Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany (40 page)
Read Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany Online
Authors: Richard Lucas
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Bisac Code 1: BIO022000, #Biography, #History
Nevertheless, Mildred eventually changed her mind and applied for parole with the encouragement and support of Father Kerrigan. With no employment prospects, she was denied parole in February 1960. In May 1960, she was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church and, two weeks later, received her first Holy Communion and Confirmation. Sister Mary Assumpta P.C.J. (Order of the Poor Child Jesus) was present and described the ceremonies as “rare, successive and beautiful.”
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Then Kerrigan actively enlisted sisters from the Our Lady of Bethlehem convent to help him develop a release plan for Axis Sally. Sister Mary Assumpta and Sister Mary Magdalen, P.C.J. visited Mildred in prison and offered her a job upon release “doing general work, including coaching.”
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With an offer of employment and the support of individuals whom she trusted in the Church, she reapplied for parole. The convent agreed to provide “room and board plus thirty dollars a month.” Mildred would teach music and other subjects to the girls in the convent school, but the offer was contingent on there being no reporters or photographers on the convent grounds when she arrived.
Warden Nina Kinsella was greatly concerned about Mildred’s life on parole. In a letter to the Director of the Bureau of Prisons, Kinsella expressed her concerns that unwanted publicity and government harassment would scuttle the release plan:
Mildred is now sixty years old and as the years go on she will have less and less opportunity to get employment. The plan suggested for her is an excellent one. In addition to being assured of board and room and a small allowance, she can get such pupils and she can keep any income thereby derived. Naturally, the school would not want publicity covering this assignment.
Miss Cottrill, Supervisor of Classification and Parole, has called to my attention that at the time Iva D’Aquino was released, the Immigration authorities placed a detainer against her which they claimed was under an old law which they had the right to apply. At that time, the Immigration Officer asked to review Mildred Sisk’s file and indicated that the Immigration authorities intended to place a warrant against her. This would be most unfortunate and would result in some publicity.
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On January 12, 1961, the Parole Board approved the release of Axis Sally to the Our Lady of Bethlehem Convent in Columbus, Ohio. Mildred was scheduled to be released on July 10, but Sister Mary Assumpta, who was traveling through the summer months, encouraged her to arrive after Labor Day. Once again, Edna Mae would be called on to aid Mildred and fulfill the promises she made so many years before. The Parole Board determined that “Mildred can go to the home of her sister in Ashtabula, Ohio for the summer months.”
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That summer would prove to be the final episode in the stormy relationship between two strong-willed but very different women.
CHAPTER 12
Penitent
“The great irony of her adult life was that she spent the first thirty years of it seeking publicity in the public eye—and then spent the last forty years trying to avoid it.”
—Robert Boyer
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JUNE 1961–JULY 1988
On a rainy Monday morning in July 1961, a group of twenty newsmen waited at daybreak to get their first glimpse of Axis Sally. Twelve years earlier, the 48-year-old convicted traitor with rouged lips and arrogant manner had walked into the women’s reformatory at Alderson, West Virginia. No photographs had emerged since that day, and the cameramen were eager to get a shot of her. A De Soto carried Edna Mae and her latest husband, Edwin Niemenen, up to the gate. Scheduled for release at 6 a.m., Axis Sally was running late. The newsmen huddled in the fog and rain for more than 25 minutes. Finally, at 6:26 a.m., a guard heard a car coming down the hill.
“Here she comes,” he called.
A black sedan with the words “Department of Justice, Bureau of Prisons” emblazoned on its doors pulled up to the far side of the entrance. Every bit the actress, Mildred Gillars gestured excitedly to her driver, Lt. Helen England. For over a minute, the crowd waited for her entrance. Edna Mae emerged from the automobile and hurriedly crossed under the gate. One of the three guards on duty tried to stop them, but let them through when another sentry recognized the family.
“It’s all right. It’s her people,” he said.
Impatiently, Edna Mae swung open the car door and Mildred burst out of the car into her arms.
She had aged dramatically in prison. “She did not show her 60 years and it was hard to tell if her hair was blond or gray,”
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one observer noted, perhaps trying to breathe some life into an image of mystery long faded. Others were not so kind:
To one reporter, she looked like an aging and forgotten actress who had been rediscovered for a moment and who enjoyed the attention she had been receiving. To another, she looked like the social leader of a small town who had called a press conference to announce winners in the garden club contest, and, after the reporters got there, learned that her husband had absconded with $20,000 of the firm’s money and his secretary.
If that was the case, she should have been satisfied. It was painful, but she pulled it off.
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Wearing a grandmotherly black hat and shoes, beige suit and dark coat, she hurried past the press. As the family walked toward the car in the drizzle, a reporter asked Mildred if she had anything to say.
“Well, after some 15 years in prison,” she responded testily, “what am I supposed to say?
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I don’t feel like making much of a statement this morning.”
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One reporter wanted to know where she would be working.
“I can’t tell you that,” she smiled evasively. Noting the tape recorder that one of the radio men carried, she suddenly became engaged, saying, “Oh, I see this is also being recorded.”
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Interrupting, Edna Mae pointed to her running car and Mildred cut off the interview. She slid into in the center seat as the press shouted questions after her.
“Where are you going?”
“We’re going north,” Mildred said.
“To Ashtabula…?”
“Yes. To Ashtabula,” she replied. “After 15 years, you don’t feel like having much to say.”
“Will you talk to us later?”
The car sped off.
Enjoying her first hours of freedom, it took a leisurely six hours for the DeSoto to travel the 110 miles to Charlestown, West Virginia. She savored the moment, telling waiting reporters, “I was drinking lots and lots of coffee. And believe me, if there had been flowers in the bottom of the cup, I’m sure I could have seen them. It’s mighty weak.”
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Asked about her plans for the future, she expected to “rest not more than six or seven weeks at the most,” and then leave Ashtabula for her new post in Columbus.
The following day, Mildred spoke to reporters. Dressed conservatively befitting her 60 years, her only jewelry was a handmade brooch and earrings from Alderson’s craft room. Holding a dog named Rajah and a duck name Cleo in the bright July sun, she spoke from Edna Mae’s yard. Fielding questions, she was unapologetic about her actions during the war.
“When I did the broadcasting, I thought I was doing the right thing. Would I do it again? Certainly, given the same knowledge and the same circumstances…”
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“After all, I was a professional broadcaster in Germany when the U.S. entered the war. It was my job. Besides I was very much in love with a German and hoped to marry him. At the time I felt I could love the United States and still serve the Berlin Broadcasting Corporation.”
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Yet she admitted that she would not have made the broadcasts if she had known at the beginning of the war what she now knew about the crimes of the Nazi state. Once more, she pointed to the long-forgotten Rome Axis Sally, Rita Louisa Zucca, as the source of so many of the scurrilous legends about her.
“It is a great pity that everything said by any woman on the radio in Europe was attributed to me.”
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She still believed that she was incapable of treason: “I certainly think it is strange that a person who signed an oath of allegiance to Germany could be convicted of treason. It is true no matter what the circumstances under which a person must sign an oath.”
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Was she bitter?
“I wouldn’t say exactly bitter. I’m just not the kind of person to be bitter. If I were, my bitterness at the injustice and perjury I have suffered would have destroyed me by now.”
Despite the excitement surrounding her release, her mind was still with the women she met at Alderson: “Instead of being concerned about me, I wish you newspapers would give some attention to the tremendous unused potentialities and talents of some of those women in the prison. Their loyalty is terrific and their sense of honor is something you would be lucky to find in a church.”
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The following Sunday, Edna Mae arranged for her neighbor, Mary Lou Sespico, to take Mildred to a Catholic Mass at a nearby church. After the service, she joined the Sespico family for dinner. The young woman likened her to “someone’s maiden aunt” who was “real straight, very neat… and well-mannered.” At dinner, she carried a small tin around to catch her cigarette ashes—a habit she developed in prison. She remembered Mildred warmly. “I really liked her. I wanted to get to know her better,” but time in Ashtabula was running out.
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A few weeks before leaving for Columbus, she rang up Sespico and donated some expensive black lace underwear to the Bishop’s clothing drive—items she clearly would not need within the confines of a convent.
After a month with the Niemenens, Mildred traveled to Columbus to take up her teaching position at Our Lady of Bethlehem Convent. It would be the final time that Edna Mae would see her sister. After all the years of her sibling standing by her, and all the whispers and ostracism she had endured for being Axis Sally’s kin, Mildred never maintained correspondence with Edna Mae and her family.
“That was the last time I saw her, when she went out that door, and that was that,” Edna Mae said in 1995.
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The Olentangy River Road School of the Sisters of the Poor Child Jesus had a convent school devoted to teaching high school subjects to girls with an interest in entering the Order. Accustomed to prison rules, Mildred quickly adjusted to the disciplined and rigorous lifestyle.
Shortly after beginning her employment in September 1961, she was interviewed by Associated Press reporter Mary McGarey about her conversion to Catholicism, her love of teaching, and her focus on the future. In the simple convent parlor, Mildred spoke somewhat ambivalently about her newfound freedom. Now 60 years of age, she clearly felt that her time behind Alderson’s gates and almost twenty years of probation amounted to a life sentence:
I’ve served 12 years, a life sentence for many. I’m free, but you’re not really free when you have to report to a parole officer regularly until 1979. I’ve paid my debt to society. [I’m] old and unattractive and no longer news…
She was opaque about the origins of her conversion to Catholicism; insisting that the reasons were “too personal” to reveal. She referred to the cataclysmic year of 1944 as the beginning of her spiritual rebirth:
I had thought about [conversion] as early as 1944. I was confirmed in 1960. I might have been raised a Catholic—it was in my family, I just collected my legacy a little late.
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Although she acknowledged the support and guidance of Father Thomas Kerrigan, Mildred gave thanks for her salvation to God alone, quoting St. Augustine: “You would not have found me if I had not been seeking you first.”
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Wary of questions that delved too deeply into her past, she was visibly animated and relaxed when discussing her happy days directing the Protestant and Catholic Choirs at Alderson.
“Just the idea of working with people appeals to me, in a convent or wherever,” she told McGarey.
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Sister Mary Assumpta asked the press to let Mildred teach “without further fanfare or publicity.” She explained the convent’s decision to accept Axis Sally to the local Catholic press:
Her background in languages, music and cultural art will be put to good use at the convent…. [Mildred] requested that she be afforded the opportunity to devote the remaining years of her life in the Lord’s service. We decided to take Miss Gillars because we felt it was the Christ-like thing to do.
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“Who Am I to Talk About Wars?”
Her moral and professional failures had been public ones. She was determined that her successes remain between herself, her friends and God. For several years, Axis Sally faded from public view. Her circle of friends was small, mostly nuns from the convent and occasionally a parent or two of the students entrusted to her care. Her days were filled with teaching, reading and eventually returning to the college education she had abandoned forty years before. She had indeed changed, as her 1965 probation report revealed. Perhaps she had mellowed and grown, perhaps her faith transformed her volatile personality into one dedicated to service and learning.