During World War II, both Britain and the United States had their own notorious traitors. These were non-conformists who, for various reasons, chose to work for the enemy. One of the most common forms of treason was broadcasting propaganda by radio.
Britain had the infamous Lord Haw-Haw, whose real name was William Joyce. He was an American-born Irishman and pre-war propaganda chief of the British Union of Fascists. In September 1939, at the outbreak of war, he fled to Berlin to avoid arrest by British police.
From Germany, Joyce broadcast Nazi propaganda to Britain in a sneering upper-class accent. After the war, he was hanged by the British, even though he was really an American, a point the prosecution sidestepped at the time.
In the Pacific campaign, Tokyo Rose, a Japanese American traitor, spouted Tojo propaganda to U.S. troops. But one of the most infamous American traitors worked for Dr. Goebbels, earning her the nickname Axis Sally among Allied troops.
She was born in Portland, Maine, in 1900 as Mildred Sisk. After her mother remarried in 1911, she changed her surname to Gillars. In 1918, she was a student at Ohio Wesleyan University, studying dramatic arts, but she never graduated.
Determined to be an actress, she ended up in Greenwich Village, New York, taking acting lessons and playing bit parts in stock theater productions and vaudeville acts. She also worked as an artist's model, but could not find anything substantial.
In 1929, Gillars crossed the Atlantic and lived in Paris for six months, but nothing panned out, and she drifted back to New York City. In 1933, she went to Algiers in North Africa, taking non-dramatic work as a dressmaker's assistant within the large expatriate community in the French colony.
In 1934, Gillars turned up in Nazi Germany, studying music in Dresden and then working as an English language teacher at a Berlitz school in Berlin. Once war broke out in September 1939, Gillars, as a U.S. citizen, was unaffected, but her native language suddenly became quite valuable to her hosts.
The Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft, or German state radio, had special propaganda stations that beamed pro-Nazi propaganda to the Allies, and native English speakers were very much prized. Gillars was recruited in 1940 and continued to work for German radio even when U.S. citizens were warned by their embassy to leave Germany in late 1941.
Up to 1942, Gillars's broadcasts were fairly harmless, but then she was selected to front a new show called "Home Sweet Home." The show was deliberately designed to lower U.S. morale by making GIs miss their homes and loved ones and doubt what they were doing in the war.
Axis Sally was the nickname Gillars quickly acquired among her many thousands of listeners. There was another female broadcaster also sometimes known as Axis Sally during the war, Rita Zucca, an Italian-American who broadcast for the Germans on the Italian front from 1943 onward, but Mildred Gillars is generally acknowledged as the Axis Sally.
Gillars also fronted three other radio programs apart from "Home Sweet Home." One broadcast in 1943 used familiar American songs of the era interspersed with Nazi propaganda, in particular anti-Jewish commentaries and attacks on President Roosevelt and members of his government.
More serious were "GI's Letterbox" and "Medical Reports," both broadcast in 1944. These programs were beamed to the U.S. home front directly. Gillars used information obtained from captured U.S. servicemen to relay to their families, in particular wounded GIs in German captivity, the idea being to worry their families and lower morale at home.
Gillars even toured prisoner of war camps in 1943, interviewing captured GIs. The recordings were used in her radio broadcasts against the soldiers' families.
Gillars also had the opportunity to act for a massive audience. In May 1944, she played an American mother who dreamed that her son was horribly killed aboard a ship in the English Channel during an invasion attempt on German-occupied France. "Vision of Invasion" was rather prescient, broadcast just three weeks before the actual D-Day invasion.
As the Red Army closed in on Berlin in April 1945, Gillars continued to broadcast. By now, the FBI had a substantial file on her, and her broadcasts were defined as psychological warfare against the United States. But arresting Gillars would prove difficult.
The FBI passed her case to the CIC, the Counter Intelligence Corps, the U.S. Army's intelligence gathering outfit. The CIC would attempt to locate and arrest her once the war ended.
Gillars left Berlin for a short period to continue her broadcasts, which were routed through Radio Hamburg. Her last program was broadcast on May 6, 1945, just two days before the war in Europe ended. But she soon drifted back to Berlin after British, American, and French troops arrived to take over their nation's respective occupation zones.
This gave the CIC the opportunity to find and arrest her. Agents spoke to known friends and colleagues of Gillars in Berlin, and she had been seen in restaurants, beauty shops, and stores in West Berlin. Cooperating with the Berlin police, CIC agents eventually discovered an antique shop where Gillars had stored a valuable piece of furniture. The owner gave up Gillars's address after some pressure.
She was quickly apprehended and held in custody until December 1946. Released as the authorities needed more time to build a case against her, Gillars was re-arrested in November 1947 and held by the U.S. Army until August 20, 1948, when she was flown to the United States to stand trial for treason.
In early 1949, the Axis Sally trial opened. The most damning evidence against her were her recordings. GIs who had been prisoners of war said that Gillars passed herself off as a Red Cross worker when she toured the camps, interviewing prisoners and gathering material for her broadcasts to U.S. families.
After a trial lasting six weeks, Gillars was found guilty and convicted of treason. She was sentenced to between 10 and 30 years in the federal women's reformatory in West Virginia and fined ten thousand dollars.
Gillars served ten years of her sentence before being paroled. She had converted to Roman Catholicism in prison. After her release, she worked for the Our Lady of Bethlehem convent in Columbus, Ohio, teaching German and French, and also music at St. George's Academy in the city.
She also returned to university, gaining a Bachelor of Arts in speech from Ohio Wesleyan. Mildred Gillars died of cancer in June 1988 at the age of 87 and was buried in St. Joseph Cemetery in Columbus.