Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany
Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany book cover

Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany

Hardcover – October 22, 2010

by
Price
$22.20
Format
Hardcover
Pages
288
Publisher
Casemate Pub
Publication Date
ISBN-13
978-1935149439
Dimensions
6.25 x 1.25 x 9.25 inches
Weight
1.55 pounds

Description

From Publishers Weekly Shortwave radio enthusiast Lucas carefully chronicles the life of Mildred Gillars, known to American GIs during WWII as "Axis Sally," in this first full-length biography of the infamous radio propagandist for Nazi Germany. With the aid of declassified federal documents and a glut of newspaper coverage after the war, Lucas follows Gillars from her Ohio upbringing to a failed New York acting career to her transformation into the Axis Sally under the tutelage of her married German lover. Known for a voice that oozed "like honey out of a big wooden spoon," Gillars was mythologized by GIs as the personification of Nazi propaganda. In her prolific broadcasts she interviewed POWs, taunted American soldiers, and revealed secret locations of American troops. She was ultimately tried for treason, served a 12-year prison sentence, and spent the rest of her long life on parole. In this fascinating, well-researched account, Lucas attempts to isolate the people and events that may have led Gillars to assume her moniker, telling a story "of poverty and hunger." Gillars was "a woman who, like the Führer she served, wished to accomplish great artistic feats but instead wandered into history and infamy." Photos. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. “Lucas is a very thorough researcher but also an excellent storyteller. His book provides not just details of Gillar’s life, but also the period details and contemporaneous events that put those details into perspective…Lucas’ blend of excellent research, period detail and well crafter narrative answers the questions of how an American girl put herself on the wrong side of history.” America in WWII “…definitive…a sorry story, and an essential one for those interested in the history of the war.” Commericial Dispatch “…a fascinating look at the life and trials of Mildred Gillars.” Imagination Café Blog “…examines one of the most infamous characters of the Second World War… The human drama which is history is filled with tragic contingencies or "what ifs."” Iron Mountain Daily News “…provides the first full length biography of Gillars…raise(s) some important questions…” Jerusalem Post “…the first full-length biography of Mildred Gillars, and it reveals the mostly untold story of the unfilled Broadway showgirl who found international fame as the notorious mouthpiece of the Third Reich in broadcasts aimed at millions of GIs.” King Features Syndicate “…reveals the mostly untold story of the unfulfilled Broadway showgirl who found international fame as the notorious mouthpiece of the Third Reich in broadcasts aimed at millions of GIs.” Payson Roundup “…fascinating, well-researched account” Publisher’s Weekly “…the first fully documented biography of the notorious World War II broadcaster…” Senior Beacon “…well-researched…” The Advocate Online “Arguably one of the more odious civilian figures to emerge from World War II was an American woman who broadcast radio propaganda aimed at U.S. troops. . . . What created the monster named Axis Sally? Mr. Lucas makes much of the deprivations suffered by a failed actress, and her frantic quest for fame.” Washington Times “…a fascinating story of a woman who was so focused on herself and her show business dreams that she was easily convinced to broadcast and work at odds with her own country.” Windy City Times With the advent of film and radio, propagandists discovered a whole new world in which to disseminate information, accurate or not, preying on the psyches of enemy soldiers. . . . Whether she was naïve or just an attention-starved actress, Mildred Gillars will always be remembered as the infamous 'Axis Sally.' She began to believe the Nazi propaganda she was spewing over the radio and, as the author states, paid a heavy price for that delusion.'" WWII History ”For those of you interested in World War II history, there’s a fascinating biography available. It’s Axis Sally by Richard Lucas. The first half of the book follows her unusual childhood, her failed struggles to build a career in theatre in New York, and her career in Germany before and during the war. The second half chronicles her arrest, eventual trial for treason and her years in prison. Many of her actual broadcasts are reprinted, and the entire book makes interesting if a bit nauseating reading.” Connie Meng, Canton Public Library “...an excellent biography of a woman who, driven by anti-Semitism and ambition, sold out her country.” Ottawa Citizen “The author did a great deal of research and did it well…The media still can do a great job of making and breaking anyone they want to go after. It makes you wonder how Axis Sally would do today spreading her stories through the media.” Feathered Quill Book Review “…an excellent biography of a woman who, driven by anti-Semitism, sold out her country.” Esprit de Corps Volume 19 Issue 3 “It’s subject is fascinating and has been researched well…an intriguing story…" Lake Chelan Mirror “…thoroughly researched…unearths some long forgotten aspects of the now mythic Sally…” Military Review Richard Lucas is a graduate of Hamilton College, Clinton, NY and received a Masters degree in Political Science at Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY. An avid amateur radio enthusiast since the 1970s, he became fascinated with the radio medium as a tool of persuasion and propaganda. He has written articles for World War II magazine. Axis Sally The American Voice of Nazi Germany is his first book, published by Casemate Publishing of Havertown, PA.Richard Lucas lives in Short Hills, New Jersey with his wife, Sachi, and two sons, Jordan and Taylor. 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Features & Highlights

  • One of the most notorious Americans of the twentieth century was a failed Broadway actress turned radio announcer named Mildred Gillars (1900–1988), better known to American GIs as “Axis Sally.” Despite the richness of her life story, there has never been a full-length biography of the ambitious, star-struck Ohio girl who evolved into a reviled disseminator of Nazi propaganda.At the outbreak of war in September 1939, Mildred had been living in Germany for five years. Hoping to marry, she chose to remain in the Nazi-run state even as the last Americans departed for home. In 1940, she was hired by the German overseas radio, where she evolved from a simple disc jockey and announcer to a master propagandist. Under the tutelage of her married lover, Max Otto Koischwitz, Gillars became the personification of Nazi propaganda to the American GI.Spicing her broadcasts with music, Mildred used her soothing voice to taunt Allied troops about the supposed infidelities of their wives and girlfriends back home, as well as the horrible deaths they were likely to meet on the battlefield. Supported by German military intelligence, she was able to convey personal greetings to individual US units, creating an eerie foreboding among troops who realized the Germans knew who and where they were.After broadcasting for Berlin up to the very end of the war, Gillars tried but failed to pose as a refugee, but was captured by US authorities. Her 1949 trial for treason captured the attention and raw emotion of a nation fresh from the horrors of the Second World War. Gillars’s twelve-year imprisonment and life on parole, including a stay in a convent, is a remarkable story of a woman who attempts to rebuild her life in the country she betrayed.Written by Richard Lucas, a freelance writer and lifelong shortwave radio enthusiast, Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany is the first thoroughly documented look at this mythologized figure of World War II.
  • Table of Contents
  • PrefaceAcknowledgmentsPrologue 1. An Unwanted Child2. In Front Of The Footlights3. Expatriate4. Wolves At The Door5. Smiling Through6. Did You Raise Your Sons To Be Murderers?7. Survivors Of The Invasion Front8. Alone9. The Stage Is Set10. Destiny11. Convicted12. PenitentEpilogueAppendicesNotesBibliographyIndex

Customer Reviews

Rating Breakdown

★★★★★
30%
(73)
★★★★
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(48)
★★★
15%
(36)
★★
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★
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(68)

Most Helpful Reviews

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A pathetic life...

Richard Lucas has written a biography of Mildred Gillars, an American woman, who was known as "Axis Sally", a nick-name she acquired from her broadcast days in Berlin during WW2. I closed the book feeling sorry for this pathetic woman, who searched all her life for fame, and instead found infamy.

Gillars, born of American-Canadian parentage, was a pretty woman with delusions of grandeur about her looks and her acting ability. She grew up nursing the fierce desire to act on the stage or in the movies. Unfortunately, her talent and personality did not allow her to achieve what she wanted. Dropping out of college in Ohio in the early 1920's, she headed for New York, looking for a lucky break. Instead, she got some journeymen roles and toured on road company shows. She stayed on the fringes of show business for the 1920's, and falling in love with a British Jewish man, went to Morocco with him. Eventually, in the early 1930's, she found herself jobless in Berlin. Just entering the Nazi-era, Gillars found work, again on the fringes of Berlin show-business. Falling in love again - and again unluckily - she stayed in Germany during the start of the war in 1939, through the American entry in December, 1941.

To support herself as an enemy-national, she went to work for the radio propaganda department. Putting her limited talents to work, broadcasting in English to the American home front and the overseas American troops, she became known as "Axis Sally". Actually, there was another "Axis Sally" - this one broadcasting from occupied Italy - just as there were several women broadcasting as "Tokyo Rose". After her mentor, a German-American professor from Hunter College in NYC, died, Gillars survived the end of the war and was eventually captured by American forces and shipped home to stand trial. She was convicted, spent 12 years at Alderson Women's prison in West Virginia, and lived her last years in well-deserved obscurity.

Lucas has produced a workman-like bio of Gillars. Note to the author - or the editor - "step-sister" and "half-sister" are NOT the same thing! Lucas has the irritating habit of sometimes referring to Gillars' half-sister as her step-sister. Not that this makes a huge difference in the greater scheme of things, but errors like that, as well as some spelling and grammatical errors in the text, make it a little hard to take seriously a book of non-fiction. But, other than those small errors, the book is quite readable and enjoyable.
38 people found this helpful
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Star-Struck American on the Nazi Airwaves

You might know of Tokyo Rose, the female voice broadcasting to the Pacific to dishearten and entertain our troops approaching Japan in World War II. For some reason, less famous is her counterpart in Berlin, and chances are you never heard of Mildred Gillars. She identified herself on the air as "Midge," but the GIs who were her target audience had various nicknames for her, like Berlin Bitch, Berlin Babe, or Olga. The most famous of her nicknames is in the title of _Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany_ (Casemate) by Richard Lucas. It's a sad story not just of misplaced political views and stupid anti-Semitism, but of a striving woman with a little bit of talent who could not make it big except through the doors that the Third Reich, mostly by chance, opened for her. Lucas's book is definitive; Gillars did not leave a memoir or diary, but she did leave recordings and transcripts of her work, and the research into these and other wartime and postwar documents seems to have been exhaustive.

Gillars, born in 1900, quit her college theatrical studies so she could get on the stage. She worked hard at menial jobs during the day and rehearsals at night. She had one-night-stands in theaters, and joined a stock company, but she yearned for bigger roles. They never came. She fell in with a dashing Briton (who happened to be Jewish) and followed him to Algiers where the relationship cooled. She went to Europe, and went to Berlin in 1934, and lucked into a job reviewing German movies for _Variety_. The German propaganda machine had a niche to fill. A memo said that German radio needed "speakers who have a command of English with an American accent" because Americans were put off by British accents. Gillars, perhaps because of her role in praising German cinema, came to the attention of German State Radio. She was initially a shift announcer, calling the tunes coming up and identifying the station. Eventually she became a radio star, the highest-paid personality in the Overseas Service. To get along, she increased the political nature of her broadcasts, which consisted of blasting Roosevelt and international Jewry. "I love America," she said into the mike one time, "but I do not love Roosevelt and all of his `kike' boyfriends who have thrown us into this awful turmoil." When the Soviets broke into Berlin and all German forces surrendered, Gillars and all non-German commentators for Reichsradio became fugitives. She started a hardscrabble existence on the run for eleven months. Captured, she was returned to Washington to be tried for treason. Her trial in 1949 got much attention from a country that was more in fear of communism than in a one-time Nazi propagandist. She seemed to enjoy the attention, and was ready to pose for the cameras. Veterans groups especially wanted her severely punished, and there was a range of charges against her. It turns out that she was simply convicted of acting in a radio play that she had no hand in writing. She served twelve years in prison, paroled in 1961. She spent the remaining seventeen years of her life trying to avoid the attention she had so earnestly courted at the beginning. She converted to Catholicism and spent her last years teaching French and German in a Catholic academy, dying in 1988.

Along the way, Lucas profiles the careers of Tokyo Rose, Lord Haw Haw, and the Italian broadcaster who was _also_ known as Axis Sally (Gillars didn't like this). Lucas's thorough biography does not exculpate Gillars from the wrong that Axis Sally did, but explains what might be a story incredible in fiction, about how a down-on-her-luck stage-struck middle-class woman got caught up in the Nazi machine just because she wanted to be a star. Oh, and wanted to stick it to the Jews and those fighting at their behest. She accepted the Nazi world view, but it was clear by her trial that she was deluding herself that she was no propagandist and had done nothing against her country. These delusions along with those about her lovers and her artistry caught up with her eventually. It's a sorry story, and an essential one for those interested in the history of the war.
24 people found this helpful
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Capacity for self-deceit is apparently unbounded: the story of Axis Sally

My father fought in WWII, so I had a natural antipathy towards our anti-hero protagonist here, but after learning of this story on NPR, and hearing the author, on getting the book, found a sympathetic but not excusing portrait of one of the most infamous women of the 20th century.

Mildred "Midge" Gillars -- aka Axis Sally -- seeks love, marriage, security, and the limelight in Germany and loses all of that in the ravages of war. She is brought back to the US, tried, sentenced, and imprisoned, and so is brought even lower, yet again. But then, at her nadir, begins something of a comeback story, but this time much quieter, and out of the limelight. In the federal pen, she is converted to Catholicism, and serves out her time helping others. Her last days are spent teaching in a Columbus, Ohio convent before she takes up her final residence, an unmarked grave in the Lockborne, Ohio countryside.

Why read this book? It is a fascinating study of the capacity of the human to deceive oneself. Another: We learn more from the comedown story than the comeback (we have published several comeback titles and one on comedowns), but the former is much less popular. Well-researched, well-written.
3 people found this helpful
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Excellent biography

Under the gun, Axis Sally, aka Mildred Gillars, used the most potent media of the day (radio) to portray Nazi Germany in a positive light. Her broadcasts, directed to Allied troops, were intended to demoralize and weaken their resolve to destroy the Third Reich. Her efforts were in vain but you must read the book to learn her ultimate fate.

This is an unbiased look at Mildred Gillar's life and, by itself, is somewhat disconcerting. You want to hate Mildred for what she did but nothing is ever so simple... While Mildred's broadcasts were unquestionably propaganda it may be argued that they were done under duress. The book doesn't favor either side of the discussion but reports the facts as they are. You can decide how you feel.
I won't spoil the story by revealing the ending but I will say that it well described the Goebbels-directed media role during WWII. As to Axis Sally, you need to read the book to find out about what happens to her. I promise you, it's worth the time.
2 people found this helpful
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EXCITING! COULD BE A MOVIE!!!

Excellent story! I think nowadays it is a hidden story but at the time of WWII it was a story all America knew. The troops listened to her as they fought across Europe or America followed her trial for treason through the press. I guess you could say it was an OJ trial before OJ. Even though this story is about WWII it could be from today. It tells the story of how citizens turn against our country. A mix of circumstances, opportunity, stress, brainwashing and money turned her. I think most would hate her. Love her or hate her you will enjoy this story. It seems like a screen play.

This book is a real page turner. It is written about the famous WWII traitor Mildred Gillars. Mildred was an America who was the voice of the famous WWII Axis Sally. She was the voice of Nazi Germany for millions of Allied soldiers. The show was a touch of home via music told to them by a sexy sounding woman interlaced with Nazi propaganda. Mildred would do a mix of things to help the Nazi cause and try to down play American troop morale.

The research is something to be believed too. This guy found records from the 20s on her. She followed Margret to her death in 88, way after she fell from the public eye. The book tells the reader who Mildred is. It gives you her history before the war and the trial afterwards. Those chapters were really good. It puts you in the courtroom. I do wish we would have gotten more of her life there.

There is something in this book for everyone. It is a very interesting story. I think her story would make a good movie someday too.
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Four Stars

Interesting and reasonable well written biography.
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Gripping story of a sad, pathetic life

I heard an interview with the author of this book on NPR, and was intrigued enough to get it from the library. I'd never heard the name "Mildred Gillars" before, or "Axis Sally" (though I do remember hearing about "Tokyo Rose" in high school history class, many years ago). What can you say about a woman who on the one hand wasn't bright enough to leave Germany before the US entered the war, but was savvy enough to sell her American accent to Reichradio? I think there's no question she was a traitor, and while she didn't hang for it, she did spend years in jail for it throughout the 1950s. I thought it was interesting (and very well written) how, ultimately, she shunned publicity and found a new life with the Roman Catholic Church--and yet, in the few remembrances we have of people who knew her in later life and asked her about her time in Germany during the war, she remained unrepentant for her actions. It's an odd, sad story of a sad, pathetic woman.
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One of the Axis Sallies

"Axis Sally" was the name the US military gave to Mildred Gillars, (nee Sisk) one of the American women who broadcast for the Nazis during the second world war. (The other so-called Axis Sally was a naturalized Italian American woman, Rita Louisa Zucca, who is not considered here.) Having grown up in the USA with a major case of being stage-struck, Mildred dropped out of college and moved to France to study. She was a failure at home; perhaps being abroad would provide the salve her ego needed. Before the war she was a film critic in Berlin; during Nazi times she was a radio announcer. If she was aware of the terrible fate that awaited her Jewish neighbors, she never made reference to it. After the war she was tried in an American court and sentenced to up to 30 years for acting in a radio play she neither wrote nor produced. The rest of the charges against her were dropped. After twelve years she was released to to a convent where she was to teach music and other subjects to the pupils. Some years later she was told that she was no longer a parolee. She eventually died of cancer.

As a young woman Mildred was difficult, arrogant, rude but by the time she became part of the convent life she was described as "a sweet little old lady." The book is interesting as it traces the growth and redemption of a misguided young woman and one inside view of life under the Nazis.

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