Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany (26 page)

Her face froze as the Commissioner read out the charges. Lawrence coolly informed her that the charges carried a maximum sentence of death. She fell quiet as she finally comprehended the seriousness of her situation. “If Miss Sisk-Gillars yet realized she faced a possible death penalty,” one witness to the proceedings reported, “she did not show it. She listened attentively to the charges for which she had been brought home from Berlin—but she had nothing to say.”
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The Commissioner asked how she chose to respond to the charges against her.

“I wouldn’t agree with them,” she abruptly replied.
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Lawrence then asked if she had any relatives or friends in the United States who could help her prepare her defense.

“As far as I know,” she replied, “I have no one here in the United States.”

He informed her that the FBI had located her half-sister, Edna Mae Herrick. Reporters on hand noted that Mildred seemed “surprised and not very interested” in this revelation, but she was likely wondering about her absent mother.
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Unknown to her, Mae Gillars had died in March 1947. She spent her final years in the Toronto rooming house she owned and managed, ill and grieving over her imprisoned daughter whose innocence she protested until the day she died.

“When did she get here?” she asked, referring to her half-sister as she was led away to the District of Columbia Jail.
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“A pretty dismal place, that jail—dark, noisy and smelly,” was how one newspaper columnist’s description of the District jail that once held mental patients and violent criminals.
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Led into a bare cell to await a hearing, bail was impossible as Federal law proscribed bond in treason cases. As officers booked her, the Commissioner advised her to find an attorney as soon as possible. When asked her age, the haggard and gray woman who had survived like an animal in demolished buildings and internment camps remained an actress to the core.

“Thirty-nine,” she told the booking officer, subtracting nine from her actual age.
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In the small town of Ashtabula, Ohio, a 39-year-old dance instructor was gazing at a newspaper picture of a woman with a prominent jaw and smiling eyes that resembled her own.

Edna Mae Herrick was positive that the woman who had arrived over the weekend from Germany was none other than the delicate “china doll” she had idolized as a child. The press soon called on the half-sister of Axis Sally for her reaction to her sibling’s return. Ever loyal, Edna Mae Herrick swore to stand by Mildred:

“I believe if my sister did anything which was treasonable to her country,” she said, “she did it unwillingly. If she is in trouble, I want to be by her side.”
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For over a year and a half, Edna Mae and her family had suffered for the actions of her distant sister. When Mildred was arrested in March 1946, she was fired from her job for the sole cause of being kin to Axis Sally. Nine months later, as false rumors of Mildred’s arrival in Miami swirled in the press, she again felt the heat of public outrage. With her mother’s health growing worse day by day, Edna Mae wrote to J. Edgar Hoover in January 1947. Alternately beseeching and defiant in tone, the handwritten letter cited the bitter loss of her own job, the meanness of the American media, and the disastrous effect of the controversy on her mother, Mae:

Less than two months later, Mae Gillars passed away.

Edna Mae and her husband, E. Reid Herrick, were busy building a new house. The unfinished home had no furnace yet, so the family kept warm by lighting three fireplaces. With Mae gone, there was no question that she would support her sister to the bitter end. “It was a mess,” Edna Mae recalled in an interview shortly before her death, “but it never entered my mind not to be there for moral support. I don’t think Mildred cared one way or another if I was there. I did it for my mother.”
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Edna Mae packed her bags for the long trip to Washington and the longer wait for Mildred’s day in court. She barely knew what to expect after more than a decade of silence. So much had changed. Their mother was dead. The family home in Conneaut had been sold. Her sister, now gray and battered by the cruelty of war, was sitting in a narrow, damp cell built to house prostitutes, thieves and murderers. The effects of her newfound fame on her family always weighed heavily on Mildred’s mind. Two years earlier she had spoken of her fear that her actions might harm her family, especially her mother.

“I am hoping my mother will not hear about this at all,” she told CIC interrogators in April 1946. “I don’t like to run the risk of my relatives and school friends finding out about it. Such notoriety has never been in my family before.”
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If there was any doubt about the extent to which Mildred Gillars had cut off her relations with family and friends in the United States, it was apparent on the day of her arrival in Washington. As she was booked into jail, she listed a friend, Mrs. E. Arnold of Dietz, Germany (where she found shelter during the 1946 Christmas amnesty), as her next of kin.
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The taint of her infamy was impossible to escape. Her mother Mae, heartbroken by her failure to convince her headstrong daughter to return to America in 1939, was only one casualty. The rest of the Hewitson and Gillars families were similarly affected by the shame of being related to Axis Sally, as FBI agents discovered when they visited Mae’s brothers in New Brunswick, Canada. Accompanied by an officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the agents traveled to the province in an attempt to verify Mildred’s American nationality. Mae’s elder brother, William Hewitson, was an elderly farmer who had not been off his Fredericton property in almost a decade. His 62-year-old younger brother, Joseph, was willing to go to Washington to testify at his niece’s trial, but was short of cash and required a fifty dollar cash advance to pay for the train ticket.

Mildred’s Uncle Joseph acknowledged that the controversy had hit his family hard. Still, he did not believe that his niece had worked for the Nazis voluntarily and could not fathom “how she could do the things which she is reported to have done.”
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Joseph pleaded with the agents to refrain from contacting his sister, Cora Ross, who was ill in a Nova Scotia hospital. The sickly woman was especially disturbed by news reports concerning her infamous niece. The investigators decided not to pursue the Hewitsons further after the FBI collected enough documentation to confirm her American birth.

Voices from the Past

As Axis Sally settled into her cell, she could not know how close she had come to avoiding prosecution altogether. In January 1947, a troubled Assistant Attorney General Lamar Caudle told Washington columnist Drew Pearson that the Justice Department was having trouble meeting the Constitution’s “two witness” requirement for a treason conviction. At the same time, the Army was pressuring his department to drop the charges rather than hold her indefinitely. In 1961, Pearson explained his role in keeping Axis Sally in jail:

Caudle also sought the help of Walter Winchell. When the Justice Department lawyer mentioned that the Army had requested a reconsideration of Mildred’s case, Winchell made sure his audience was duly outraged. Assuming the mantle of spokesman for “Mr. and Mrs. America,” the columnist demanded an explanation from the War Department:

After months of arrest, release and then re-arrest, the Army could not hold Axis Sally indefinitely. The rank and file soldier who enjoyed her music from afar could not give eyewitness testimony to her treachery. Men who saw Axis Sally at work in the flesh were required—the GIs that Mildred sought to help by broadcasting messages to their loved ones as they lingered in a prison camp. Caudle needed the few who were disgusted to see an American woman in league with the enemy that killed and maimed their comrades.

Pearson and Winchell’s campaign to see Axis Sally behind bars paid off. Within days of Drew Pearson’s January 26 appeal, the columnist received handwritten letters from two former American prisoners of war. Albert J. Lawlor of Stony Brook, NY, had been held in
Stalag VII
A near Furstenberg on the Oder between February 1943 and April 1945. Lawlor described his encounter with Axis Sally:

A few days later, Pearson received another handwritten note from a former Army Ranger named Robert Ehalt, the prisoner of war who refused to let the men of
Stalag IIB
record messages for Midge and the Professor in 1944. He vividly recalled her angry reaction to the horse manure-filled cigarette carton that his fellow prisoners gave her, and her threat that they would soon regret it. Ehalt vowed not to let the haughty collaborator get away: