
Mildred Elizabeth Gillars (29 November 1900-25 June 1988) was an American broadcaster employed by Nazi Germany to disseminate Axis propaganda during World War II, for which she was nicknamed "Axis Sally" by American soldiers.
Biography[]
Mildred Gillars was born in Portland, Maine in 1900, and she was raised in Bellevue, Ohio and Conneaut. She moved to Greenwich Village, New York City in 1918 and failed to become a vaudeville actress, after which she became a model and moved to France and later to Dresden, Germany in 1934. Gillars became an English teacher in Berlin, and, at the start of World War II, she became an announcer for German state radio. In 1941, she chose to remain in Germany with her fiancee rather than leave Germany as the State Department advised. While her husband was killed on the Eastern Front, she stayed in Germany, started a relationship with propagandist Mxa Otto Koischwitz, and broadcasted the Home Sweet Home show, which expressed anti-Semitic sentiments, questioned the fidelity of soldiers' wives and sweethearts during their service, and gave information on wounded and captured US airmen to their families at home to cause fear and worry in their families. Koischwitz died in 1944, after which the quality of Gillars' broadcasts declined. Her last broadcast was on 6 May 1945, two days before Germany's surrender. She was arrested on 15 March 1946 and was charged with ten counts of treason in 1948. In 1949, she was sentenced to 10 to 30 years in prison, and she was released in 1961. After converting to Catholicism in prison, she moved to a convent in Columbus, Ohio and became a language teacher at a Catholic school, and she died in 1988.