would emphasize her “love for America,” her opposition to the war, her hatred of Roosevelt, and her assertion that it was the United States that abandoned her as war approached—not the other way around.

  CHAPTER 5

  Smiling Through

  “Between the two wars, Fascism and Nazism attracted human derelicts as a flame attracts a moth. Most of the Nazi hierarchy consisted of derelicts from the First War, who could not find a place in the Germany of the Republic. Nazism offered them, as it offered our American traitors, a chance to become somebody. It offered them a career and it offered them something ready-made on which to vent their hates.”

  —William L. Shirer160

  DECEMBER 1942–AUGUST 1943

  Even before the United States entered the war, Max Otto Koischwitz was a rising star at the German Foreign Office. He left behind a stalled academic career in the United States to become an important player on the periphery of the Third Reich’s inner circle. It was not uncommon for the former professor to fly to Hitler’s headquarters to discuss radio content with Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. Although Koischwitz held several different titles within the organizational maze of the radio corporation, he was the de facto liaison between the Foreign Office and Reichsradio. He was, as Mildred proudly boasted, “the man who interviewed Ribbentrop personally on matters concerning the broadcasting company which displeased him or pleased him, as the case may be.”161

  On February 23, 1942 he was promoted to manager for political broadcasting to the USA Zone.162 His mission was to improve the shortwave broadcasts and increase their appeal to American GIs and their families back home. Although the other American commentators (Kaltenbach, Chandler, et al.) were effective broadcasters, Koischwitz sought to bring a voice to the mix that would attract the lonely soldier far from home. He hoped to make Mildred his spokeswoman for that purpose but he would first have to persuade her to abandon her reluctance to broadcast propaganda to her native land. There were also bureaucratic obstacles to overcome. Johannes Schmidt-Hansen, her manager at Sender Bremen, did not want to give up one of the European Service’s most talented broadcasters to another department without a fight.

  During 1942, Mildred became Mistress of Ceremonies (the title then used for the host of a show) for an increasing number of programs. Club of Notions was replaced by the war-focused music/variety show Smiling Through. Aimed at the ladies in the audience, it dealt with cultural events in Germany, and entertainment. Political content was minimal until December 1942, when Koischwitz came on board as producer and changed the format. Renamed Home Sweet Home, “O.K.” took the show in a decidedly propagandistic direction.

  As American men faced fierce battles in the deserts of North Africa, Home Sweet Home was designed to arouse homesickness in the soldiers. Opening with a quintessentially American sound—the moaning of a lonely train whistle—Home Sweet Home was a tug on the heartstrings that played on the desires, fears and jealousies of the fighting men. Jazz and swing, while outlawed by the Nazi regime as a “degenerate” art form, were a staple (albeit in an “Aryanized” incarnation) on Home Sweet Home. Speaking in a breathless voice, Midge portrayed herself as a much younger but experienced woman. She played the vixen behind the microphone, taunting the men on the front lines and casting doubt in their minds about their mission, their wives and girlfriends, and their prospects after the war. In one early broadcast, she told the GIs:

  Hello, Gang. This is Midge, calling the American Expeditionary Forces in the four corners of the world tonight with their little “Home Sweet Home” program. Well, kids, you know I’d like to say to you “Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kit Bag,” but I know that that little old kit bag is much too small to hold all the trouble you kids have got…

  Well I’m afraid that [your girl] will never surrender till you kids surrender. How about it? There’s no getting the Germans down. You’ve been trying for a long time now; and you remember what was told to you before you went to Africa—that it would be a walk away for you boys. Well, was it?… Well, if we women had our way, there would be no wars anyhow… I just wonder if [she] isn’t sort of running away with one of the 4-Fs back home and you know just as well as I do that if the cases were reversed you wouldn’t go on waiting year after year either, would you?163

  Complete with a live orchestra, Home Sweet Home marked the culmination of Mildred Gillars’ transformation from down-on-her-luck actress to the woman known to the world as Axis Sally—the insidious, hateful, anti-Semitic golden girl of Nazism. On one show in early 1943, she treated Dick, her bandleader, to her particular brand of pacifism and defeatism:

  Gee, Dick, I’m afraid, you’ll be giving them… some very bad ideas. They’ll just get all kind of woozy and would like to throw down those little old guns and toddle off home. Well, that would be the right thing for them to do after all, because they’re certainly not making any headway here in the sector right now.… Gee, I’d never have a war if I could do anything to prevent it and I think most women are like that.164

  It was during Christmas 1942 when her conversion to propagandist became complete, that the romantic relationship between the lonely announcer and her married mentor caught fire. She was a solitary figure in the studio. “As I was unmarried and had no home,” she remembered, “I was free to work on Christmas Day and give the other girls a chance to be with their families.”165

  The romance blossomed quickly as the two met frequently at the coffee house located near the Deutschland House in the broadcasting complex. Eventually the two became inseparable. They dined together at the Hotel Adlon, a favorite haunt of the Nazi elite and the foreign diplomatic corps on Unter den Linden near the Brandenburg Gate. He personally directed her broadcasts and soon expanded her role to become the host of Morocco Sendung (Morocco Calling), another offering for the troops in North Africa. The Professor worked overtime attempting to wrest his prize announcer from the European Service.

  “[From March to July 1943] Professor Koischwitz was trying to get me away from Sender Bremen and to have all my time concentrated on programs to the USA. So we had many talks about it, around Deutschland House and in this coffee house.”166 The pressure on her to join the USA Zone full-time became so intense that she later described it as a constant source of discord between the couple. Koischwitz used his considerable pull within the Foreign Office eventually to outmaneuver Schmidt-Hansen.

  “After long negotiations… Schmidt-Hansen finally agreed to release me from Sender Bremen until 8.30 in the evening. This caused a great deal of trouble in the studio because of the times,” she later remembered.167 Her schedule was frantic, finishing Morocco Sendung at the Deutschland House and then running over to the “Big House” to start her nightly duties for the Overseas Service.

  Mildred was not the only radio broadcaster who was influenced to change loyalties as the result of a romantic liaison. Before the 1938 Anschluss, Robert H. Best was a correspondent in Vienna for the Chicago Tribune and a bachelor. His engagement to an attractive Austrian woman and devout Nazi named Erna Maurer (along with disappointing career reversals) likely played a central role in his decision to remain. William L. Shirer, the CBS Radio correspondent, recalled that when American reporters were interned at Bad Nauheim during the first days of America’s involvement in the war, Best mentioned to the other internees that his fiancée owned land in Austria that she could not abandon.168
r />   Best left Bad Nauheim and reemerged as “Mr. Guess Who,” the host of the Best Berlin Broadcast for Sender Bremen, much to the shock of all who knew him in Vienna. While interned, Best offered his services to the regime. He was interviewed by Werner Plack, a liaison responsible for recruiting English-speaking radio personalities. Several years before, Plack had briefly been an actor and wine merchant in Los Angeles and was reputed to be skilled at vetting prospective announcers. Best had been a radio correspondent for Radio Vienna, and his prior experience made him an ideal candidate for Reichsradio. This man, whose closest friend and protégé before the war was Jewish and who was never regarded as an anti-Semite by his fellow correspondents, became one of the crudest commentators on the German radio. The tone of his diatribes resulted in instances where the Foreign Office took issue with the overt, unsophisticated anti-Semitism displayed in his broadcasts.

  Neither were the British immune to the charms of the frauleins. Norman Baille-Stewart was a British army officer who fell deeply in love with a German woman. Shortly thereafter, he offered his services to Germany as a spy. He sold military secrets during travels to Holland and Germany and was arrested in 1933. After imprisonment in the Tower of London, he was released in 1937 and fled to Germany in search of the woman he loved. He briefly broadcast for the European Service (until December 1939) and then Nazi “black” propaganda efforts from 1942 on under the sobriquet “Lancer.”

  In Mildred’s case, as in the others, a German began a romantic relationship with a lonely and unattached enemy national to influence the object of their “affection” to, in the words of American journalist Dorothy Thompson, “go Nazi.” Whether these relationships were born out of romantic love or service to the Reich may never be conclusively known, but they nevertheless served as effective recruiting tools.

  As Koischwitz and Midge drank coffee and made plans, the remnant of Berlin’s Jewish population served as slave labor in the city’s war production factories. Goebbels, in his role as Gauleiter of Berlin, was infuriated that his city was not yet Judenfrei (Jew-free) and actively pressed the Gestapo and SS to remove the remaining Jews from factory work and dispatch them to the East for extermination. The factories were to be kept running by importing Poles to replace the murdered Jews. By the beginning of 1943 there were approximately 10,000 Jews remaining in the capital working at war-related jobs. In a mass roundup, trucks went through the streets of the city and Jewish men, women and children were pulled out of their homes and workplaces for deportation. The arrests extended to the mischling (those whom the Reich determined were of partial-Jewish ancestry) and those married to non-Jews.

  In March the regime was forced to relent on the matter of those Jews married to Gentiles, as hundreds of angry wives congregated on Rosenstrasse demanding the return of their husbands. Fearing the wrath of the female workforce that the Nazis relied on for political support and factory work, it was thought to be politically wise to release the husbands and wives of the protesters. These violent mass arrests, like so many others that preceded them, could not have gone unnoticed by the couple whose political and romantic alliance grew stronger by the day. In fact, while Berlin’s Jews were being sent to their fate, Mildred’s broadcast of May 18, 1943 stressed Jewish culpability for the war and the misfortune that had befallen America:

  This is Berlin Calling. Berlin calling the American mothers, wives and sweethearts. And I’d just like to say, girls, that when Berlin calls it pays to listen. When Berlin calls it pays to listen in because there’s an American girl sitting at the microphone every Tuesday evening at the same time with a few words of truth to her countrywomen back home. Girls, you all know, of course, by now that it is a very serious situation and there must be some reason for my being here in Berlin, some reason why I’m not sitting at home with you at the little sewing bees knitting socks for our men over in French North Africa.

  Yes, girls, there is a reason, and it’s this: it’s because I’m not on the side of President Roosevelt. I’m not on the side of Roosevelt and his Jewish friends and his British friends, because I’ve been brought up to be a 100 percent American girl; conscious of everything American, conscious of her friends, conscious of her enemies. And the enemies are precisely those people who are fighting against Germany today, and in case you don’t know it, indirectly against America too, because a… defeat for Germany would mean a defeat for America. Believe me, it would be the very beginning… of the… end of America and all of her civilization and that’s why, girls, I’m staying over here and having these little heart to heart talks with you once a week….

  Gee, girls, isn’t it a darn shame? All the sweet old American summer atmosphere which the boys are missing now? Just imagine sitting out on the old… ah… back porch in a sweet old rocking chair listening to the birds and twilight? Instead of that the boys are over there in the hot, sunny desert, longing for home and for what? Fighting for our friends? Well, well, well, since when are the British our friends? Now, girls, come on, be honest. As one American to another, do you love the British? Why, of course the answer is “no.” Do the British love us? Well, I should say not! But we are fighting for them. We are shedding our good young blood for this “kike” war, for this British war. Oh, girls, why don’t you wake up? I mean, after all, the women can do something, can’t they? Have you tried to… realize where the… ah… situation is leading us to? Because it is the downfall of civilization if it goes on like that. After all, let the British get out of their own mess girls, and let “God Save The King”; if he’s worthy of it, I’m sure God can. At least, there’s no reason for we Americans to get mixed up in British messes. Don’t you agree…?169

  … I love America but I do not love Roosevelt and all of his “kike” boyfriends who have thrown us into this awful turmoil.170

  Mildred’s resistance to political broadcasting weakened not only because of her infatuation with Koischwitz, but also due to pressures stemming from her status as an enemy national without papers. An incident in a Berlin train station in the fall of 1942 may have played a role in her decision to yield. After a day of shopping for antiques, she walked through the station and realized that she had left her food ration coupons in a nearby coffee shop.

  “I went into a phone booth and called the shop. While I was talking, I noticed people gathering around the booth. While the shopkeeper was telling me she’d found the tickets, I noticed the crowd getting larger—more and more faces appeared.171 A man suddenly yelled out, ‘You can tell by her accent, she’s an American.’172 He tore open the door to the telephone booth and grabbed hold of my arm, and said, ‘I’m from the Gestapo, come with me.’”173 Frightened, she argued, “You can’t do this to me. I’m with the radio company.” Producing her Reichsradio identification card, the agent examined it, brushed it away, and proceeded to arrest her.

  Recalling an earlier incident when she was accused of sabotage for neglecting to read a few lines of scripted text in her broadcast, she protested. “I told the agent that I had to call the radio station—that if I didn’t show up for the broadcast—that would be sabotage.”174 The agent allowed her to call her manager, Schmidt-Hansen. She turned the telephone over to the agent and, as they spoke, Mildred suddenly saw a man in the crowd motioning to her. Taking advantage of the confusion, the stranger grabbed her wrist and pushed her into the open doors of a departing train. Frightened and shaking, she returned to the broadcasting studio. The agent arrived at the Rundfunkhaus a few minutes later. After a few minutes of discussion with Schmidt-Hansen, the agent apologized to Midge and left, saying, “Well, ten times out of eleven you’re wrong, but the eleventh time you’re right.”175 The incident was a sobering reminder of the precariousness of her position in Germany and her dependence on her superiors at Reichsradio to move about freely without arrest or harassment.

  While their relationship deepened, Otto Koischwitz kept a disturbing secret from his mistress. The Professor began the affair with his star announcer with the full knowledge that his wif
e Erna was pregnant with his fourth child. Despite the impending birth, he professed his love to Mildred in two letters from his boyhood home in Silesia. Troubled by the situation, he went away in April 1943 on a weekend trip to what he termed his “Mount Olympus”:

  There was a particular mountain in Silesia which had played a fateful role in his life ever since his childhood; and he said that every time he had a spiritual problem, since the early days of his youth, he had gone to this particular mountain, which he called his Mount Olympus, and had conferred with himself and considered the problem and found the answer, and he realized at that time, in the spring of ’43, what was happening and reverted back to his boyhood habit of going to his Mount Olympus. He got the answer, that God favored his love.176

  Koischwitz’s love may have been favored by Providence, but the fortunes of the Wehrmacht were not. The remnants of the Sixth Army surrendered at Stalingrad on February 2, 1943, and Hitler’s government declared three days of national mourning for the fallen. German cities were under attack by Allied bombers: Wilhelmshaven on January 27, Berlin on January 30 in daylight raids; Essen and the Ruhr on March 5. Even Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda machine could not disguise the desperate turn of events. The message had to be retooled to prepare the Volk for the sacrifices that lay ahead. Hitler, enraged by the reversals on the Eastern Front, disappeared from view. It was left to Goebbels to proclaim the new message to a carefully selected group of Nazi party loyalists at the Berliner Sportpalast (Sports Palace) on February 18. Known as the “Total War” speech, it set the theme for all radio propaganda for the duration of the war: