Mildred Gillars, the Berlin Axis Sally, attracts a new audience as she arrives in the United States in 1948 to face charges. (National Archives)

'Well, kids, you know I'd like to say to you, "Pack up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag," but I know that that little old kit bag is much too small to hold all the trouble you kids have got.' —Axis Sally

From the deserts of North Africa to the Normandy beaches, GIs listened to the sensual voice of an American woman broadcasting over the radio for Nazi Germany. The voice, alternately seductive and condemning, wondered aloud if their wives and girlfriends were "running around" with the 4-Fs back home, and gently pointed out the benefits of surrender. As the men tried to imagine the mysterious beauty behind the microphone, the swing music she played kept them tuning in. She cultivated a persona of worldly allure, ready to welcome the boys and understand their troubles.

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The reality behind the voice was less glamorous. Two American women competed for the soldiers' fantasies: Mildred Gillars, a middle-aged former showgirl from Ohio, broadcast from Berlin; the other, a cross-eyed 30-year-old New Yorker with a honeyed voice named Rita Zucca, broadcast from Rome. One was the willing mouthpiece of her mentor and lover, while the other collaborated with the Nazis for financial gain. But both women became enmeshed in the collective memory of American soldiers and sailors as one indelible figure: Axis Sally.

They, like the women who broadcast for Japan under the name Tokyo Rose in the Pacific theater, entertained their audience despite ham-handed attempts to break the morale of Allied soldiers. As Air Corps corporal Edward Van Dyne said of Axis Sally in 1944, "Doctor Goebbels no doubt believes that Sally is rapidly undermining the morale of the American doughboy. I think the effect is directly opposite. We get an enormous bang out of her. We love her."

And indeed, both Sallys became women who were wanted and pursued by the end of the war, but in a way that ultimately had nothing to do with desire—and everything to do with treason.

The Germans' use of foreign nationals in radio broadcasting began early in the war with the hiring of William Joyce, better known as Lord Haw Haw. Joyce, an American-born Irish fascist, was a protégé of Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists. He fled to the Reich on August 26, 1939, narrowly escaping arrest in Britain, and the German Propaganda Ministry hired him to write anonymous commentaries on British foreign policy and politics. At the height of his influence, in 1940, Joyce had an estimated 6 million regular and 18 million occasional listeners in the United Kingdom alone.

Lord Haw Haw's success as a broadcaster was aided immeasurably by the lack of forthright reporting at the BBC, which featured entertainment programming—largely organ music—and severely censored news broadcasts. The BBC's disadvantage was compounded as Holland, Luxembourg, Denmark, Belgium, and Norway fell in the spring of 1940, and the Germans appropriated Europe's most popular and powerful commercial stations. Combined with the huge 100-kilowatt transmitters in the Berlin suburb of Zeesen, the Reichsrundfunk, or Reich Radio, broadcast worldwide 24 hours a day in 12 languages.

The Propaganda Ministry and the German Foreign Office hoped to extend Reich Radio's European success to North America, but needed broadcasters who could communicate with American listeners in terms they could understand. At the outset of the war, American expatriates in Berlin were few and far between. Most had returned home in the face of hostilities, but there were some willing candidates. One of the first was Frederick W. Kaltenbach, an Iowa-born high school teacher fired from his job in 1935 for establishing a student organization based on the Hitler Youth. The Germans dubbed him Lord Hee Haw for his folksy style, and cast him as the American equivalent of William Joyce. Kaltenbach and Max Otto Koischwitz—a naturalized American citizen and former professor who would play a defining role in the creation of Axis Sally—dominated Berlin's broadcasts to America in those early years of the war.

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