Mildred Gillars, also known as Axis Sally, was an American broadcaster who worked for the Nazis during WWII. She used her American accent and knowledge of American culture to demoralize American soldiers. Gillars was convicted of treason in 1948 and remained in prison until 1961. She died in 1988.
Axis Sally was a radio broadcaster who worked for the Nazis during World War II. As an American citizen, she used her familiar accent and her knowledge of American music and culture to attempt to demoralize American soldiers serving in Europe, by reading from prepared scripts generated by Nazi propagandists. Numerous Axis Sally broadcasts can be heard on archive websites, for those interested in getting a taste of what her broadcasts were like.
While we know her as Axis Sally, this woman’s name was actually Mildred Gillars, and she was born Mildred Sisk in the US state of Maine in 1900. Gillars studied music and was interested in becoming an actress. In the mid-1930s she moved to Europe, eventually ending up in Berlin, where she studied music and taught English. When Radio Berlin offered Gillars a job, she took her, working as a broadcaster until the fall of Berlin in 1945.
During the broadcast, Gillars referred to herself as “Midge at the Mic”. The nickname “Axis Sally” was bestowed upon her by American troops, many of whom resented her Gillars for working for the Nazis while her American comrades were trying to fight them. Axis Sally loved to include information about missing, wounded, and captured soldiers in her broadcasts, often teasing listeners with misleading and discouraging information. She was also fond of making suggestive comments about the loyalty of wives and girlfriends back home, suggesting that while the soldiers were fighting the war in Europe, their loved ones entertained themselves with 4-F, people who had failed the physical tests necessary for enlistment.
The most infamous broadcast made by Axis Sally occurred just before D-Day, when she recorded the “Vision of the Invasion,” strongly suggesting that any land invasion of Europe would be unsuccessful, and playing the “D” in the D-Day with an alliterative nursery rhyme about how it stood for “misfortune, disaster, death, defeat” and so on. Fortunately for most of Europe, Allied troops did not heed her warnings, and the Normandy invasion ultimately proved a major success of Allied efforts in World War II.
In 1948, Axis Sally was deported to the United States, where she faced trial for treason. Her lawyers tried to argue that, since she had not written her broadcasts, she had not fully colluded with the Nazis. They also argued that she had been coerced into making her famous broadcasts of her, leading the jury to convict her on only one of the 10 counts she faced. She remained in prison until 1961 and, upon her release, became a music teacher in Ohio.
Axis Sally died in 1988.
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