Mildred Gillars

Early life

Born Mildred Elizabeth Sisk in Portland, Maine, she took the surname Gillars in 1911 after her mother remarried. At 16, she moved to Conneaut, Ohio, with her family. In 1918, she enrolled at Ohio Wesleyan University to study dramatic arts, but left without graduating.

She then moved to Greenwich Village, New York City, where she worked in various low-skilled jobs to finance drama lessons. She toured with stock companies and appeared in vaudeville but she was unable to establish a theatrical career.

In 1929, Gillars left the US for France, where she worked as an artist's model in Paris. In 1933, she left the US again, residing first in Algiers, where she found work as a dressmaker's assistant. In 1934, she moved to Dresden, Germany, to study music, and was later employed as a teacher of English at the Berlitz School of Languages in Berlin.

German radio

In 1940 she obtained work as an announcer with the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft (RRG), German State Radio.

By 1941, the US State Department was advising American nationals to return home. However, Gillars chose to remain because her fiancé, Paul Karlson, a naturalized German citizen, said he would never marry her if she returned to the United States. Shortly afterwards, Karlson was sent to the Eastern Front, where he was killed in action.

On December 7, 1941, Gillars was working in the studio when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was announced. She broke down in front of her colleagues and denounced their allies in the east. "I told them what I thought about Japan and that the Germans would soon find out about them," she recalled. "The shock was terrific. I lost all discretion." She later said that she knew that such an outburst could send her to a concentration camp. Faced with the prospect of joblessness or prison, the frightened Gillars produced a written oath of allegiance to Germany and returned to work, her duties initially limited to announcing records and participating in chat shows.

Gillars' broadcasts initially were largely apolitical. This changed in 1942, when Max Otto Koischwitz, the program director in the USA Zone at the RRG, cast Gillars in a new show called Home Sweet Home. She soon acquired several names amongst her GI audience, including the Berlin Bitch, Berlin Babe, Olga, and Sally, but the one most common was "Axis Sally". This name probably came when asked on air to describe herself, Gillars had said she was "the Irish type… a real Sally."

In 1943, an Italian-American woman, Rita Zucca, also began broadcasting to American troops from Rome, using the name "Sally". The two often were confused and even thought by many to be one and the same.

Gillars' main programs from Berlin were:

Opening with the sound of a train whistle, Home Sweet Home attempted to exploit the fears of American soldiers about the home front. The broadcasts were designed to make soldiers feel doubt about their mission, their leaders, and their prospects after the war.

Gillars made her most notorious broadcast on June 5, 1944, just prior to the D-Day invasion of Normandy, France, in a radio play written by Koischwitz, Vision Of Invasion. She played Evelyn, an Ohio mother, who dreams that her son had died a horrific death on a ship in the English Channel during an attempted invasion of Occupied Europe.

Koischwitz died in August 1944 and Gillars' broadcasts became lackluster and repetitive without his creative energy. She remained in Berlin until the end of the war. Her last broadcast was on May 6, 1945, just two days before the German surrender.

Arrest, trial, and imprisonment

The US attorney general dispatched prosecutor Victor C. Woerheide to Berlin to find and arrest Gillars. He and Counterintelligence Corps special agent Hans Winzen only had one solid lead: Raymond Kurtz, a B-17 pilot shot down by the Germans, recalled that a woman who had visited his prison camp seeking interviews was the broadcaster who called herself "Midge at the Mike". According to Kurtz, the woman had used the alias Barbara Mome. Woerheide organised wanted posters with Gillars' picture to put up in Berlin, but the breakthrough came when he was informed that a woman calling herself "Barbara Mome" was selling her furniture at second-hand markets around town. A shop owner who was found selling a table belonging to Gillars was detained, and under "intensive interrogation" revealed Gillars' address. When she was arrested on March 15, 1946, Gillars only asked to take with her a picture of Koischwitz.

She was then held by the Counterintelligence Corps at Camp King, Oberursel, along with collaborators Herbert John Burgman and Donald S. Day, until she was conditionally released from custody on December 24, 1946. However, she declined to leave military detention. She was formally re-arrested on January 22, 1947 at the request of the Justice Department and was eventually flown to the United States to await trial on August 21, 1948.

Gillars was indicted on September 10, 1948, and charged with ten counts of treason, but only eight were proceeded with at her trial, which began on January 25, 1949. The prosecution relied on the large number of her programs recorded by the Federal Communications Commission, stationed in Silver Hill, Maryland, to show her active participation in propaganda activities against the United States. It was also shown that she had taken an oath of allegiance to Hitler. The defense argued that her broadcasts stated unpopular opinions but did not amount to treasonable conduct. It was also argued that she was under the hypnotic influence of Koischwitz and therefore not fully responsible for her actions until after his death. On March 10, 1949, the jury convicted Gillars on just one count of treason, that of making the Vision Of Invasion broadcast. She was sentenced to 10 to 30 years in prison. and a $10,000 fine. In 1950, a federal appeals court upheld the sentence.

Gillars served her sentence at the Federal Reformatory for Women in Alderson, West Virginia. She became eligible for parole in 1959, but did not apply until 1961. She was released on June 10, 1961.

Later life

Having converted to Roman Catholicism while in prison, Gillars went to live at the Our Lady of Bethlehem Convent in Columbus, Ohio, and taught German, French, and music at St. Joseph Academy, Columbus.

In 1973 she returned to Ohio Wesleyan University to complete her degree.

Gillars died of colon cancer at Grant Medical Center in Columbus on June 25, 1988.