Gillars Mildred - Axis Sally the American voice of Nazi Germany

While browsing through a website devoted to rare and historic audio clips in 2003, I first heard the voice of Axis Sally. This woman (Mildred Gillars) was the notorious Nazi propagandist whose theme song Lili Marlene became an international favorite during and after the war. Despite her undeniable skills as a broadcaster, the recording also featured a vile anti-Semitism rant. Insinuating that Franklin Roosevelt was a homosexual surrounded by Jewish boyfriends, her words were jarring and repulsive. Yet I wondered how Mildred Gillars, who described herself as a 100% American girl, became a willing mouthpiece for a genocidal regime. How did this woman with middle-class Ohio roots end up on the wrong side of history, convicted of aiding the Nazi regime and betraying her country? I looked for a biography that answered the question, but none existed. Books on the subject of treason mentioned her in passing and tended to focus on her illicit relationship with a former Hunter College professor who served as her Svengali. Her New York Times obituary in November 1988 focused on the frisson her somewhat scandalous testimony caused at her 1949 trial.

As I listened to the Axis Sally audio clips that first day, I noticed that one of the recordings featured another woman with an American accent. Her on-air sidekick addressed her as Sally but the voice was clearly not that of Mildred Gillars. Aware of the circumstances that led to the conviction of Iva Toguri dAquino as the one and only Tokyo Rose (in fact, there had been several other women employed by Japanese radio who broadcast under the moniker Orphan Ann), I wondered how many other Axis Sallies there might have been, and whether any of those women were punished as Gillars and dAquino were.

A visit to the National Archives in College Park, Maryland to look at the Department of Justices Notorious Offenders case files on Axis Sally, as well as a telephone conversation with John Carver Edwards (the author of the excellent 1991 book Berlin Calling, about Americans who broadcast for the Third Reich) convinced me to write a factual, documented biography of Axis Sally. Over the next seven years of research and writing, I discovered a deeply flawed but fascinating woman whose thirst for fame led her to the heart of Hitlers Germany; whose hope for love and marriage convinced her to remain; and whose inner strength compelled her to survive in the death-strewn shelters and cellars of defeated Berlin.

In my younger years, I was a devoted listener to shortwave radio. The radio waves were a battleground of the Cold War in those days. Radio Moscow, Radio Peking, Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe were propaganda powerhouses that fought for the hearts and minds of countless millions for whom radio was their only link to the developed world. In the darkest and farthest reaches of the earth, the signal from the shortwave transmitters represented nations and peoples and political ideologies. It was Joseph Goebbels who envisioned the power of the medium long before the advent of the Second World War. By 1940, Berlins foreign radio service sang the praises of Adolf Hitler and the new Germany twenty-four hours a day in twelve languages. An unemployed American named Mildred Gillars stepped into that burgeoning radio empire and became, along with William Joyce (Lord Haw Haw), one of the regimes most effective propagandists.

Today, radio is arguably one of the most pervasive means of political persuasion. One wonders how a woman with the innate talents of Mildred Gillars would have fared in her native land in a more forgiving time.

Richard Lucas

September 2010