After the defeat of Germany, Gillars was not immediately apprehended but blended into the throngs of displaced persons in occupied Germany seeking assistance from the Western Allies in obtaining food, shelter, medical treatment, location of relatives and friends, and possible employment. She spent three weeks in an American hospital in 1946, then was taken to an internment camp in Wansel, Germany. About Christmastime 1946, when she was granted amnesty and released, she obtained a pass to live in the French Zone of Berlin. Later, when she traveled to Frankfurt to get her pass renewed, she was arrested by the Army and kept there for more than a year. At the end of that detention she was flown to the United States and incarcerated in the Washington, D.C., District Jail on August 21, 1948. She was held there without bond. Later she was charged with 10 counts of treason (eventually reduced to eight to speed up the trial) by a federal grand jury. Her trial began on January 25, 1949, in the district court of the nation’s capital, with Judge Edward M. Curran presiding. The chief prosecutor was John M. Kelley, Jr., and Gillars’ attorney was James J. Laughlin.

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Prosecutor Kelley pressed home some important points right from the start. First was the fact that after being hired by Radio Berlin she had signed an oath of allegiance to Hitler’s Germany. He also put witnesses on the stand who testified that Gillars had posed as a worker for the International Red Cross and persuaded captured American soldiers to record messages to their families and relatives in order to garner a large listening audience in the United States. By the time she finished weaving propaganda into the broadcasts, the POWs’ messages to their loved ones were not exactly messages of comfort.

Gilbert Lee Hansford of Cincinnati, a veteran of the 29th Infantry Division who lost a leg in the Normandy invasion, said Gillars visited him in a Paris hospital in August 1944. ‘She walked up with two German officers,’ Hansford said, and she stated that she was working with the International Red Cross. She then told a group of wounded captives, ‘Hello boys, I’m here to make recordings so your folks will know you are still alive.’

Hansford said he and others talked into a microphone, recording messages for broadcast to their families at home. A courtroom playback of the messages as picked up by the American monitoring stations showed that Nazi propaganda had been inserted between the GIs’ messages. One insertion by Gillars said, ‘It’s a disgrace to the American public that they don’t wake to the fact of what Franklin D. Roosevelt is doing to the Gentiles of your country and my country.’

On February 10, 1949, an American paratrooper from New York, 36-year-old Michael Evanick, told the jury he was captured on D-Day, June 6, 1944, after parachuting behind German lines in Normandy. Pointing his finger, he identified Gillars as the woman who interviewed him in a German prisoner-of-war camp near Paris on July 15, 1944.

‘I’d been listening to her broadcasts through Africa, Sicily, and Italy, and I told her I recognized her voice,’ Evanick remembered. ‘She said, ‘I guess you know me as Axis Sally,’ and I told her we had a name for her.’ The witness said Gillars gave him a drink of cognac and a cigarette and told him to make himself comfortable in a chair. After a few drinks, he said, she sent for a microphone and began the interview, asking him if he did not feel good to be out of the fighting.

‘No ma’am,’ Evanick said he replied. ‘I feel 100 percent better in the front lines where I get enough to eat.’ At that, he said, Gillars angrily knocked the microphone over, but regained her composure and offered him another drink.

On February 19, Eugene McCarthy, a 25-year-old ex-GI from Chicago, was called to answer a single question. Defense attorney Laughlin asked him if Gillars had posed as a Red Cross worker when she came to make recorded interviews with American POWs at Stalag 2-B in Germany. The soldier stated that she did not. Then in a dramatic outburst, shouting over the defense counsel’s angry protest, the witness told the jury: ‘She threatened us as she left–that American citizen, that woman right there. She told us we were the most ungrateful Americans she had ever met and that we would regret this.’

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