A defeat for Germany would mean a defeat for America. I say damn Roosevelt and Churchill, and all of their Jews who have made this war possible. I, as an American girl, will stay over here on this side of the fence because it's the right side. Girls, watch out! Don't forget the beautiful things we have at home which are now in danger.
-Mildred Gillars, "Home Sweet Home"
Mildred Sisk was born in Portland, Maine in late 1900. Her father was an alcoholic. It's possible that he sexually abused her. She grew up wanting to be an actress, perhaps like Lillian Gish (who, ironically, would go on to be a supporter of Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee). When Mildred's mother divorced her first husband and remarried dentist Robert Gillars in 1911, Mildred Sisk became Mildred Gillars.
Five years later the Gillars moved to Conneaut, Ohio, between Cleveland and Erie. Mildred attended Ohio Wesleyan University - which had begun admitting female students in 1877 - and studied Dramatic Arts, but dropped out in 1922 (what must have been her junior or senior year) to attend an acting school in Cleveland and focus on her dream of the stage. Later, Mildred got a suspended sentence for pretending to be an abandoned New Jersey bride, which the press ate up, but was actually a publicity stunt for a movie. That's as close as she came to a starring role...in the States.
So Mildred did whatever any frustrated American actress does: move to Europe. In 1931 Mildred followed a British (and Jewish, ironically) man to Algiers. It was a short-lived fling, as Mildred met her mother in Budapest, after which they traveled to Berlin in Spring 1934.
German President Paul Von Hindenburg, in an effort to unify a fractured country, named his political opponent Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany in 1932. Over the next 19 months, Hitler worked to consolidate his power, soon gaining Hindenburg's trust. Upon learning that Hindenburg was on his deathbed, Hitler had the German cabinet pass the Law Concerning the Highest State Office of the Reich. So, when Hindenburg died on August 2, 1934 at the age of 86, Hitler officially became the head of state for Germany, as well as the leader of the government. A referendum was held on August 19, 1934 for the public to vote on their approval of Hitler as Fuhrer. 90% said they approved. Hitler's power could not be checked. New York Times reporter Frederick T. Birchall wrote:
The endorsement gives Chancellor Hitler, who four years ago was not even a German citizen, dictatorial powers unequaled in any other country, and probably unequaled in history since the days of Genghis Khan. He has more power than Joseph Stalin in Russia, who has a party machine to reckon with; more power than Premier Mussolini of Italy who shares his prerogative with the titular ruler; more than any American President ever dreamed of.
This is the Germany that Mildred Gillars encountered, a country that allowed Hitler to democratically rise to power and a "legislature" that allowed him to render them subservient to his own interests, fueled by the people of Germany.
Mildred worked briefly as a language instructor in the Berliz Institute and wrote film and theatre reviews for Variety (which were pretty Anti-Semitic) before finding work for the Reichsradio Corporation - Radio Berlin - whose use of AM and shortwave radio transmission in propaganda was unparalleled at the time. The Propaganda Ministry of the Nazi Party assumed control over the German press. Joseph Goebbels made cheap radios available to the German public. This is where Mildred Gillars comes in, under the persona of "Axis Sally." Finally, Mildred Sisk Gillars was to be a star.
In Spring 1941, Mildred's passport was confiscated by a U.S. Embassy official. She got engaged to a German physicist who said that, if she returned to the United States, he wouldn't marry her. She stayed. He died on the Eastern Front. So she began an affair with a married radio producer named Max Otto Koischwitz, a former German professor at Hunter College, on the Upper East Side of New York City, who got pushed out thanks to his Nazi sympathies and went to Germany, where he was put in charge of radio broadcasts targeting American troops and put her on the air as "Midge." Mildred directed her show "Home Sweet Home" at American soldiers stationed throughout Europe.
Home Sweet Home began:
"Hello, gang. Throw down those little old guns and toodle off home. There's no getting the Germans down."
Then this popular (among German and American troops) song was the main intro:
It was a total mindbend (Note: this is not the word that first came to mind) for the GIs, 36 million of whom had registered for the draft by late 1942. "Home Sweet Home" was a mixture of popular music and - at first - some light propaganda, which later devolved into outright headgames. Koischwitz wrote, Mildred spoke, right in line with Goebbels' "Principles of Propaganda" in which he wrote:
...The best form of newspaper propaganda was not 'propaganda' (i.e., editorials and exhortation), but slanted news which appeared to be straight.
Richard Lucas, whose book tackles the subject of "Axis Sally," wrote:
She played the vixen behind the microphone, taunting the men on the front lines and casting doubt in their minds about their mission, their wives and girlfriends, and their prospects after the war.
Axis Sally, or, "The Berlin Bitch," went full Anti-Semite:
I love America but I do not love Roosevelt and all his 'kike' boyfriends who have thrown us into this awful turmoil.
Or even:
One thing I pride myself on is to tell you American folks the truth and hope one day that you'll wake up to the fact that you're being duped; that the lives of the men you love are being sacrificed for the Jewish and British interests!
She would play to the soldiers' insecurities and wonder aloud if their wives and girlfriends would stay faithful, "especially if you boys get all mutilated and do not return in one piece."
Mildred's broadcasts would list off the names of Americans who had recently been sent to German POW camps, which gave listeners back home (short wave radio, remember) updates on family members.
In February 1943, Koischwitz was indicted - along with poet Ezra Pound - in absentia by a District of Columbia grand jury on grounds of treason. (Pound moved to Italy in 1924 out of anger over WW1 and became enamored by Mussolini's fascism, recording hundreds of broadcasts that criticized the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, and Jews as a whole.) Beginning in October 1943, Koischwitz and Gillars toured POW camps interviewing captured Americans and recording messages for their families, designed to destroy their morale.
On May 11, 1944, just over three weeks from D-Day, Mildred played the role of "Evelyn" in a radio broadcast called "Vision of Invasion" in which an Ohio mother has a nightmare that her son died in the English Channel aboard a ship bound for the coast of France in a failed invasion. Evelyn turns to her husband Elmer, who is trying to laugh off her concerns, and says of this hypothetical invasion:
But everybody says the invasion is suicide. The simplest person knows that. Between 70 and 90 percent of the boys will be killed or crippled for the rest of their life...The whole world, waiting and watching for hundreds of thousands of young men to be slaughtered on the beaches of Europe and you -- you laugh!
Koischwitz's wife died in 1943 in an Allied bombing raid. As long as Koischwitz was alive and he married Gillars (which she assumed would ultimately happen), Gillars was covered for German citizenship by marriage. Koischwitz died in 1944 of tuberculosis and heart failure. Later, when asked why she didn't take off back to the USA, Gillars said "I never thought he would die."
Two days before the German surrender, on May 6, 1945 Gillars gave her last broadcast, going out the back door as Soviet troops stormed the front of the radio station (according to her testimony).
Mildred was found living in the cellars of bombed-out Berlin buildings, was arrested in 1946 and was held in an internment camp until 1948, upon which she was returned to the United States and tried for treason. The jury threw out seven of the eight counts levied against Gillars, leaving only the Vision of Invasion broadcast as the basis for treason. Chief Prosecutor John M. Kelley, Jr. described it as "a typical example of German psychological warfare, aimed at destroying the morale of American soldiers by dramatizing the horrors and carnage awaiting them." Mildred drew the line in her mind that she was an entertainer, not a traitor. Her defense was that there were two personalities in play: Mildred, the failed actress, and "Midge" the radio star.
Mildred Gillars was convicted on March 8, 1949 and sentenced to 10-30 years in prison. While serving 12 years of her sentence at Alderson Federal Prison Camp in West Virginia, she made Bavarian beer steins with "Accept your fate for it is sealed" as the message, and was released in 1961, having converted to Catholicism.
Which is how she found herself at the Our Lady of Bethlehem convent in Columbus, Ohio, and worked as a music tutor. She earned enough credits to finish her degree at Ohio Wesleyan in 1973, at the age of 72. Mildred died of cancer in 1988 and is buried in an unmarked grave outside of Columbus.
