Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany (10 page)

Although the German government sought to minimize the war’s economic impact on day-to-day life in the Reich, it nevertheless instituted rationing on clothing, gasoline, soap and other essential goods. Ration coupons were distributed to German citizens, but Mildred as a foreign national was ineligible for such aid. In the spring, when the situation was particularly dire, her luck suddenly changed:

The art historian had spoken to Dr. Eugen Kurt Fischer, an acquaintance of Mildred’s and a former professor from the University of Königsberg. Although she knew the professor socially, she was unaware of his position in the Nazi government as an official at the European service of Reichsradio (
Reichsrundfunk
). The Reichsradio Corporation, an arm of the Ministry of People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda, run jointly with the Foreign Office, was bombarding the British Isles with a steady diet of news and propaganda through its
Sender Bremen
(Station Bremen). The European Service was having considerable success with the broadcasts of one William Joyce, better known as “Lord Haw Haw.”

Joyce, an American-born Irish Fascist, was a protégé of Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists. At the height of his influence, Joyce had a large listening audience—an estimated 6 million regular and 18 million occasional listeners in the United Kingdom alone.
¹¹⁸
He and his wife Margaret Cairns Joyce (“Lady Haw Haw”) narrowly escaped arrest and fled England on August 26, 1939. Ingratiating himself with the German Propaganda Ministry and seizing upon his many contacts within the regime, Joyce was hired to anonymously write and record commentaries on British policy, politics and the progress of the war.

Joyce’s popularity was not only attributable to his skill as a broadcaster, but also to the lack of forthright news and comment available on the British Broadcasting Corporation. The BBC had suspended entertainment programming the day war was declared and heavily censored all news. The censorship was so indiscriminate that many English listeners immediately turned to Joyce’s commentaries after the 9 p.m. BBC news to hear the details their government had been holding back. Making matters worse, the BBC had also unknowingly reported fictitious reports of successes on the front only to report later that the Allied forces were, in fact, retreating.
¹¹⁹
Entertainment programming was limited to theater organ music and records. Inevitably, listeners looked elsewhere on the dial. The BBC had been slow to respond to the German propaganda onslaught. In fact, the programming staff had fled to “undisclosed locations” when war was declared in anticipation of a massive blitzkrieg on London.
¹²⁰

As Holland, Luxembourg, Denmark, Belgium and Norway fell in April and May 1940, those popular commercial stations on the Continent that the British public listened to daily were expropriated by the Germans for pro-Nazi broadcasts.
¹²¹
In a matter of months, Reichsradio had the facilities and high-powered transmitters to cover the entire European Continent. Combined with the huge 100 kilowatt transmitters and antennas that the regime established in the Berlin suburb of Zeesen, German shortwave radio covered the world twenty-four hours a day in twelve languages on both medium wave (AM radio) and shortwave bands.

As German forces racked up success after success in Western Europe, Joyce was brutal in his evaluation of the conduct of the British war effort, and singled out Winston Churchill, the man selected as Prime Minister in the face of these reversals, for special contempt. During the withdrawal of British forces from Narvik, and later Dunkirk, “Lord Haw Haw” underlined the differences between the British radio’s depiction of events and the reality on the ground:

Joyce reserved his greatest vitriol for Churchill:

Reichsradio’s management hoped to duplicate the success of the European Service on the North American continent. Unlike today’s radios, it was common for radio sets of the period to include shortwave bands for international listening. Who could speak to these American and Canadian listeners in terms that they could understand? American expatriates in Berlin were few at the outset of the war as most were trying to flee Germany in the face of hostilities, but the Radio Department of the Foreign Office did find some willing candidates. One of the first was Frederick William Kaltenbach, an Iowaborn German-American teacher fired from his job at a Dubuque high school in 1935 for leading a brown-shirted student organization based on the Hitler Youth. Angered by his termination, Kaltenbach left the US for Germany as an avowed convert to National Socialism and began his service for the Reich reading press releases in English. Dubbed “Lord Hee Haw” for his folksy style, he was cast as the American equivalent of William Joyce.

Another recruit was Edward Leo Delaney, an Illinois-born actor and author of dime-store novels, who began broadcasting for the Germans under the alias “E.D. Ward” in late 1939. Kaltenbach, Delaney and a Foreign Office official who would have a defining role in the creation of “Axis Sally,” Dr. Max Otto Koischwitz, dominated the USA Zone’s commentaries early in the war.
¹²⁴

On September 8, 1939, Hitler issued a decree stating that von Ribbentrop’s Foreign Office would be responsible for the general guidelines and instructions of all foreign propaganda (radio, film, newspapers and pamphlets) for the duration of the war. Ribbentrop’s political victory over Goebbels exacerbated an already vicious rivalry between the two ministers. Moreover, Hitler decreed that those instructions would be “adopted unchanged and implemented.”
¹²⁵
In order to ensure that the guidelines were carried out, the Führer specified that von Ribbentrop assign “competent officials as liaisons” to the Propaganda Ministry.
¹²⁶
This development signaled a considerable loss of influence and control for Goebbels, who regarded these liaisons as spies for his arch-enemy.

Although the Propaganda Minister still retained control over domestic propaganda and efforts in Bohemia, Moravia, the Government General in Poland and the occupied countries of Western Europe, he experienced a bureaucratic defeat he found hard to take. Intensely critical of the Foreign Office overseers, the minister found their input “stupid,” “intellectual” and far too gentle on the Jewish Question. To circumvent their influence, the
Reichsminister
held daily conferences where he directly communicated his personal orders to department heads without interference. The two staffs at times engaged in violent disagreements. In one instance, Goebbels ordered that one Foreign Office representative be physically removed from a studio for meddling in his broadcasts.
¹²⁷

Despite the efforts of Kaltenbach and Delaney, the Foreign Office was dissatisfied with the quality of the USA Zone’s speakers as early as March 1940. Several of the announcers had distinct and, in certain cases, thick German accents. Dr. Markus Timmler, head of the Radio and Culture section, expressed as much in a memorandum to the USA Zone management:

Enter “Midge”

Within a month of Dr. Timmler’s critique, a down-on-her-luck Mildred Gillars entered the cavernous headquarters of the Reichsradio Corporation. The broadcasting complex consisted of three major buildings:
Das Grosse Haus
(the “Big House”), the “Deutsch land House” and a large barracks that housed several radio studios. The Big House had hundreds of rooms that accommodated the organizational maze that was the corporation. It was only one of the buildings devoted to Germany’s massive overseas broadcasting service, which broadcast daily around the clock.

Johannes Schmidt-Hansen, the manager of the European Section, asked the nervous actress to audition at the microphone. Her mellifluous voice and command of English impressed Schmidt-Hansen and he told her that she would be getting a phone call with a formal offer. Mildred was skeptical: “I had been promised things like that for years and years along Broadway; since practically nothing ever materializes, I just thought it was another one of those things.”
¹²⁹
When the call finally came, she was told to report to the station the next day (May 6) at the rate of 18 Reichmarks per performance. Her duties were originally limited to station identification and the introduction of records and musical performances.

She began as a shift announcer for two nights a week and for the next seven months eked out a living on a per show basis. Her ease at the microphone was such that she was promoted within three months to be the first female host of a musical variety program on the European Service. Her income rose as she took on more work, and she was offered substantially more for political broadcasts. Over the next four and a half years, she would clock over 10,000 hours of broadcasting to become the highest paid radio personality on the Overseas Service. Paid from a cashier’s window in the broadcasting complex, she was eligible for the ration coupons that would become more and more critical to daily life as the war progressed.

In those early days, Mildred was a “cut and dried” announcer, longing for the day when she could work with what she called “live bands instead of dead records.” At the beginning of her employment, she was a popular figure by all accounts, and her radio colleagues remembered her as light-hearted and friendly. Easily given to teasing and joking in the studio, her attitude was in direct contrast to the tense atmosphere created by Goebbels and his underlings: “She did not take her job very seriously and made fun of a great many things in Nazi Germany,” a musician recalled after the war.

At times her comments could be reckless, and she gained a reputation as a “loose cannon.” “I often had to warn her that her speeches about Goebbels would be very dangerous for her,” a colleague recalled.
¹³⁰
Another orchestra member remembered that she would sign off the broadcast with the words “
Heil Hitlerchen
” in what he described as an “absolutely joking manner.”
¹³¹
Werner Berger, the chief director of radio plays, described her political and social views at the time:

However, there was an unstable and volatile side to her nature. Berger continued: