She was named Mildred Elizabeth Sisk when she was born in Portland, Maine, on November 29, 1900. Her parents, Vincent Sisk and Mae Hewitson Sisk, were divorced in 1907, and a few years later Mildred's mother married a dentist, Dr. Robert Bruce Gillars. From that time on she was known as Mildred Gillars.


According to her half sister, Gillars worked at a variety of jobs after leaving college ,clerk, salesgirl, cashier and waitress ,all to further her ambition to become an actress. In 1929 she went to Europe with her mother and spent six months studying in France before returning to the United States. In 1933 she returned to Europe and worked in France as a governess and salesgirl. She moved to Germany in 1935 and became an English instructor at the Berlitz School of Languages in Berlin. English teachers were paid less than Russian instructors, it was the possible reason for her decision to accept employment by Radio Berlin as an announcer and actress. This was a job much more to her liking, and she stayed with it until the defeat of NS Germany in May 1945.


Gillars' propaganda program was known as "Home Sweet Home" and usually aired sometime between 8 p.m. and 2 a.m. daily. With the enthusiastic endorsement of the Propaganda Ministry, she soon became known as "Axis Sally" to American servicemen, especially just before D-Day, when she rolled off a sad litany of the horrors awaiting anyone who tried to invade Adolf Hitler's fortress.


Mildred�s broadcasts were heard all over Europe, the Mediterranean, North Africa and the United States from December 11, 1941, through May 6, 1945. Although most of her programs were broadcast from Berlin, some were aired from Chartres and Paris in France and from Hilversum in the Netherlands.


Sally's most famous broadcast, and the one that got her convicted of treason, was a play titled Vision of Invasion that went out over the airwaves on May 11, 1944.After the defeat of Germany, Mildred was not immediately captured , she blended in with the rest of the displaced people in occupied Germany .


Mildred spent three weeks in an American hospital in 1946, then was taken to an internment camp in Wansel, Germany. About Yule time 1946, when she was granted amnesty and released, she obtained a pass to live in the French Zone of Berlin.


Later, when she traveled to Frankfurt to get her pass renewed, she was arrested by the Army and kept there for more than a year. At the end of that detention she was flown to the United States and incarcerated in the Washington, D.C., District Jail on August 21, 1948. She was held there without bond. Later she was charged with 10 counts of treason (eventually reduced to eight to speed up the trial) by a federal grand jury. Her trial began on January 25, 1949.


Mildred�s trial ended on March 8, 1949, after six chaotic weeks. The following day Judge Curran put the case in the hands of the jury of seven men and five women. After deliberating for 101�2 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.


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


WAU Ireland.