Two years earlier, Leschetitzky had been a musician with the Lutz-Templin Orchestra, a fifteen-piece band that provided much of the accompaniment for Midge’s Home Sweet Home program. During his days as a musician for the show, he never spoke to the shapely brunette in the announcer’s booth. He would see her face one more time as the Reich fell. As Leschetitzky made his way through the upper floor of the building, he discovered an extremely distressed woman hiding in the nearly empty broadcasting house. He related his story to military interrogators after the war:
There I met a very disturbed looking woman… She told me during the course of a short conversation that she was so afraid of the Americans because she had said so much against them in the broadcasts. Our conversation was very brief.… She had said that she was afraid of the Americans because she was an American.254
Suddenly, a tank alarm sounded and Leschetitzky left the woman to return to his post. A few days after this encounter, a terrified Mildred Gillars ended her broadcasting career—leaving through the studio’s back exit as the Red Army stormed through the front door.255
In Berlin, Soviet troops had also closed in on the bunker in which the Nazi high command huddled. Hitler, along with Eva Braun, committed suicide on April 30, and the next day Goebbels did likewise, after first killing his six children and his wife.
Radio Fugitives
The unconditional surrender of all German forces on May 8 turned the American and British radio commentators for Reichsradio into fugitives. Robert H. Best, Douglas Chandler, Frederick Kaltenbach, William Joyce (“Lord Haw Haw”), Margaret Joyce (“Lady Haw Haw”), Ezra Pound, John Amery and others went into hiding at various points across the decimated Reich. One by one, they would be tracked down to answer for their crimes. Unlike their American counterparts, the British government was not averse to administering the hangman’s noose to their radio propagandists.
William Joyce was arrested on May 28, 1945 when he made the mistake of speaking in English to two British officers looking for firewood in a forest near Flensburg on the Danish border. The two Tommies were shocked to hear the unmistakable voice of “Lord Haw Haw” from the bedraggled refugee, and immediately asked if he was William Joyce. When he reached into his pocket to retrieve the false identity papers supplied to him by the Nazis, one of the soldiers opened fire and wounded Joyce in the hand. During a three-day trial at the Old Bailey, it was discovered that the accused had actually been born in New York City (making him legally an American citizen). Nevertheless, William Joyce was found guilty of treason and sent to the gallows on January 3, 1946.
Another Briton, John Amery, fared no better. The troubled son of an English statesman who had fought alongside Franco in the Spanish Civil War, Amery turned on King and Country to broadcast for the Nazis. He was notable for his recruitment of British prisoners of war for his brainchild—“The Legion of St George.” Later known as the British Free Corps, or Freikorps, the “Legion of St George” was a National Socialist paramilitary force assembled to join forces with the Germans against the Bolshevik enemy to save Western civilization. Amery, accompanied by a lovely young Frenchwoman, traveled to prisoner-of-war camps across the Reich to convince the unstable of mind and conviction to join his motley band. After the war, Amery stood in the dock for only eight minutes when he shocked the court and the nation by pleading guilty to treason. British law did not allow an alternative sentence for the crime. A guilty plea was tantamount to suicide. Three weeks later, Amery was executed.
Although the American radio traitors were sought out and arrested as swiftly as their British counterparts, the question of what to do with them was a troublesome one for the Army Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) and the US Justice Department. As early as 1943, there had been an active debate in the Attorney General’s office over whether a conviction could be won on the merits of “mere words” broadcast over the radio. In past cases, the expression of unpopular political opinion during wartime had been insufficient to reach the level of treason. Justice Department attorney Oscar R. Ewing convinced a doubtful Attorney General Frances Biddle that technological advances such as radio meant that words and ideas damaging to the war effort could be spread far and wide—and thus provide the “aid and comfort” required by the Constitution to prove treason. Ewing recalled his discussions with the Attorney General:
I got the idea that we ought to prosecute those American citizens who were broadcasting Nazi propaganda and Fascist propaganda from abroad. So, I went to Attorney General Francis Biddle and suggested that these broadcasters be indicted for treason. He answered my suggestion by saying “I don’t think we can make a case stick because there are some Civil War cases which hold that mere words do not constitute the overt act that is an essential element of the crime of treason.”… I explained to Mr. Biddle why I thought we could make the case. I argued that those Civil War cases involved nothing more than a man getting on a stump and talking to a crowd of people that were within the normal range of his voice. I felt this was quite different from words spoken into a microphone that could project the words all over the world; furthermore, that propaganda had become a definite weapon of warfare, and that anyone who used that weapon against his own country should be prosecuted for treason. When I had finished, the Attorney General said, “Well, I think you’ve got a point.…”256
The Attorney General asked the FCC to monitor and record all Axis broadcasts from the listening post in Silver Hill, Maryland to collect evidence for future prosecutions. Not long after Ewing’s conversation with Biddle, the July 1943 indictments against Max Otto Koischwitz, Fred Kaltenbach, Douglas Chandler, Robert H. Best, Jane Anderson, Constance Drexel, Edward Delaney and Ezra Pound were passed down.
Closed Doors
From the moment she left the studio, Mildred Gillars was a wanted woman and a risk to all who sheltered her. Although Koischwitz was dead, it would not be long before the indicted man’s paramour would be identified and sought by military authorities. The Professor’s eldest daughter, Stella, was living in her father’s Berlin apartment when a desperate and disheveled Midge arrived at the door. After her father’s passing in September 1944, Stella had been earning a living by reading news items for Reichsradio. When she saw her father’s ex-mistress at her door, Stella demanded that the fugitive leave the apartment and not return. As she left, Mildred mused to Stella that she might “lose herself” in the Soviet sector to avoid the Americans.
Confronted with the brutality that greeted German women and the epidemic of mass rape that raged through occupied Berlin, Mildred would soon find that the Soviet soldiers would not offer her safety or respite. Russian propagandists exhorted the victorious soldiers to take their revenge (“Soldiers of the Red Army—German Women Are Yours,” one poster exhorted) and the men took full advantage.257 It is estimated that of the 2.7 million Germans who remained in Berlin that April, two million were women.258 Estimates of the number of women treated for rape in Berlin range from 95,000 to 130,000.259 German girls and women hid in the nighttime to avoid the drunken soldiers, venturing out for water and food in the morning while the victorious revelers slept it off.
Antony Beevor recounts the experience of a young newsreader at the “Big House”—the massive broadcasting complex on the Masurenallee—who remained in the studios during the last days of the Reich. Women composed two-thirds of the remaining staff in the Rundfunkhaus and the final week of broadcasting was rife with drunken and indiscriminate sexual encounters in the sound archives. Those young women who were still virgins preferred to surrender their chastity to a German man rather than the invaders.260 Similar dissolution took place throughout Berlin in the dark cellars and shelters that were located in almost every square. The fear of impending death stripped personal conduct to its most primitive.
The terror faced by German women in the months between the surrender in May and the arrival of US, British and Free French troops in July, may explain the lack of detail in Mildred’s account of her own personal experience dur
ing this time. Although she would describe this period in general as one of “sheer starvation” and “great tragedy,” she was remarkably reticent about describing specific events in detail. Her talent for florid and highly detailed storytelling failed her when discussing this period. It is as if a dark hole had appeared in her history that only she would fully know.
She descended into the filthy cellars and shelters that dotted Berlin, seeking whatever food and water she could barter or scavenge. Reeking of urine and excrement, the cellars were a hell with intermittent light and no water. The dead—some from suicide, some from sickness or war wounds—were crowded together with the living until shortly after the city’s capitulation. Mildred struggled to survive, bartering her jewelry and clothes for food on the black market. Even the fraternity pin given to her by Calvin Elliott, her college fiancé, was traded for food.261 Her travel pass bore the name “Barbara Mome,” a former stage name that Koischwitz was fond of.
An estimated 20 million homeless German refugees trod the bomb-cratered roads of Germany in those days. Mildred disappeared into their number heading west to evade the Soviet conquerors and she experienced the hunger and fear that rose out of the chaos. Hitch-hiking southwest over 200 kilometers, she went to visit her friends Hans and Georgia von Richter in Bad Mergentheim.
Hungry and shabbily dressed, her hair was now gray and matted. The maid greeted her at the door. Mildred asked to see her old friends. The maid said that Frau von Richter was working but Herr von Richter was available. Hans walked into the reception room and did not recognize the destitute woman who had dined at his home less than a year before. “Can I help you?” he asked. Realizing that it was his old friend Midge, Hans apologized for not recognizing her. However, the man who swore his loyal friendship less than a year before would not offer her a place to stay. He explained that his wife Georgia was now working for the Allied Military Government and it would be simply too risky for the couple to harbor a fugitive sought by the Americans.
Another Sally
By the fall of 1945, the Justice Department sent investigators to Occupied Germany to locate those Americans named in the treason indictment of July 1943, as well as other unnamed individuals suspected of collusion with the enemy. On February 29, 1946, President Truman’s new Attorney General, Tom Clark, announced that 22 additional Americans were sought for pro-Nazi broadcasts made from Berlin, Munich, Vienna and Paris. Clark expressed his determination to hunt down all of the suspected traitors and vowed to “bring every single American who played the Axis game to trial.”262 He appointed Timothy A. McInerney, the Department of Justice’s Director of Public Information, to go to Europe and begin the process of assembling evidence against the collaborators.
One of McInerney’s most difficult tasks was to initiate the search for Axis Sally. As early as June 1944, the CIC was receiving tips about possible suspects. One lead came from an infantryman who reported that a middle-aged woman calling herself “Berniece” claimed that she was Axis Sally as she caroused with American enlisted men at the Red Cross Club in Rome.263 After several false starts, the mystery seemed to be solved when on July 7, 1945, US military police in Turin, Italy arrested a cross-eyed woman of 33. The unmarried woman, carrying a six-month-old baby, admitted freely that she was the in famous radio host.
A New York-born Italian-American, Rita Luisa Zucca was the Rome-based announcer who had enraged Mildred Gillars less than two years before, when she heard that Zucca was calling herself “Sally.” Rita was the daughter of Constantine Zucca, a Manhattan restaurateur who owned Zucca’s Italian Gardens at 118 West 49th Street. She had attended an Italian convent school in Florence from 1925 to 1930 and then returned to New York to work in her father’s restaurant. She briefly worked for the entertainment publication New York—What to Watch before leaving again for Italy in 1938.
She worked as a typist in Italy for three years before deciding to renounce her American citizenship. According to Rita, her decision was rooted in a wish to save her family’s property from expropriation by the Fascist government:
In June 1941, I understood that Mussolini had put out an order that property of foreigners, including Americans, would be confiscated by the Italian Government. My family had considerable property at Raveno and Turin. I renounced my American citizenship in order to save our property, since it was my understanding that if one member of the family was an Italian citizen, the property would be saved.264
In May, Rita informed the American Vice Counsel in Rome that she planned to remain in Italy, and on June 9, signed a statement renouncing her US citizenship. Six months later, she met an Italian soldier, Siro Mariottini, and fell in love with him. Rita was working at a cultural publication in Rome and planned to marry Mariottini after the war’s end, but lost her job in March 1942 for copying an anti-Fascist pamphlet. Unemployed for almost a year, she was hired as a radio announcer for the EIAR (Radio Roma) in February 1943. The station wanted fluent English announcers for a new program aimed at American and British soldiers in Tunisia. The Sally and Phil Show (a.k.a. Jerry’s Front Calling) was immensely popular among Allied troops on the North African front, and Zucca was the recipient of military intelligence for use on her show.
In one instance, it was Rita Zucca on Jerry’s Front who addressed the Allied troops on the night before the invasion of Sicily (July 8, 1943). Calling “the wonderful boys of the 504th Parachute Regiment,” “Sally” told the soldiers that “Colonel Willis Mitchell’s playboys [the 61st Troop Carrier Group] are going to carry you to certain death. We know where and when you are jumping and you will be wiped out.”265 The propaganda value of this revelation backfired because she told the men that their regiment had been wiped out—one hour before the first plane took off. During the subsequent Italian campaign, the Rome Axis Sally seemed to know the names and ranks of American soldiers in the 3rd, 4th, 34th and 47th divisions on their way to Naples. General Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, was concerned that her propaganda would adversely affect the morale of the troops on the bloody Italian front. Every night, Zucca signed off her broadcasts “with a sweet kiss from Sally.”266
Rita attempted to resign from EIAR in August 1943, a month before the Allied invasion of the Italian mainland. Her superiors demanded that she remain at the microphone until a replacement announcer could be found. Financial pressures, however, forced her to return to radio in January 1944. Rita told US interrogators in 1945: “I was unemployed a long time and had sold my jewels to meet the demands of my lover, Siro Mariottini, who was constantly nagging me for more money.”267 This time, she found herself working directly for the Germans.
Her manager, the new head of Anglo-American broadcasting, was Dr. George Goedel, who had created the program Jerry’s Front Calling. Sally (Zucca) and George (Goedel) were the hosts, and the format was almost identical to the “Midge” programs emanating from Berlin. Goedel wrote the scripts in longhand for Rita, as well as radio plays critical of Franklin Roosevelt and the US–British alliance. George and Sally also read the names of captured prisoners of war, bantered back and forth about the effects of the war on the American home front, and played “hot” jazz and swing. Like their counterparts to the north, Zucca and Goedel had their own band, Jerry’s Swinging Tigers, as well as a vocal group consisting of three Italian sisters called The Three Doves of Peace. Although Goedel never told Rita Zucca where he received direction for the propaganda content of the program, she always assumed he took his orders from the German Embassy in Rome.
With Rome threatened by Allied forces, the cast and crew of Jerry’s Front left for Florence where they moved into the Hotel Excelsior. Ten days later, they were forced to move on to Milan. Resuming the program from that city on June 17, 1944, they stayed only a few months. On September 15, Rita Zucca fled to the sliver of northern Italy known as Mussolini’s “Social Republic.” Her show and its personnel became part of a German military propaganda unit dubbed the “Liberty Station.” The Italian “Sally” was feted as the gues
t of honor at a party broadcast from a castle in Fino Mornasco (near Como). The live show sent out the sounds of merriment, laughter and clinking glasses across the ether to the advancing American forces. Other Reichsradio personalities, including the British broadcaster John Amery, took part in the festivities.
These strange broadcasts were indicative of the desperation of the dying regime. During one of these danses macabres, the familiar, honeyed voice of an American girl came over the radio to the troops on the frontlines. It was a very pregnant Rita Zucca who took the microphone and told the GIs:
Hello, boys… how are you tonight? A lousy night it sure is… Axis Sally is talking to you… you poor silly dumb lambs, well on your way to be slaughtered!268
Her baby, fathered by Mariottini, was born on December 15, 1944. Rita returned to the studio 40 days after the birth and continued broadcasting until her final show on April 25, 1945. With Italian partisans a few miles away, she fled Fino. On May 5, she quietly boarded a train to Milan where she was met at the station by one of her cousins. He took her to safety at the family home in Turin where she remained until her capture.
Rita Zucca and her child were ushered into IV Corps Military Police Headquarters. “When I saw her coming through the door I said to myself, ‘What the hell is this, another rape case?’” an officer remembered. The MPs found her and her baby, now six months old, staying with her aunt and uncle in Turin. Wearing an American field jacket, blue print dress and sandals, Rita was loaded into a jeep with her child on her lap for the overnight drive to Rome. Although the Stars and Stripes military newspaper was forbidden to interview the prisoner, the paper described the feminine charms of this particular Axis Sally. One officer observed that she was “really stacked,” while the correspondent noted, “True, her left eye is inclined to wander—but that cooey, sexy voice really has something to back it up.” As the jeep pulled out for the long drive, the American soldiers gave her and her baby eight blankets to protect them against the night air.
Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany Page 14
