On this day in 1961 Mildred Gillars was released from the Federal Reformatory for Women in Alderson, West Virginia after serving 11 years.
Who, you might be asking yourself, was Mildred Gillars and just what did she do?
Well, you probably know her better from history as “Axis Sally,” the American voice of Nazi propaganda during World War II. Hers was the voice that American soldiers heard during the war trying to coax them into giving up and going home, stoking fear that their wives and girlfriends were cheating on them, in between programs of swing music, popular with the GIs at the time.
After the war Gillars was taken into custody and returned to the United States where she was tried for treason and convicted on March 8, 1949. She was the first woman in U. S. history to be convicted of treason against the United States.
