Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany (21 page)

Rita Zucca and her child were ushered into IV Corps Military Police Headquarters. “When I saw her coming through the door I said to myself, ‘What the hell is this, another rape case?’” an officer remembered. The MPs found her and her baby, now six months old, staying with her aunt and uncle in Turin. Wearing an American field jacket, blue print dress and sandals, Rita was loaded into a jeep with her child on her lap for the overnight drive to Rome. Although the
Stars and Stripes
military newspaper was forbidden to interview the prisoner, the paper described the feminine charms of this particular Axis Sally. One officer observed that she was “really stacked,” while the correspondent noted, “True, her left eye is inclined to wander—but that cooey, sexy voice really has something to back it up.” As the jeep pulled out for the long drive, the American soldiers gave her and her baby eight blankets to protect them against the night air.

Immediately, the American press and military announced in no uncertain terms that Rita Zucca was
the
Axis Sally, and emphasized that the sultry voice that greeted the doughboys on the beach at Anzio belonged to the cross-eyed mother of a newborn infant.
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Zucca was pictured in front of a large radio and a baby’s cradle in
Stars and Stripes
. Her picture graced
The New York Times
of June 14, 1945 with the heading “Reminder of Anzio.” Newspapers in the United States demolished the Axis Sally mystique by claiming that the actual woman was nothing like the fantasies of a million GIs. “Soft-Voiced ‘Sally from Berlin’ Found to Be Ugly Ex-N.Y. Girl” was a typical headline, with stories describing the young mother as “ugly and unattractive in person as her voice was appealing.”
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One
Stars and Stripes
writer called Zucca “cross-eyed, bow-legged and sallow-skinned.”

Nevertheless, Rita was more fortunate than Mildred Gillars would ever be. The Zucca family hired a New York lawyer, Max Spekle, on her behalf. Spekle traveled to Washington to investigate the evidence against her. The press was allowed to tout the successful arrest of the woman who had tormented and teased soldiers throughout the war, but it soon became clear to the Justice Department that Zucca could not be prosecuted for treason in an American court. When the FBI discovered documentation of her 1941 renunciation of citizenship, J. Edgar Hoover informed the Justice Department that a treason case was impossible. Only a month after Rita Zucca’s arrest, Hoover wrote to the Assistant Attorney General:

The US Government’s case against Zucca was closed. On September 30, 1945, Rita was tried and found guilty by an Italian court of collaboration. Based on the testimony of three American soldiers over two days, Rita Luisa Zucca was sentenced to four years and five months in an Italian jail. She would serve only nine months, after the Italian government declared a general amnesty for collaborators in 1946.

Although Mildred Gillars took no part in the Italian broadcasts and divulged no military intelligence over the air, she would shoulder the blame for both women. When an American soldier heard Axis Sally broadcast their supposedly secret location at Anzio, Como and a score of other places on the Italian peninsula, he likely heard Rita Zucca rather than Mildred Gillars. Mildred was remarkably prescient when she threatened resignation in 1944 because of Rita Zucca’s use of her moniker. The victorious Americans would not care which Axis Sally or Tokyo Rose actually made the most vicious or treasonous statements. The women who “played the Axis game” would have to pay for their crimes. It would prove to be uneven, inexact justice all around.

With one Axis Sally evading American law, the Justice Department was doubly determined to locate other employees of Reichsradio. The CIC dispatched Special Agent Hans Wintzen to Berlin to search for the woman who would replace Rita Zucca as the embodiment of Axis Sally in the minds of the American public. Wintzen knew that the shrewd, self-assured mother in the custody of the IV Army Corps was not the only female voice that FCC radio monitors at Silver Hill had intercepted night after night.

In August 1945, the search was on but the CIC had only one lead. Raymond Kurtz, a B-17 pilot who had been shot down and captured by the Germans recalled that he was told that the woman who had visited his prison camp was Midge of
Midge at the Mike
. Kurtz remembered that the woman used an alias: Barbara Mome.
²⁷²
A “Wanted” poster went up in all occupied sectors of Berlin.

On March 4, 1946, CIC received a tip that she had been seen in the British Sector. Wintzen had a plan: the fugitive had distributed her property among friends across the city. As a person without identification papers, she would have to purchase food through the black market. Barbara Mome was selling her property at various antique shops on consignment to obtain hard currency. Wintzen decided to keep an eye on those shops. Certain that she would eventually emerge from hiding to collect her money or reclaim the property, he believed it was only a matter of time before she would be caught.

After weeks of waiting and watching, Wintzen received a tip from a former neighbor that “Barbara” had left some belongings in a basement storeroom adjacent to her former apartment at 7 Bonnerstrasse. Agent Wintzen questioned the building superintendent and was told that the American had asked for her possessions to be stored away in a safe place when she left the apartment for the last time. Wintzen and the superintendent walked into the storeroom to find seven acetate records containing full programs featuring the voice of Axis Sally.
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The discovery, if admissible in court, would prove to be a treasure trove of evidence against her. The storeroom also contained an expired US passport—showing her real name—that had been in the possession of her Nazi Party block leader.

Wintzen interviewed her neighbors, friends and colleagues and asked about her “habits, behavior and other little peculiarities.” He reported:

The CIC compiled a list of addresses visited by Mildred since May 1945 and set up twenty-four-hour surveillance on those places. When agents were not available, German police were used to stake out the homes. CIC received tips that she had been seen at “different restaurants, beauty shops and other business establishments” in the Kurfurstendamm section of Berlin. The tips helped to narrow down the search to a small section of the city.

The investigation hit pay dirt when the agents found a small table that had belonged to Mildred in an antique shop hidden away on an isolated side street. The store owner gave the CIC the name of the friend who had sold the table to the shop. “Under intensive interrogation,” the final report said, “this person eventually admitted having sold the item for Gillars and after a long ‘coaxing’ by the investigators, also revealed Gillars’ present address.”
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After eleven desperate months on the run, Mildred had settled into a room rented out by a woman and her sister in the British Sector of Berlin. In the cramped conditions that existed after the capitulation, it was not uncommon for strangers to share rooms in single homes and apartments. On March 15, 1946, Mildred returned late in the evening and rang the doorbell. A German plainclothes detective paced outside. Ushered in by the landlady’s sister, she found a pale, shaking American soldier in the living room. He pointed a revolver directly at her.

Special Agent Robert Abeles, accompanied by the German policeman, announced, “Miss Gillars, you are under arrest.” Momentarily stunned, she reacted with a murmured “Oh…” and asked if she could take one possession with her—a photo of Max Otto Koischwitz.
²⁷⁶
The agent granted her request and Mildred Gillars went to prison—clutching a photograph of the man she called her “destiny.”

Her first night in jail was spent in British confinement. As she slept, another prisoner stole the picture of the dead Professor. Sleep was almost impossible as the lights were kept on all night in the cells. The following morning she was transported to the Wannsee Internment Camp outside Berlin where Hans Wintzen interrogated her for an hour. Another Justice Department lawyer, Victor C. Woerheide entered the room:

“Well, I have heard that you would have given yourself up if you had known that you would have received something to smoke.”

“Yes, Mr. Woerheide,” Mildred said, “that is more or less the truth.”

“Well, it was quite a long search and now we have you.”

“You see, I have no experience in this sort of thing,” she replied. “I would just like to know, is there such a thing as eating?”
²⁷⁷

Woerheide apologized and asked a soldier to bring in a hamburger. She had not eaten since her arrest and was famished. She recalled: “I remember digging my bicuspids into the hamburger and making the remark that it was the first meat I had tasted in three months.”
²⁷⁸

As she left her first interrogation, Mildred admiringly told the agents, “I’ll take my hat off to the U.S. investigators. They certainly knew a lot about me.”
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Reporters were ushered into the Interrogation Center to get their first look at the latest incarnation of Axis Sally.

“When I came to Germany in 1934,” she told the press, “I had never heard of Hitler. I still don’t know anything about politics—I am an artist.”

Asked for her reaction to the possibility of the death penalty, she was fatalistic and, as always, highly quotable. “I have always liked to travel, seeking new adventures, and I think death might be the most exciting adventure of all.”
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Sadly, she added, “It doesn’t matter. I have lost everything anyhow.”
²⁸¹

She told the press that her motive for broadcasting was “peace” and declared, “My conscience is clear, and I don’t have anything to hide.… Everything I did, I did of my own free will.”
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On her third day of captivity, a reporter from
Stars and Stripes
visited her cell to see the mythic figure in the flesh. Relishing the moment, the Army reporter taunted her, “Well, well, well, so you are Axis Sally. Well, I just would like to tell you, Sally, that we are all looking forward to your hanging and it is going to be some field day in Washington.”
²⁸³

Although the newspapers printed photos of Mildred playing cards with her guards, she was frequently tormented by those GIs seeking to give the “Berlin Bitch” a piece of their mind. She remembered, “From the very beginning, I had only heard of hanging and death, and that I would never need my things, and that I would never eat again.”
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“I never thought he would die…”

Emaciated and still weak from her days in hiding, Axis Sally trudged into a small interrogation room at CIC Headquarters in Berlin. It was April 2, 1946, and although she had given CIC a written statement, Samuel Ely and Helen McRae had more questions. Deprived of even military legal counsel, she answered each question openly—even supplying the names of her managers and supervisors at Radio Berlin. Ely and McRae asked about her background.

She did not know if her mother was alive or dead and told the two interrogators that her father died “a long time ago… we did not get along very well.”
²⁸⁵
The prisoner matter-of-factly explained her choice to remain in Germany: