Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany

by Richard Lucas

  I speak first to the world, and proclaim three theses regarding our fight against the Bolshevist danger in the East. The first thesis: Were the German army not in a position to break the danger from the East, the Reich would fall to Bolshevism, and all Europe shortly afterwards. Second: the German army, the German people and their allies alone have the strength to save Europe from this threat. Third: Danger is a motivating force. We must act quickly and decisively, or it will be too late… Now people rise up, and let the storm break loose!177

  In Goebbels’ estimation, Germany would be the final defense against the Bolshevization of Europe and the destruction of Western civilization. “Total war” would require sacrifice to the last man, woman and child. There would be no turning back. “Total war” meant victory or total destruction for the German nation.

  Family Affair

  Not content with merely recruiting his mistress, Koischwitz did not hesitate to use his children as soldiers in the propaganda war. His eldest daughter, Stella, had been recruited as an actress in her father’s radio plays as early as 1940, playing the part of Mildred’s daughter. By early 1943, Koischwitz had cast all three of his daughters in a new show called Seven at the Mike with Mildred fittingly cast as Mistress of Ceremonies.

  Seven at the Mike was aimed at the wives and mothers of America. The children sang and a panel of women, including Lord Haw Haw’s wife, Margaret Cairns Joyce, discussed the social and cultural dimensions of wartime German life. Although it is not known definitively whether Erna Koischwitz knew of the romantic relationship between her husband and Midge, it is unlikely that his history of philandering had gone unnoticed at home. Nevertheless, her children were coaxed by her husband to work side by side with his paramour.

  The first day of March 1943 was a holiday in the German Reich dedicated to honoring the Luftwaffe. American and British air forces marked the day with fierce air strikes on the German capital. Although the bombing was only a foretaste of what was to come, over 700 men, women and children perished in the attack.178 Several residential areas and the Berlin Zoo were damaged. Fearing further attacks, Koischwitz arranged for the evacuation of his wife and children to Silesia. Dispatching his family to the countryside also made it easier to conceal Erna’s pregnancy from Midge. Left without her onair “family,” the show was renamed Midge at the Mike in April.

  Transformed into a program of primarily political commentary, Midge at the Mike was a “heart-to-heart” talk with the mothers, wives and sweethearts of America about the war, the current political situation, and the nefarious ways of Franklin Roosevelt and his “Jewish advisors.” It would also feature some of the vilest anti-Semitic rhetoric ever broadcast on German Radio. With Erna and the girls out of Berlin, forty-two-year-old Mildred finally had her man and a starring role to herself.

  A Woman of Privilege

  With a high-ranking Foreign Office official as her patron, Mildred had more control over the content of her broadcasts than the rest of her American colleagues. She could thus be difficult and egotistical—even a prima donna. In the large barracks of the “Big House,” one of her tasks was to introduce the commentaries of Robert H. Best. Best, whose diatribes against Roosevelt and his administration were crudely anti-Semitic, had the temerity to criticize her “talks” and made suggestions on how to improve her Jew-baiting skills.

  “Mr. Best even came up to me while a piece of music was being played and suggested that I say this or I say that. And I did not like the spirit in which I was working up there, interrupted by other people’s suggestions,” she remembered.179 Best coached her to “dress up” her commentaries: “I was told to use the word ‘kike’ and I said I didn’t like it and considered it to be very undignified, and I would not say it in private life, and I didn’t see why I should say it in a broadcast.”180

  Best’s meddling resulted in Mildred successfully lobbying Koischwitz to gradually eliminate all other speakers from the Morocco Sendung and the Home Sweet Home broadcasts. When the Foreign Office protested the removal of Best from the broadcast, the Professor took up her cause. “Professor Koischwitz cooperated with me to the greatest extent of his ability to force my ideas through,” she recalled. “If Professor Koischwitz had not helped me, I am sure that my days would have been numbered at the broadcasting company.”181 It was probably not Best’s racist terminology that annoyed her most, since she used the terms “kike” and “Jew” liberally in later broadcasts, but the insolence of the former newspaper correspondent in questioning the quality of her work.

  Her financial fortunes increased as her involvement in propaganda deepened. For broadcasts with “political content,” she received as much as 60 to 80 RM, effectively tripling her income.182 At the height of her influence, she was earning 3,000 RM per month, a sizable sum in wartime Germany.183 She was making so much that she was subject to a confiscatory tax.

  “No single person in Germany wanted to earn two thousand marks anyway. If you couldn’t earn 50,000, then you certainly didn’t want to earn 3,000, because the taxes jumped relatively to such an extent that an unmarried person had to pay terrific taxes,” she remembered in 1949.184 Even with the privations of the war, however, she was earning a comfortable sum for the first time in her life. In addition to the rations of butter and cheese provided monthly by the government, she had ample means to buy what she needed on the black market.

  Mildred did not shy away from using her relationship with Koischwitz to settle scores and gain influence in the studio. She raised hackles with her superiors in the Foreign Office when she convinced the Professor to provide American magazines and newspapers to assist her in the preparation of her commentaries. Listening to foreign broadcasts was punishable by death, and access to foreign media was severely limited to high party officials, salaried commentators and radio department heads. Essentially a per diem employee, Mildred was not high enough in the hierarchy to meet the requirements. Although she later claimed that she sought the magazines in order to avoid being influenced by German propaganda, it is clear that she was extraordinarily privileged.

  “I would read the American magazines and ‘O.K.’ would suggest that I give a little talk on this article, that article, something that Mrs. Roosevelt had said.…” The magazines were never kept at the radio studio, but kept under wraps so that no one but the higher strata of the party could see them. “They were very careful about their magazines, and they weren’t supposed to be anywhere where announcers, secretaries or anyone else could get at them. They were considered pretty secret material,” she recalled.185 Since the radio broad-casting company was overseen by representatives of Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, Ribbentrop’s Foreign Office, and eventually a representative from Himmler’s SS, it is unlikely that these transgressions would have been ignored if it were not for the access provided by her important mentor.

  Moreover, the Foreign Office was shocked to discover that, thanks to Koischwitz, she was working without a script or the supervision of a censor. When Karl Schotte, the manager of the Overseas Service, discovered the freedom that Koischwitz had bestowed on his paramour, he flew into a rage.

  “The top blew off everything,” Mildred remembered. “Schotte… just went raving around the place and said ‘How did this happen; are you completely mad?’”186 Confident of her position, she told Schotte that Koischwitz reached an agreement with her when she started working for him—no censor and no propaganda. Schotte went to Horst Cleinow, the head of the USA Zone, and ordered that she work from a script and that Schotte himself censor all of her shows. Dreading the repercussions of such liberties, Schotte told Cleinow that “nothing like that had ever been done and that it was mad to think it could be done in wartime.”187

  In August 1943, Schotte’s failure to read and censor two sentences in an announcer’s script resulted in his being dispatched to a concentration camp for sloppy censorship. There are varying accounts of the incident that led to Schotte’s arrest. One account claims that a female announcer ad-libbed to an a
udience of American women and inadvertently mentioned the privations that German women faced as the war progressed. The last thing the Propaganda Ministry wanted was news of the bleak economic situation on the German home front reaching the enemy via one of its own broadcasts.

  Another account came from Eduard Dietze, Dr. Winkelnkemper’s deputy at the RRG (Reichsrundfunkgesellschaft, or German Broad casting Company). A few days before the August 1943 Quebec Conference between Churchill and Roosevelt, a scriptwriter named Harl wrote that Germany could consider altering its National Socialist policies in return for a negotiated peace. Schotte had read and approved the script. When the Associated Press picked up the text of the broadcast, they published a story citing the item an “olive branch” signaling Germany’s willingness to sue for peace. Goebbels and von Ribbentrop were furious, and the Propaganda Minister ordered the arrest of the manager who allowed the script to be broadcast. Although Winkeln-kemper defended Schotte by claiming that the manager never read the script, he was sent to a concentration camp. Karl Schotte was released from the camp on Christmas 1943 and allowed to return to the Overseas Service as a producer of entertainment programs.188 After the incident, Winkelnkemper ordered a mandatory review of each script and recording by an additional censor prior to each broadcast.

  “O.K.” Indicted

  In a small, undistinguished house in Silver Spring, Maryland, radio technicians monitored the broadcasts of the German Overseas Service. Every audible Axis broadcast was examined for content and recorded on acetate disc for future use. Those recordings would lead to the identification of the American expatriates who assisted the German Reich and the Italian Fascists in their war against the United States. As the tide of battle had finally turned in favor of the Allies, Attorney General Francis Biddle determined that the time was right to put the “radio traitors” on notice that there would be a price to pay for their collaboration.

  On July 26, 1943, the Justice Department announced a Federal indictment for treason against eight Americans: Max Otto Koischwitz, Frederick W. Kaltenbach, Robert H. Best, Edward Leo Delaney, Douglas Chandler, Constance Drexel, Jane Anderson and the renowned poet Ezra Pound. Reichsradio employed all except Pound at some time after December 11, 1941, the day Hitler declared war on the US. Ezra Pound, an American who had lived as an expatriate in London, Paris and Rapallo, Italy since 1908, was featured on the Italian Radio in several disjointed, obscure and at times, unintelligible commentaries against Franklin Roosevelt, America’s involvement in the war and Jewish finance. The Attorney General’s statement accused Koischwitz and his cohorts of betraying “the first and most sacred obligation of citizenship.”189 The indictment did not include Axis Sally, who had yet to be identified by the FCC analysts. The indictments appeared on the front page of The New York Times and the now-fugitive commentators learned of their status as accused traitors in short order.

  With her lover wanted for treason, and the possibility of a German defeat becoming increasingly real, the pressures on Mildred cannot be underestimated. In addition, the likelihood that Koischwitz would ever leave his wife became even more remote when she discovered in August 1943 that Erna was giving birth to his fourth child. A boy named Max Otto Koischwitz was born in a hospital in Silesia on August 15, only to die a few hours later. Mildred’s friend and colleague, Erwin Christiani, later revealed to US investigators that Mildred had attempted suicide. Christiani speculated that “her friend” (no longer Paul Karlson, but Koischwitz) had reneged on his promise to marry:

  Later on, in 1943, her friend had obviously broken his promise, I guess, for in that year she had tried to commit suicide. It was prevented by her colleague, Miss Ria Kloss, who entered her residence in the certain night by force, because she had got some notion about the intention of Miss Gillars, and shut off the gas valve.190

  Ria Kloss, a 25-year-old strawberry blonde, was one of Mildred’s closest friends at the studio. Forcing her way into the apartment, she discovered Mildred passed out on the floor and took steps to revive her. Mildred had found out only the day before the birth of Koischwitz’s son that Erna was pregnant, and the death of the infant must have been a double shock. Christiani never knew the complete details of what had occurred for he was sent to the Eastern front within days of the incident.* Nine days later on August 24, 1943, Erna Koischwitz herself was killed when a massive Allied air attack hit the hospital where she was recovering.191

  CHAPTER 6

  Did You Raise Your Sons to Be Murderers?

  “Well folks, that’s what comes of this war, of course… they’re coming in by the hundreds, these American boys, who day after day are flying over Germany in their terror raids trying to extinguish a whole race, killing ruthlessly helpless women and children.… I ask you American women if you brought up your boys to be murderers? Have you? Because that is what they are becoming.”

  —Axis Sally (February 26, 1944)192

  By the summer of 1943 the war had taken an increasingly personal toll on Mildred Gillars and Max Otto Koischwitz. In May, Mildred’s apartment had been heavily damaged in an air raid. Arriving home from work at 3 a.m. she found the place in ruins. “Where I originally had two rooms,” she remembered, “I had just one room because the walls had collapsed and everything in the place [was] smashed to smithereens. It was just a heap of debris, but at least the outside walls were still standing.”193 The Berlin broadcasting complex was a prime target for British and American raiders. During one broadcast that summer, Mildred was on the air as a bomb destroyed a building across the street from the studios. Forced to continue the program without missing a beat, she watched in horror as the structure burned to the ground.

  The air attacks on Berlin gained in intensity throughout the year. The raids began on January 30 when British Mosquitoes harassed the tenth anniversary celebration of Hitler’s rule in daylight raids. On August 23 and 24 the RAF sent 719 planes over the capital and dropped over 1,700 tons of explosives. Despite the heavy air defenses surrounding the city, the bombardment left Berliners shaken. 854 people died in the attacks and virtually every government building on the Wilhelmstrasse was damaged. As a result, the Overseas Service staff was evacuated to the Berlin suburb Köenigs Wusterhausen a few miles from the transmitters at Zeesen.

  Instead of the spacious, barracks-like quarters of the Funkhaus, these suburban studios were located in the cramped basement of a post office. Reichsradio personnel lived and worked out of a small inn in nearby Gussow. The major commentators of the Overseas Service were dispatched to locations across the Reich. Douglas Chandler (“Paul Revere”) and Robert H. Best were sent to Vienna. William Joyce (“Lord Haw Haw”) worked from the studios of Radio Luxembourg, transmitting his commentaries via landline for transmission to Great Britain. The already damaged Berlin broadcasting complex was hit again in a series of raids in November–December 1943—bombings that killed 2,700 Berliners and left a quarter million homeless.194

  The war’s reverses were particularly devastating to Otto Koischwitz. In July, his wife Erna was killed in her hospital bed as she recovered from the tragic childbirth. The hospital was destroyed and everyone in it perished.195 His newborn son was dead. Indicted for treason in the United States, he faced the possibility of trial and execution. The widespread fame among the troops of the American woman who spoke to them nightly meant that an indictment of Axis Sally would follow. Defeat followed defeat for the Wehrmacht in the summer and fall of 1943. In Western Europe, the resignation of Mussolini in July was followed by the Italian surrender in September. In the East, the Germans’ last great attempt to wrest the strategic initiative from the Red Army failed with the loss of hundreds of tanks at the Battle of Kursk.

  As prospects for a Nazi victory faded, it was essential that Midge put a different face on her service to Germany. She approached Koischwitz with an idea:

  We very often talked about America… and I told him that I felt that my only reason for being was to go to prisoner of war camps, if he could arrange it. He knew tha
t I wasn’t a propagandist, and that I certainly had no ambition in that direction, and I told him that the only thing which would be able to give me a little happiness in all this war was to have the feeling that I was being of some service to the people in my own country, and he said that he would do the very best he could do. Negotiations went on for a long, long time‖ it was not until Halloween day of ’43 that we made our first visit to a prisoner of war camp.196

  When Karl Schotte was sent to a concentration camp in August, Koischwitz was named to replace him as the permanent head of the USA Zone. His new status enabled him to gain the necessary approval to go to the POW camps and travel with Midge to Holland, Belgium and France. Using his influence in the Foreign Office, he obtained an alien passport (Fremdenpass) for Mildred in October of 1943—a highly unusual privilege for a foreign national with no papers. She had first applied for one after the US consulate retained her American passport in 1941, but she received no response. With the intervention of the newly promoted department head, her passport was granted almost a full two years later.

  It was not long before Dr. Goebbels expressed his dissatisfaction with a Foreign Office employee managing the USA Zone. The Propaganda Minister demanded that O.K. cut all his ties to the Foreign Office or resign. The former professor resigned as manager to join Midge on her travels to prison camps and hospitals, recording prisoner interviews on erasable cylinders that functioned as the 1940s equivalent of magnetic recording tape. At the end of the tour, the couple brought the recordings back to Köenigs Wusterhausen where the completed programs were assembled with Midge providing introductory and closing comments.