Following McCarthy to the witness stand were veterans John T. Lynskey of Pittsburgh and Paul G. Kestel of Detroit. Both testified that when Gillars visited them in a Paris hospital she identified herself as a Red Cross worker.

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Defense counsel Laughlin argued that treason must be something more than the spoken word: ‘Things have come to a pretty pass if a person cannot make an anti-Semitic speech without being charged with treason. Being against President Roosevelt could not be treason. There are two schools of thought about President Roosevelt. One holds he was a patriot and martyr. The other holds that he was the greatest rogue in all history, the greatest fraud, and the greatest impostor that ever lived.’

Laughlin also tried to point out to the court the great influence that Max Otto Koischwitz had on Gillars. Koischwitz was a former professor at Hunter College in New York who became romantically involved with Gillars when she was one of his students. She had attended Hunter briefly while trying to pursue a stage career before finally abandoning the effort and going back to Europe in 1933. German-born Koischwitz eventually returned to Germany, renounced his U.S. citizenship, and became an official in the Nazi radio service in charge of propaganda broadcasts. He thus was Mildred’s superior.

In her trips to the witness stand, Gillars was usually tearful. She said Koischwitz’s Svengali-like influence over her had led her to make broadcasts for Hitler. She and the professor had lived together in Berlin, she said, and she burst into tears when informed that he had died.

In his final summation before the jury, prosecutor Kelley told them Gillars was a traitor who broadcast rotten propaganda for wartime Germany and got a sadistic joy out of it, especially those broadcasts in which she described in harrowing detail the agonies of wounded American soldiers before they died. ‘She sold out to them,’ he said. ‘She thought she was on the winning side, and all she cared about was her own selfish fame.’

The trial ended on March 8, 1949, after six hectic weeks. The next day Judge Curran put the case in the hands of the jury of seven men and five women. After deliberating for 101ž2 hours, they were unable to reach a verdict and were sequestered in a hotel for the night. They met again the next morning, and after 17 hours of further deliberation they acquitted her of seven of the eight counts pressed by the government in its original 10-count indictment. However, they found her guilty on count No. 10, involving the Nazi broadcast of the play Vision of Invasion.

On Saturday, March 26, Judge Curran pronounced sentence: 10 to 30 years in prison, a $10,000 fine, eligible for parole after 10 years. Mildred Gillars, alias Axis Sally, was then transported to the Federal Women’s Reformatory in Alderson, W.Va. When she became eligible for parole in 1959, she waived the right, apparently preferring prison to ridicule as a traitor on the outside. Two years later, when she applied for parole, it was granted. At 6:25 a.m. on June 10, 1961, she walked out the gate of Alderson prison a free woman.

Gillars taught for a while in a Roman Catholic school for girls in Columbus, Ohio, and then returned to her old college, Ohio Wesleyan. She received a bachelor’s degree in speech in 1973. Gillars died June 25, 1988, at the age of 87.

This article was written by Dale P. Harper and originally published in the November 1995 issue of World War II.

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