Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany (32 page)

I saw her in the barracks. There was a German officers’ headquarters there, and that morning a German came there and called my name—called me from the group of prisoners sitting on the outside and took me for interrogation. I was told I was going to be interrogated by somebody else, so when I came in, there were 8 to 10 German officers and soldiers in the room, and they just told me to go into the next room.

When I opened the door, I hear that sweet voice—“Hello Michael.” So right away, I would know her, because I have been listening to her, through Africa, Sicily and it was very familiar to me. So she introduced herself to me. “I think you know who I am, I am Sally or whatever otherwise you fellows are calling me”—because we never call her Axis Sally but we have a name “Berlin Babe.” So she introduced herself by the name Sally and said, “You are going to know me better by that name.”

She told me to sit down, and pulls a chair over at the wall and I sit down, and there was a German army cot, and she sits there, lifted her leg, and really exposed herself and really, she did not have any undergarments on. She started to talk to me about New York, and places she used to work, and she sung in the Village there. And she said, “By the way, do you care for a drink?” and I say, “Well, I never refuse.” So she called in a fellow—she calls him “Professor” and he came in and she sent him for the cognac. He brought the cognac and he opened the bottle and handed it to her, and she made a move for him to walk out.

The bottle was opened and she said, “Sorry we haven’t any glasses, but we are going to drink in the American style.” And she said, “Well, you’re probably going to be afraid to take the first drink from the bottle,” and handed the bottle to me. And eventually she said, “It is good stuff. It is 60-year-old cognac.”

We talked and she gives me a cigarette, and she started talking to me again about New York and about the places there and said, “How would you like to say hello to your family back home?” And so on, [to] which I said, “I would like it.” She opens the door again, called and told the Professor to bring the microphone in…. I said, “I would like to say hello to the people back home,” and then she said after I’d finished with that, she said, “Michael, aren’t you feeling happy that you are a prisoner of war and don’t have to fight anymore?” And I said, “No, ma’am. I do not because I feel one hundred percent better when I am in the front lines, at least I am not hungry and starving for being hungry and I got whatever I needed.” So she got mad and just knocked the microphone down which fell toward the cot there.

She started all over talking and asked what did we [the prisoners] do [in the camp]? I said, “I sunbathe.” She asked if I would say the same thing and I said yes. She brought the mike and I said, “We are just sitting in the sun, burning ourselves to death, because we are hungry and are watching American planes come over and bomb every five minutes.”

So at that time, she threw the microphone down again, which was the last time I spoke into the mike.
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Would it not have been greater punishment, then, to have revoked the American citizenship of Axis Sally and consigned her forever to live—scorned and friendless—in the country to which she sold out? Like Philip Nolan in Edward Everett Hale’s “The Man without a Country,” Axis Sally might have been eternally forbidden to return to her native land; never again could she have visited her relatives, friends and former neighbors in Maine or Conneaut, Ohio.
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