Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany (31 page)

Like all foreign nationals in wartime, Georgia needed ration coupons to survive, and took employment as an announcer for the radio service. On several broadcasts, Mrs. Von Richter joined Midge, Margaret Joyce (“Lady Haw Haw”), Constance Drexel and others to chat on air about women’s concerns and cultural events. Georgia claimed that the content of her radio appearances was never political in nature. Unlike Koischwitz, Hans never demanded that his wife espouse political positions on the air or make propaganda broadcasts to America.

Von Richter spat out the gum and apologized. He testified that he saw Mildred Gillars speak into a Berlin radio microphone “many times.” Hans matter-of-factly acknowledged that
Vision of Invasion,
the recording most explicitly aimed at derailing the American war effort, featured her voice. Mildred whispered excitedly into her attorney’s ear as von Richter spoke. When Kelley finished his questioning, Laughlin rose to ask the witness if his wife had made broadcasts for the Germans. Von Richter answered in the affirmative and Laughlin delved into their content. Kelley strenuously objected, perhaps fearing the court hearing of other Americans who made similar broadcasts but were not facing the prospect of prison or death. The defense attorney saw his chance to wave the flag of injustice:

“We want to show that his wife’s broadcasts were far in excess of anything with which this defendant is charged. There should be equal justice. There should not be persecution of some and exoneration of others.”
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A torrent of objections rose from the prosecution table. Kelley accused the defense of trying to prejudice the jury. The judge agreed and once again Laughlin was forced to abandon a line of questioning that would have undoubtedly shed light on the motives of the government and the selectivity of its prosecutions. In the midst of the controversy, Hans von Richter defended his wife, stating that she “was a German citizen and under the laws, she was assigned to this task [broadcasting].”
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Little separated the actions of Mildred Gillars and Georgia von Richter but a marriage certificate, just as a single piece of paper separated the Berlin Axis Sally from Rita Zucca, the Rome Axis Sally. A marriage certificate or a testament of allegiance meant freedom, exoneration and a life uninterrupted. Unfortunately for Midge, Otto Koischwitz was dead. For her, there would be no such escape.

Georgia von Richter spoke to the press and took angry exception to the introduction of her wartime broadcasts into the public record. Ironically, she also expanded on her role, claiming that her broadcasts were merely “non-political Red Cross” messages from wounded and imprisoned American soldiers. “To compare my broadcasts with those made by Mildred Gillars would be ridiculous. My broadcasts contained no political references or tinges. I interspersed no commentary. I was only concerned with sending the messages of the boys who were prisoners to their parents in the United States,” she told the Associated Press in an eerily familiar defense.

Described in the press as a Vassar College graduate from a respectable background, Georgia told reporters that she resisted an offer of extra rations in return for broadcasting propaganda. Not withstanding her honorable refusal to participate in those programs, the fact remained that her husband was a salaried Foreign Office employee of aristocratic lineage. Unlike the single Mildred Gillars, Georgia did not need the extra rations “to live.”
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Mrs. Von Richter described her radio job as a “nightmare I have been trying to forget for two years,” and described Laughlin’s effort to drag her into the case as “an effort to discredit the testimony of my husband in Washington.” For some, the nightmare was not over.

Hans von Richter left the witness stand, and the judge and jury put on their headphones to listen to
Vision of Invasion
. Penned by Koischwitz, Mildred played an Ohio mother (Evelyn) whose son (Alan) is an American GI destined for the invasion of France. Her husband (Elmer) is blithely accepting of the war but Evelyn, who is something of a psychic, has a disturbing premonition that both her son and the invasion are doomed. Scratchy and at times unintelligible, the recording of
Vision of Invasion
did have moments of clarity that spoke to the core of the government’s case.

The radio play began with a portentous voice:

Why D-Day?

D stands for Doom and Disaster!

For Defeat and Death!

For Dunkirk and Dieppe!
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The 1942 Dieppe raid claimed the lives of over 6,000 Allied servicemen, and Koischwitz’s narrative graphically compared that battle’s dead to “roasted geese” and “heads of cabbage on their way to market.” The drama opens in Evelyn and Elmer’s living room. The radio is playing jaunty swing music when a news announcer breaks in to announce the beginning of the invasion of France. Evelyn is terrified that D-Day will end in disaster for her only son.

The scene shifts to an American troop ship where her son, Alan, awaits his orders. The young man is despondent and tells a shipmate, “I have a feeling that I shall never see the States again. I was just thinking what mother is doing now.”
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Back in Ohio, the radio continues to play dance music. At her wits’ end, Evelyn is unnerved by the blaring orchestra and demands that Elmer shut off the radio. When he refuses, she retires to her bed and dreams of her son:

Mildred’s overwrought hysterics and hackneyed acting won no admirers among the listeners. “Amateur night stuff” and “a monumental bore” were just a sample of the press notices.
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Her wild sobbing “almost fractured our eardrums,” one reporter claimed.
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Another wag hoped for Axis Sally’s conviction just “to prevent her from going back to radio.”
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The prosecution then called Ulrich Haupt, the thirty-year-old actor who played the role of Alan in
Vision of Invasion
. Although Haupt confirmed that Mildred had acted in the play, he was not the damning witness the government expected. Haupt’s mother was Jewish and the actor had faced the constant threat of deportation to the East. In 1936, he was inducted into the
Wehrmacht
and assigned to the theater. Laughlin asked Haupt what the ramifications would have been had he refused to participate. The witness offered a vivid reminder of the power of the Nazi state:

Haupt’s matter-of-fact testimony made it clear that the threat of imprisonment or death was an ever-present reality for an employee of the
Reichsradio
. If Haupt, a German citizen, had reason to fear for the lives of his wife, mother and children, what fate would befall a solitary American woman if she refused to perform
her
duties as instructed?

To limit the damage of Haupt’s testimony to his case, John Kelley recalled Adelbert Houben to the stand. Houben was asked to recount the “Schotte incident” of 1943, when Karl Schotte, manager of the USA Zone, was sent to a concentration camp for sloppy censorship. In Houben’s version of the incident, Schotte was arrested after failing to edit out a few sentences from a prisoner of war’s message to his folks at home. In an atmosphere of increasing paranoia and overlapping oversight by the Foreign Office, the Propaganda Ministry and eventually the SS, the Gestapo feared that the errant script might be a secret code to American forces.

“Isn’t it a fact,” Laughlin asked Houben, “that Miss Gillars broadcast those messages in the exact form in which they were written and thereby jeopardized her safety?”

When Houben replied in the affirmative, Judge Curran stepped in and asked the witness if it was the manager’s job to edit the prisoner messages and pronounce them safe for broadcast—as if the editor or supervisor alone faced the risk of arrest. Once again, Curran assisted the prosecution by blunting the impact of testimony favorable to the defense.
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Prisoner Parade

For the next several days, the prosecution focused on Midge’s interviews with Allied prisoners of war. Kelley played selections from
Christmas Bells of 1943, Easter Bells of 1944 and Survivors of the Invasion Front
, and then followed the audio with the testimony of the actual former prisoners featured in each broadcast. The first witness was a Canadian officer, Captain Harvey Crossthwaite. In the summer of 1944, he was a wounded prisoner at the Hospital de la Pitié in Paris. Crosthwaite recalled that the defendant arrived at his bedside in a red dress, spoke in the style of a showgirl, and claimed to be recording messages for the International Red Cross.

Prosecutor Kelley then called an American who lost a leg in the Normandy invasion. Gilbert Lee Hansford had been heavily sedated when Midge came to the hospital, but he clearly remembered that she claimed to work for the Red Cross. Another American, John Lynsky, hobbled up to the witness stand on two crutches. Crippled by injuries sustained at the hands of the Germans, Lynsky remembered that she wore “a little Red Cross pin.”
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With the Allies only a few miles from Paris, the witnesses made it clear to the court that it was easier for Midge to find willing interviewees as a Red Cross representative than a Berlin radio personality.

The parade of prisoners continued on for days. Each man told the same basic story, differing only in the small details. Then, a thirty-year-old ex-private with a slight Ukrainian accent took the stand. Michael Evanick, a former infantryman from New York City, stepped up and took the oath. With his wartime diary written in the Ukrainian language admitted into evidence, Evanick told his story about an unusual private meeting with Axis Sally. It was July 15, 1944 in the Chartres prisoner of war camp where Evanick first saw the woman he called the Berlin Babe: