Axis Sally Traditional Cache

Cache is located within St Josephs Cemetery. It is not on or near a grave so please be respectful of the area as you search. The cemetery is open from 7am to dusk (8pm in the summer, 6 pm in the winter) so please be mindful of the hours of operation. This is a regular sized container with room for trades and trackables.

Axis Sally. She was an American woman who made propaganda broadcasts for Radio Berlin in Nazi Germany. She was born Mildred Elizabeth Sisk in Portland, Maine. Her parents divorced and she assumed the name of her stepfather, becoming Mildred Gillars. She graduated from High School in Conneaut, Ohio and enrolled at Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, pursuing a degree in dramatic arts but did not graduate. She enrolled at Hunter College in New York becoming romantically involved with Max Otto Koischwitz a German born professor. Her stage career at a dead end, she traveled to Germany where she met up with Koischwitz who had renounced his US citizenship and become an official in the Nazi radio service in charge of propaganda. He convinced her to make broadcasts for Hitler while living together in Berlin.

Gillars' main programs from Berlin were: Home Sweet Home Hour, from December 24, 1942, until 1945,[6] a regular propaganda program the purpose of which was to make American forces in Europe feel homesick. A running theme of these broadcasts was the infidelity of soldiers' wives and sweethearts while the listeners were stationed in Europe and North Africa. Opening with the sound of a train whistle, Home Sweet Home attempted to exploit the fears of American soldiers about the home front. The broadcasts were designed to make the soldiers cast doubt on their mission, their leaders, and their prospects after the war.[7] Midge-at-the-Mike, broadcast from March to late fall 1943,[6] in which she played American songs interspersed with defeatist propaganda, anti-Semitic rhetoric and attacks on Franklin D. Roosevelt. G. I.’s Letter-box and Medical Reports 1944,[6] directed at the US home audience in which Gillars used information on wounded and captured US airmen to cause fear and worry in their families. After D-Day, June 6, 1944, US soldiers wounded and captured in France were also reported on. Gillars and Koischwitz worked for a time from Chartres and Paris for this purpose, visiting hospitals and interviewing POWs.[9] In 1943 they had toured POW camps in Germany, interviewing captured Americans and recording their messages for their families in the U.S. The interviews were then edited for broadcast as though the speakers were well-treated or sympathetic to the Nazi cause. Gillars made her most notorious broadcast on May 11, 1944, just prior to the D-Day invasion of Normandy, France, in a radio play written by Koischwitz, Vision Of Invasion. In this she played Evelyn, an Ohio mother, who dreams that her son had died a horrific death on a ship in the English Channel during an attempted invasion of Occupied Europe. Koischwitz died in August 1944 and Gillars' broadcasts became lackluster and repetitive without his creative energy. She remained in Berlin until the end of the war. Her last broadcast was on May 6, 1945, just two days before the German surrender.

After the defeat of Germany, Gillars was arrested and kept in detention for a year in Frankfort until it was decided she would face trial. Returned to the US, she was incarcerated in the Washington, D.C. District Jail and held without bond and charged with 10 counts of treason. The trial lasted for six hectic weeks. Finally the jury found her guilty of one count of treason and Mildred received a10 to 30 years sentence in prison, a $10,000 fine and would be eligible for parole after 10 years. Mildred Gillars, alias Axis Sally was transported to the Federal Women's Reformatory in Alderson, West Virginia. Becoming eligible for parole, she waived the right, preferring prison to life on the outside facing ridicule as a traitor. Two years later, she applied for parole and it was granted. She departed Alderson prison at the age of 60.