Supplied to me by James Hennessey. You are just a wealth of information! 
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Dear Mr. Rappaport,
According to me, this article is interesting. During
the war, did you listen her broadcasts???
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American-born Axis Sally made propaganda broadcasts
for Radio Berlin in Hitler's Germany.
She was named Mildred Elizabeth Sisk when she was born
in Portland, Maine, on November 29, 1900. Her parents,
Vincent Sisk and Mae Hewitson Sisk, were divorced in
1907, and a few years later Mildred's mother married a
dentist, Dr. Robert Bruce Gillars. From that time on
the child was known as Mildred Gillars.
The family moved around a great deal during her early
years, but Mildred Gillars eventually graduated from
high school in Conneaut, Ohio, in 1917. Then it was on
to Ohio Wesleyan University in the small town of
Delaware, where, hoping to pursue a stage career, she
majored in dramatic arts. Gillars did well in speech,
languages and dramatics but did not graduate because
of her failure to meet all university requirements and
standards.
According to her half sister, Gillars worked at a
variety of jobs after leaving college--clerk,
salesgirl, cashier and waitress--all to further her
ambition to become an actress. In 1929 she went to
Europe with her mother and spent six months studying
in France before returning to the United States.
Eventually Gillars went to New York, where she worked
in stock companies, musical comedies and vaudeville,
but never made enough impact to gain any real
recognition. In 1933 she returned to Europe and worked
in France as a governess and salesgirl. She moved to
Germany in 1935 and became an English instructor at
the Berlitz School of Languages in Berlin. English
teachers were paid less than Russian instructors--a
possible reason for her decision to accept employment
by Radio Berlin as an announcer and actress. This was
a job much more to her liking, and she stayed with it
until the defeat of Nazi Germany in May 1945. Gillars'
propaganda program was known as "Home Sweet Home" and
usually aired sometime between 8 p.m. and 2 a.m.
daily. Although she referred to herself as "Midge at
the mike," GIs dubbed her Axis Sally. Her broadcasts
were heard all over Europe, the Mediterranean, North
Africa and the United States from December 11, 1941,
through May 6, 1945. Although most of her programs
were broadcast from Berlin, some were aired from
Chartres and Paris in France and from Hilversum in the
Netherlands.
Once the war was over, her broadcasts would come back
to haunt her. At a listening post operated by the
Federal Communications Commission in Silver Hill, Md.,
all her programs had been monitored and recorded and
would provide the prosecution with damaging evidence
at her trial. The prosecution charged that her
broadcasts were sugarcoated propaganda pills aimed at
convincing U.S. soldiers that they were fighting on
the wrong side.
Most GIs agreed that Gillars had a sultry, sexy voice
that came over the radio loud and clear. Like her
counterpart in the Pacific, Tokyo Rose, she liked to
tease and taunt the soldiers about their wives and
sweethearts back in the States. "Hi fellows," she
would say. "I'm afraid you're yearning plenty for
someone else. But I just wonder if she isn't running
around with the 4-Fs way back home."
She would get the names, serial numbers and hometowns
of captured and wounded GIs and voice concern about
what would happen to them, in broadcasts that could be
heard in the United States. "Well I suppose he'll get
along all right," she would say. "The doctors don't
seem... I don't know... only time will tell, you see."
At sign-off time she would tease her listeners some
more, telling them, "I've got a heavy date waiting for
me."
Perhaps Sally's most famous broadcast, and the one
that would eventually get her convicted of treason,
was a play titled Vision of Invasion that went out
over the airwaves on May 11, 1944. It was beamed to
American troops in England awaiting the D-Day invasion
of Normandy, as well as to the home folks in America.
Gillars played the role of an American mother who
dreamed that her soldier son, a member of the invasion
forces, died aboard a burning ship in the attempt to
cross the English Channel. The play had a realistic
quality to it, sound effects simulating the moans and
cries of the wounded as they were raked with gunfire
from the beaches. Over the battle action sound
effects, an announcer's voice intoned, "The D of D-Day
stands for doom... disaster... death... defeat...
Dunkerque or Dieppe." Adelbert Houben, a high official
of the German Broadcasting Service, would testify at
Axis Sally's trial that her broadcast was intended to
prevent the invasion by frightening the Americans with
grisly forecasts of staggering casualties.
After the defeat of Germany, Gillars was not
immediately apprehended but blended into the throngs
of displaced persons in occupied Germany seeking
assistance from the Western Allies in obtaining food,
shelter, medical treatment, location of relatives and
friends, and possible employment. She spent three
weeks in an American hospital in 1946, then was taken
to an internment camp in Wansel, Germany. About
Christmastime 1946, when she was granted amnesty and
released, she obtained a pass to live in the French
Zone of Berlin. Later, when she traveled to Frankfurt
to get her pass renewed, she was arrested by the Army
and kept there for more than a year. At the end of
that detention she was flown to the United States and
incarcerated in the Washington, D.C., District Jail on
August 21, 1948. She was held there without bond.
Later she was charged with 10 counts of treason
(eventually reduced to eight to speed up the trial) by
a federal grand jury. Her trial began on January 25,
1949, in the district court of the nation's capital,
with Judge Edward M. Curran presiding. The chief
prosecutor was John M. Kelley, Jr., and Gillars'
attorney was James J. Laughlin.
Prosecutor Kelley pressed home some important points
right from the start. First was the fact that after
being hired by Radio Berlin she had signed an oath of
allegiance to Hitler's Germany. He also put witnesses
on the stand who testified that Gillars had posed as a
worker for the International Red Cross and persuaded
captured American soldiers to record messages to their
families and relatives in order to garner a large
listening audience in the United States. By the time
she finished weaving propaganda into the broadcasts,
the POWs' messages to their loved ones were not
exactly messages of comfort.
Gilbert Lee Hansford of Cincinnati, a veteran of the
29th Infantry Division who lost a leg in the Normandy
invasion, said Gillars visited him in a Paris hospital
in August 1944. "She walked up with two German
officers," Hansford said, and she stated that she was
working with the International Red Cross. She then
told a group of wounded captives, "Hello boys, I'm
here to make recordings so your folks will know you
are still alive."
Hansford said he and others talked into a microphone,
recording messages for broadcast to their families at
home. A courtroom playback of the messages as picked
up by the American monitoring stations showed that
Nazi propaganda had been inserted between the GIs'
messages. One insertion by Gillars said, "It's a
disgrace to the American public that they don't wake
to the fact of what Franklin D. Roosevelt is doing to
the Gentiles of your country and my country."
On February 10, 1949, an American paratrooper from New
York, 36-year-old Michael Evanick, told the jury he
was captured on D-Day, June 6, 1944, after parachuting
behind German lines in Normandy. Pointing his finger,
he identified Gillars as the woman who interviewed him
in a German prisoner-of-war camp near Paris on July
15, 1944.
"I'd been listening to her broadcasts through Africa,
Sicily, and Italy, and I told her I recognized her
voice," Evanick remembered. "She said, 'I guess you
know me as Axis Sally,' and I told her we had a name
for her." The witness said Gillars gave him a drink of
cognac and a cigarette and told him to make himself
comfortable in a chair. After a few drinks, he said,
she sent for a microphone and began the interview,
asking him if he did not feel good to be out of the
fighting.
"No ma'am," Evanick said he replied. "I feel 100
percent better in the front lines where I get enough
to eat." At that, he said, Gillars angrily knocked the
microphone over, but regained her composure and
offered him another drink.
On February 19, Eugene McCarthy, a 25-year-old ex-GI
from Chicago, was called to answer a single question.
Defense attorney Laughlin asked him if Gillars had
posed as a Red Cross worker when she came to make
recorded interviews with American POWs at Stalag 2-B
in Germany. The soldier stated that she did not. Then
in a dramatic outburst, shouting over the defense
counsel's angry protest, the witness told the jury:
"She threatened us as she left--that American citizen,
that woman right there. She told us we were the most
ungrateful Americans she had ever met and that we
would regret this."
Following McCarthy to the witness stand were veterans
John T. Lynskey of Pittsburgh and Paul G. Kestel of
Detroit. Both testified that when Gillars visited them
in a Paris hospital she identified herself as a Red
Cross worker.
Defense counsel Laughlin argued that treason must be
something more than the spoken word: "Things have come
to a pretty pass if a person cannot make an
anti-Semitic speech without being charged with
treason. Being against President Roosevelt could not
be treason. There are two schools of thought about
President Roosevelt. One holds he was a patriot and
martyr. The other holds that he was the greatest rogue
in all history, the greatest fraud, and the greatest
impostor that ever lived."
Laughlin also tried to point out to the court the
great influence that Max Otto Koischwitz had on
Gillars. Koischwitz was a former professor at Hunter
College in New York who became romantically involved
with Gillars when she was one of his students. She had
attended Hunter briefly while trying to pursue a stage
career before finally abandoning the effort and going
back to Europe in 1933. German-born Koischwitz
eventually returned to Germany, renounced his U.S.
citizenship, and became an official in the Nazi radio
service in charge of propaganda broadcasts. He thus
was Mildred's superior.
In her trips to the witness stand, Gillars was usually
tearful. She said Koischwitz's Svengali-like influence
over her had led her to make broadcasts for Hitler.
She and the professor had lived together in Berlin,
she said, and she burst into tears when informed that
he had died.
In his final summation before the jury, prosecutor
Kelley told them Gillars was a traitor who broadcast
rotten propaganda for wartime Germany and got a
sadistic joy out of it, especially those broadcasts in
which she described in harrowing detail the agonies of
wounded American soldiers before they died. "She sold
out to them," he said. "She thought she was on the
winning side, and all she cared about was her own
selfish fame."
The trial ended on March 8, 1949, after six hectic
weeks. The next day Judge Curran put the case in the
hands of the jury of seven men and five women. After
deliberating for 101Ž2 hours, they were unable to
reach a verdict and were sequestered in a hotel for
the night. They met again the next morning, and after
17 hours of further deliberation they acquitted her of
seven of the eight counts pressed by the government in
its original 10-count indictment. However, they found
her guilty on count No. 10, involving the Nazi
broadcast of the play Vision of Invasion.
On Saturday, March 26, Judge Curran pronounced
sentence: 10 to 30 years in prison, a $10,000 fine,
eligible for parole after 10 years. Mildred Gillars,
alias Axis Sally, was then transported to the Federal
Women's Reformatory in Alderson, W.Va. When she became
eligible for parole in 1959, she waived the right,
apparently preferring prison to ridicule as a traitor
on the outside. Two years later, when she applied for
parole, it was granted. At 6:25 a.m. on June 10, 1961,
she walked out the gate of Alderson prison a free
woman.
Gillars taught for a while in a Roman Catholic school
for girls in Columbus, Ohio, and then returned to her
old college, Ohio Wesleyan. She received a bachelor's
degree in speech in 1973. Gillars died June 25, 1988,
at the age of 87.
