“We want to show that his wife’s broadcasts were far in excess of anything with which this defendant is charged. There should be equal justice. There should not be persecution of some and exoneration of others.”398
A torrent of objections rose from the prosecution table. Kelley accused the defense of trying to prejudice the jury. The judge agreed and once again Laughlin was forced to abandon a line of questioning that would have undoubtedly shed light on the motives of the government and the selectivity of its prosecutions. In the midst of the controversy, Hans von Richter defended his wife, stating that she “was a German citizen and under the laws, she was assigned to this task [broadcasting].”399 Little separated the actions of Mildred Gillars and Georgia von Richter but a marriage certificate, just as a single piece of paper separated the Berlin Axis Sally from Rita Zucca, the Rome Axis Sally. A marriage certificate or a testament of allegiance meant freedom, exoneration and a life uninterrupted. Unfortunately for Midge, Otto Koischwitz was dead. For her, there would be no such escape.
Georgia von Richter spoke to the press and took angry exception to the introduction of her wartime broadcasts into the public record. Ironically, she also expanded on her role, claiming that her broadcasts were merely “non-political Red Cross” messages from wounded and imprisoned American soldiers. “To compare my broadcasts with those made by Mildred Gillars would be ridiculous. My broadcasts contained no political references or tinges. I interspersed no commentary. I was only concerned with sending the messages of the boys who were prisoners to their parents in the United States,” she told the Associated Press in an eerily familiar defense.
Described in the press as a Vassar College graduate from a respectable background, Georgia told reporters that she resisted an offer of extra rations in return for broadcasting propaganda. Not withstanding her honorable refusal to participate in those programs, the fact remained that her husband was a salaried Foreign Office employee of aristocratic lineage. Unlike the single Mildred Gillars, Georgia did not need the extra rations “to live.”400 Mrs. Von Richter described her radio job as a “nightmare I have been trying to forget for two years,” and described Laughlin’s effort to drag her into the case as “an effort to discredit the testimony of my husband in Washington.” For some, the nightmare was not over.
Hans von Richter left the witness stand, and the judge and jury put on their headphones to listen to Vision of Invasion. Penned by Koischwitz, Mildred played an Ohio mother (Evelyn) whose son (Alan) is an American GI destined for the invasion of France. Her husband (Elmer) is blithely accepting of the war but Evelyn, who is something of a psychic, has a disturbing premonition that both her son and the invasion are doomed. Scratchy and at times unintelligible, the recording of Vision of Invasion did have moments of clarity that spoke to the core of the government’s case.
The radio play began with a portentous voice:
Why D-Day?
D stands for Doom and Disaster!
For Defeat and Death!
For Dunkirk and Dieppe!401
The 1942 Dieppe raid claimed the lives of over 6,000 Allied servicemen, and Koischwitz’s narrative graphically compared that battle’s dead to “roasted geese” and “heads of cabbage on their way to market.” The drama opens in Evelyn and Elmer’s living room. The radio is playing jaunty swing music when a news announcer breaks in to announce the beginning of the invasion of France. Evelyn is terrified that D-Day will end in disaster for her only son.
EVELYN: Everyone knows that the invasion is suicide. Even the simplest person knows that. Between 70 and 90 percent of the boys will be killed or crippled for the rest of their lives.
ELMER: What can we do about it?
EVELYN: Bah. We could have done a lot about it. Have we got a government by the people or not? Roosevelt had no right to go to war.402
The scene shifts to an American troop ship where her son, Alan, awaits his orders. The young man is despondent and tells a shipmate, “I have a feeling that I shall never see the States again. I was just thinking what mother is doing now.”403 Back in Ohio, the radio continues to play dance music. At her wits’ end, Evelyn is unnerved by the blaring orchestra and demands that Elmer shut off the radio. When he refuses, she retires to her bed and dreams of her son:
EVELYN: I was dreaming, but you are so real, Alan, I’m so happy.
ALAN: It’s no dream, mother, our ship is sinking. I only came to say farewell. (Wailing) Mother!
EVELYN: Alan! (Screaming). The dead bells of Europe’s bombed cathedrals are tolling the death knell of America’s youth.404
Mildred’s overwrought hysterics and hackneyed acting won no admirers among the listeners. “Amateur night stuff” and “a monumental bore” were just a sample of the press notices.405 Her wild sobbing “almost fractured our eardrums,” one reporter claimed.406 Another wag hoped for Axis Sally’s conviction just “to prevent her from going back to radio.”407
The prosecution then called Ulrich Haupt, the thirty-year-old actor who played the role of Alan in Vision of Invasion. Although Haupt confirmed that Mildred had acted in the play, he was not the damning witness the government expected. Haupt’s mother was Jewish and the actor had faced the constant threat of deportation to the East. In 1936, he was inducted into the Wehrmacht and assigned to the theater. Laughlin asked Haupt what the ramifications would have been had he refused to participate. The witness offered a vivid reminder of the power of the Nazi state:
HAUPT: My mother would have been sent to a concentration camp. My wife and three children would have been sent to concentration camps. I, too, would have been sent to a concentration camp.
LAUGHLIN: And you might have been shot?
HAUPT: That would have been very mild.
LAUGHLIN: But you knew you were participating in Nazi propaganda, didn’t you?
HAUPT: Oh, yes sir. Everything you did in Germany whether you were playing in classics or playing a flute, everything was coordinated to fit their purpose.408
LAUGHLIN: Do you regard yourself as a Jew?
HAUPT: No, sir.
LAUGHLIN: How were you regarded in Germany?
HAUPT: As not a Jew.
LAUGHLIN: Did you oppose the Nazis?
HAUPT: I certainly did as far as possible.
Haupt’s matter-of-fact testimony made it clear that the threat of imprisonment or death was an ever-present reality for an employee of the Reichsradio. If Haupt, a German citizen, had reason to fear for the lives of his wife, mother and children, what fate would befall a solitary American woman if she refused to perform her duties as instructed?
To limit the damage of Haupt’s testimony to his case, John Kelley recalled Adelbert Houben to the stand. Houben was asked to recount the “Schotte incident” of 1943, when Karl Schotte, manager of the USA Zone, was sent to a concentration camp for sloppy censorship. In Houben’s version of the incident, Schotte was arrested after failing to edit out a few sentences from a prisoner of war’s message to his folks at home. In an atmosphere of increasing paranoia and overlapping oversight by the Foreign Office, the Propaganda Ministry and eventually the SS, the Gestapo feared that the errant script might be a secret code to American forces.
“Isn’t it a fact,” Laughlin asked Houben, “that Miss Gillars broadcast those messages in the exact form in which they were written and thereby jeopardized her safety?”
When Houben replied in the affirmative, Judge Curran stepped in and asked the witness if it was the manager’s job to edit the prisoner messages and pronounce them safe for broadcast—as if the editor or supervisor alone faced the risk of arrest. Once again, Curran assisted the prosecution by blunting the impact of testimony favorable to the defense.409
Prisoner Parade
For the next several days, the prosecution focused on Midge’s interviews with Allied prisoners of war. Kelley played selections from Christmas Bells of 1943, Easter Bells of 1944 and Survivors of the Invasion Front, and then followed the audio with the testimony of the actual former pri
soners featured in each broadcast. The first witness was a Canadian officer, Captain Harvey Crossthwaite. In the summer of 1944, he was a wounded prisoner at the Hospital de la Pitié in Paris. Crosthwaite recalled that the defendant arrived at his bedside in a red dress, spoke in the style of a showgirl, and claimed to be recording messages for the International Red Cross.
Prosecutor Kelley then called an American who lost a leg in the Normandy invasion. Gilbert Lee Hansford had been heavily sedated when Midge came to the hospital, but he clearly remembered that she claimed to work for the Red Cross. Another American, John Lynsky, hobbled up to the witness stand on two crutches. Crippled by injuries sustained at the hands of the Germans, Lynsky remembered that she wore “a little Red Cross pin.”410 With the Allies only a few miles from Paris, the witnesses made it clear to the court that it was easier for Midge to find willing interviewees as a Red Cross representative than a Berlin radio personality.
The parade of prisoners continued on for days. Each man told the same basic story, differing only in the small details. Then, a thirty-year-old ex-private with a slight Ukrainian accent took the stand. Michael Evanick, a former infantryman from New York City, stepped up and took the oath. With his wartime diary written in the Ukrainian language admitted into evidence, Evanick told his story about an unusual private meeting with Axis Sally. It was July 15, 1944 in the Chartres prisoner of war camp where Evanick first saw the woman he called the Berlin Babe:
I saw her in the barracks. There was a German officers’ headquarters there, and that morning a German came there and called my name—called me from the group of prisoners sitting on the outside and took me for interrogation. I was told I was going to be interrogated by somebody else, so when I came in, there were 8 to 10 German officers and soldiers in the room, and they just told me to go into the next room.
When I opened the door, I hear that sweet voice—“Hello Michael.” So right away, I would know her, because I have been listening to her, through Africa, Sicily and it was very familiar to me. So she introduced herself to me. “I think you know who I am, I am Sally or whatever otherwise you fellows are calling me”—because we never call her Axis Sally but we have a name “Berlin Babe.” So she introduced herself by the name Sally and said, “You are going to know me better by that name.”
She told me to sit down, and pulls a chair over at the wall and I sit down, and there was a German army cot, and she sits there, lifted her leg, and really exposed herself and really, she did not have any undergarments on. She started to talk to me about New York, and places she used to work, and she sung in the Village there. And she said, “By the way, do you care for a drink?” and I say, “Well, I never refuse.” So she called in a fellow—she calls him “Professor” and he came in and she sent him for the cognac. He brought the cognac and he opened the bottle and handed it to her, and she made a move for him to walk out.
The bottle was opened and she said, “Sorry we haven’t any glasses, but we are going to drink in the American style.” And she said, “Well, you’re probably going to be afraid to take the first drink from the bottle,” and handed the bottle to me. And eventually she said, “It is good stuff. It is 60-year-old cognac.”
We talked and she gives me a cigarette, and she started talking to me again about New York and about the places there and said, “How would you like to say hello to your family back home?” And so on, [to] which I said, “I would like it.” She opens the door again, called and told the Professor to bring the microphone in…. I said, “I would like to say hello to the people back home,” and then she said after I’d finished with that, she said, “Michael, aren’t you feeling happy that you are a prisoner of war and don’t have to fight anymore?” And I said, “No, ma’am. I do not because I feel one hundred percent better when I am in the front lines, at least I am not hungry and starving for being hungry and I got whatever I needed.” So she got mad and just knocked the microphone down which fell toward the cot there.
She started all over talking and asked what did we [the prisoners] do [in the camp]? I said, “I sunbathe.” She asked if I would say the same thing and I said yes. She brought the mike and I said, “We are just sitting in the sun, burning ourselves to death, because we are hungry and are watching American planes come over and bomb every five minutes.”
So at that time, she threw the microphone down again, which was the last time I spoke into the mike.411
On cross-examination, Laughlin asked the witness how he knew that the woman was wearing no underclothes. Evanick responded, “Because she was sitting across the room from me, and she just opened her legs right in front of me and I have to see it. I am not talking about a slip. I am talking about bloomers or whatever you call it.”412 Laughlin asked if Mildred made any sexual advances toward him and Evanick said no. The attorney focused on the lurid details of the soldier’s story rather than challenge discrepancies between the recorded evidence and his testimony.
Evanick claimed that Midge was so angry after he mentioned the hunger of the American prisoners that she knocked down the microphone stand for a second time and ended the recording session. He also claimed that he left the angry woman and walked out of the room. However, the FCC-monitored recording of the program explicitly shows the young GI cheerfully saying, “Goodbye New York!” in unison with Midge as they ended the interview—a crucial discrepancy that the defense did not exploit. Instead, Laughlin took aim at the motivation of the witness and Evanick admitted under cross-examination that it was he who expressed a keen interest in meeting Axis Sally. The prisoner told his German interrogators that it was “every paratrooper’s wish was to see her.” Two days later, Evanick got his wish.
The drama continued as a combative, ex-GI named Eugene McCarthy took the stand. Interned at Stalag IIB, McCarthy witnessed Mildred Gillars and Otto Koischwitz in action as they sought interviews for Easter Bells of 1944. McCarthy and his fellow soldiers were alone with the defendant for more than an hour while O.K. sought approval for the interviews. The young man testified how a nervous, chain-smoking Midge attempted small talk with her fellow Americans. Soon, the small talk disintegrated into a maelstrom of anger and threats:
McCARTHY: She [Gillars] asked for an American cigarette, then another…. As we were sitting in the room, a carton of American cigarettes was passed into the room. It was… passed to her and she was as surprised as we were, wondering where the cigarettes came from. She took it and thanked the boys generously until she opened the carton.
KELLEY: What was in it?
McCARTHY: Horse manure.
KELLEY: How did she react?
MCCARTHY: Very surprised and angry…. She said we were the worst bunch of American prisoners she ever ran into… [that] we treated her terribly for being a woman…. There were quite a few men in the barracks at that time, about 300 men standing on the tables and the bunks outside the “man of confidence’s” room. The room was full, and men were going in and out. At the time, the men were very, very angry—as a bunch of GIs will get—and they were saying very vile words.… [She said] “I am leaving!” She turned to the GIs in the bar racks; she said, “You will regret this!”413
Laughlin tried to mitigate the impact of McCarthy’s testimony by accusing the former POW of “bias” against his client. The witness met the accusation with a withering reply:
McCARTHY: If you put 15 months in a prison camp, and you seen your buddies once a month in that camp—one fellow a month shot—and that camp was there 18 months. In 18 months there were 18 men shot, and I saw the way we were treated in there and made to live, and all is just not right, and you see an American person come in and say she is an American working for them; do you think I love that person to sell out her country, no sir?
LAUGHLIN: Now, Mr. Witness, you do not know the circumstances under which she was doing that.
MCCARTHY: Well, sir—now, why in that two and a half hours, or hour and a half, when the German officers and Otto Koischwitz went out, and she was in the room by herself
, why didn’t she make a statement to us at that time as to what she was being held to?
Laughlin changed the subject and took aim at one of the core tenets of the prosecution’s case. Did Axis Sally’s activities adversely affect the fighting man’s morale?
LAUGHLIN: Did she undermine your morale?
McCARTHY: Undermine it. Absolutely.
LAUGHLIN: She did.
McCARTHY: Absolutely.
LAUGHLIN: She caused you to desert.
McCARTHY: To desert? I don’t know what you mean.
LAUGHLIN: How did she undermine—
McCARTHY: (Interposing) She lowered herself—
LAUGHLIN How did she undermine your morale?
Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany Page 21
