Mildred Elizabeth Gillars (née Sisk; November 29, 1900 – June 25, 1988)[1] was an American broadcaster employed by Nazi Germany to disseminate Axis propaganda during World War II.

[4] Gillars then moved to Greenwich Village, New York City, where she worked in various low-skilled jobs to finance drama lessons.

[9][10] In 1934, she moved to Dresden, Germany, to study music and was later employed as a teacher of English,[11] at the Berlitz School of Languages in Berlin.

However, Gillars chose to remain because her fiancé Paul Karlson, a naturalized German citizen, said he would never marry her if she returned to the United States.

[8] Eventually, she started a relationship with Max Otto Koischwitz,[14] the German-American program director in the USA Zone at the RRG.

"[15] In 1943, an Italian-American woman, Rita Zucca, also began broadcasting to American forces from Rome using the name "Sally".

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.

He and Counterintelligence Corps special agent Hans Winzen only had one solid lead: Raymond Kurtz, a B-17 pilot shot down by the Germans, recalled that a woman who had visited his prison camp seeking interviews was the broadcaster who called herself "Midge at the Mike", and had used the alias Barbara Mome.

Woerheide organized wanted posters with Gillars's picture to put up in Berlin, and the breakthrough came when he was informed that a woman calling herself "Barbara Mome" was selling her furniture at second-hand markets around the city.

[13] She was then held by the Counterintelligence Corps at Camp King, Oberursel, along with collaborators Herbert John Burgman and Donald S. Day, until she was conditionally released from custody on December 24, 1946; however, she declined to leave military detention.

The prosecution relied on the large number of her programs recorded by the Federal Communications Commission, stationed in Silver Hill, Maryland, to show her participation in propaganda activities directed at the United States.

[30][31][32][33][34] The judge spared Gillars from a harsher sentence since she had not participated in high-level Nazi propaganda policy conferences as was the case with Douglas Chandler and Robert Henry Best.