March 15, 1946: The Arrest of "Axis Sally"

March 15, 1946, 80 years ago: Mildred Gillars, the Nazi propagandist known as "Axis Sally," is arrested.

She was born in Portland, Maine on November 29, 1900, and grew up in Bellevue, Ohio, about halfway between Cleveland and Toledo. He studied drama at Ohio Wesleyan University, dropped out to move to New York, and her level of success in theater suggested she shouldn't have dropped out.

She moved to Paris and Algiers, and got a job as an English teacher at the Berlitz School in Berlin in 1934. When the Nazis started World War II in 1939, the U.S. government told its citizens to leave all German territories. Her fiancé was a German citizen, who said if she went home, he would divorce her for abandonment, and, under German law, she would get nothing. She stayed. He was sent to the Eastern Front, where he died for his Fatherland.

Gillars was working as an announcer for German State Radio. At first, her broadcasts weren’t political, but did start with the words, "This is Berlin calling." In 1942, she started fooling around with the program director, Max Koischwitz, who had lived in the U.S. and even became an American citizen, but was deported after his rabid anti-Semitism went too far.

Together, they launched a new show called Home Sweet Home, with Mildred as co-star, to broadcast Nazi propaganda. She told U.S. soldiers things like how their wives and girlfriends were finding men who were 4-F in the Army medical offices but 1-A in bed. She told the boys their girls wouldn't want them when they came home, especially "if you boys get all mutilated, and do not return in one piece."

Once, while on the air, she called herself "the Irish type... a real Sally." Often called "The Bitch of Berlin" by the G.I.s, she was "Axis Sally" from then on.

The tide turned in 1944. On June 6, the D-Day invasion came. On August 25, Paris was liberated. And on August 31, Max died of tuberculosis. Mildred was alone, and, as it turned out, she couldn't do the broadcasts very well when she did them alone. She made her last broadcast on May 6, 1945, 2 days before V-E Day.

She stayed in Berlin, but U.S. authorities tracked her down, and arrested her on March 15, 1946. It took until January 25, 1949 for her trial to begin. Her lawyers said that, while her broadcast stated unpopular opinions, they did not amount to treasonable conduct, and that she was under the "hypnotic influence" of Koischwitz -- who, of course, was dead, and thus unable to defend himself against that charge, regardless of whether it was true.

But with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) having recorded her broadcasts, the evidence against her was conclusive enough to convict her of one count of treason on March 10. She was stripped of her U.S. citizenship, sentenced to 10 to 30 years in prison, and fined $10,000.

She served 12 years in prison, and was paroled. Having converted to Catholicism in prison, she returned to Ohio, and taught German, French and music at a Catholic girls' high school. But she never renounced her Nazi beliefs. Certainly, unlike Iva Toguri D'Aquino, a.k.a. "Tokyo Rose," she was no victim of circumstance: Mildred Gillars chose to be a Fascist pig. Axis Sally joined her Führer in the ultimate bunker on June 25, 1988, at the age of 87, long forgotten.

Actress Meadow Williams financed the 2021 film American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally, and played the title role. Al Pacino played her defense attorney. This time, he did not tell the court, "This whole trial is out of order!"