A graduate of Hunter College in New York, Gillars went to France to study music in 1929 after failing as an actress. By 1934 she was in Germany, where she fell for former Hunter professor Max Otto Koischewitz.
Koischewitz became Radio Berlin's Program Director, and GIllars became his star propaganda broadcaster. Typically, she did a DJ program -- breaking up the music with anti-semetic raps. "Damn Roosevelt! Damn Churchill!", went one of her tirades. "Damn all Jews who made this war possible. I love America, but I do not love Roosevelt and all his kike boyfriends."
"Axis Sally" also liked to air messages from American POWs. Telling the POWs she visited that she was a Red Cross representative, she enticed them to send happy messages to suggest that living under the Nazis, even in POW camps,was a good thing. Once on the air, she would intercut POWs messages with propaganda, despite having promised the prisoners not to do so.
Despite all her other antics, "Axis Sally" was convicted on the basis of just one broadcast, a radio drama called "Vision of Invasion" that - on the eve of D-Day - sought to scare GI's out of invading occupied Europe. In the play, the mother of an Ohio soldier sees her son in a dream. He tells her that he's already dead, his ship having been destroyed mid-invasion by Germans. GI's can be heard sobbing and shrieking in the background, and the effect of the broadcast is said to have been chilling.
Gillars tried several tactics in court, but ultimately claimed, unsuccessfully, that her love for Koischewitz had motivated her. Her lawyers argued that Koischewitz had a Svengali-like grip over her ; she was his puppet.
- Rob Weisberg.
SOURCE: Duus, Masayo
"Tokyo Rose: Orphan of the Pacific"
Kodansha International, Ltd.
New York, 1979