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TRANSCRIPT
J.D. Salinger and the Nazis
Eberhard Alsen © 2015
1
J.D. Salinger and the Nazis
J.D. Salinger and the Nazis
Contents
Preface 2-4
Introduction 5-11
1. Salinger in Austria Before the Nazi Take-Over 12-22
2. Continued Unconcern About the Nazis 23-36
3. Ready to Kill Nazis 37-43
4. The Slapton Sands Disasters 44-54
5. Under Fire from the Nazis 55-66
6. Salinger’s Job as a CIC Agent 67-76
7. The Saint Lô SNAFU and the Liberation of Paris 77-86
8. The Hürtgen Forest Fiasco 87-99
9. Searching for Nazi Spies and Collaborators in Luxembourg 100-108
10. Visit to a Nazi Concentration Camp 109-117
11. Nervous Breakdown 118-132
12. Was Salinger’s German Wife a Nazi? 133-149
13. Halfheartedly Hunting Nazis After the War 150-163
14. American Bastards and Nazi Bastards 164-176
Conclusion 177-182
Photo Credits 183-185
Notes 186-197
Biliogrphy 198-207
Preface
__________________________________________________________________________
This book grew out of research I did to find out if Salinger’s nervous breakdown
shortly after the end of World War II can help explain the reasons for the nervious
breakdowns of two of his fictional characters, Sergeant X in “For Esmé––With Love and
Squalor” and ex-sergeant Seymour Glass in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” Like Salinger
himself, they both served in Europe during World War II, and like Salinger they also wund
up with the Army of Occupation in Germany.
In a journal article entitled “New Light on the Nervous Breakdowns of Salinger’s
Sergeant X and Seymour Glass,” I argued that what triggered Salinger’s nervous
breakdown was probably his visit to a concentration camp recently abandoned by the
Nazis. At that camp he saw and smelled the charred corpses of scores of prisoners who had
been burned alive by the SS guards.
I therefore concluded that like Salinger’s own nervous breakdown those of Sergeant
X and Seymour Glass could be understood as having been caused by “the horrifying sights
of one of the many concentration camps that the US Army came across in southern
Germany at the end of the war.”
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J.D. Salinger and the Nazis
While I was working on this article, the idea for a book on Salinger and the Nazis
began to take shape. I got this idea because in her memoir, Dream Catcher, Salinger’s
daughter Margaret claims that a woman whom her father married a few months after the
war had been a minor official in the Nazi Party. I found it unbelievable that Salinger would
marry an ex-Nazi after visiting a concentration camp and witnessing what atrocities the
Nazis were capable of. I therefore embarked on a systematic investigation of Salinger’s
attitude toward the Nazis.
I had not gotten very far with this research when I was contacted by Shane Salerno
who was working on a documentary movie and an “oral biography” about J.D. Salinger.
Because very little information existed about Salinger’s activities during and shortly after
the war, Mr. Salerno hired me as a researcher and funded trips to the National archives in
Washington, D.C.; College Park, Maryland; New York City; and several archives in
Germany. I am extremely grateful that Mr. Salerno gave me permission to use in my book
some of the material I collected for him, especially the information about Salinger’s
German wife. But neither Mr. Salerno’s movie nor his biography mentions the core idea of
my book, namely that Salinger hated the US Army more than the Nazis. Also, I since the
appearance of Mr. Salerno’s book and film, I found important new information about
Salinger and the Nazis.
Concerning my research in Europe, I want to express my gratitude to three
archivists and to two journalists who provided me with valuable information. The archivists
are Jürgen Zottmann of the city archive of Nuremberg, Reiner Kammerl who heads the
town of Weißenburg archive, and Lukas Morscher of the Stadtarchiv Innsbruck in Austria.
I am also grateful to the free-lance journalist Bernd Noack who published new information
J.D. Salinger and the Nazis
about Salinger’s time in Germany in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and especially to
Jan Stephan of the newspaper Weißenburger Tagblatt who allowed me to use information
from an as yet unpublished interview with two relatives of Salinger’s German wife.
J.D. Salinger and the Nazis
Introduction
___________________________________________________________________________
J.D. Salinger’s attitude toward the Nazis is a topic that has not yet been explored.
This is surprising because during World War II Salinger’s job as an agent of the Counter
Intelligence Corps was to arrest Nazi spies and collaborators, and after the war he continued
to work for the CIC as a private contractor, tracking down Nazis who had gone into hiding.
The topic deserves attention first of all because in his recent biography, Salinger a
Life, Kenneth Slawenski claims that Salinger fought the Nazis day after day alongside the
combat soldiers of the Twelfth Infantry Regiment. But the daily reports of Salinger’s CIC
detachment at the National Archives show that Salinger and his fellow CIC agents never
participated in combat.
The topic deserves even more attention because the statements that Salinger made
about the Nazis in his fiction range from early unconcern to gung-ho anti-Nazi propaganda,
and from there to non-judgmental ambivalence. Salinger ignored the Nazis and the war in
Europe in his first six wartime stories. Then, in the story “Last Day of the Last Furlough”
J.D. Salinger and the Nazis
(1944), Salinger had his central character say that he believes “in killing Nazis and Fascists
and Japs.” But in The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Holden Caulfield quotes his brother D.B.––
like Salinger a non-combat soldier––as saying that if he had been forced to shoot anybody, he
wouldn’t have known in which direction to shoot because “the Army was practically as full of
bastards as the Nazis.”
Finally, the topic of Salinger’s attitude toward the Nazis also deserves attention
because in her memoir, Salinger’s daughter Margaret made conflicting statements concerning
her father’s feelings about the Nazis. On the one hand she claims that the mysterious
Sylvia––the German woman to whom Salinger was briefly married after the war––had been
an official in the Nazi Party. On the other hand, Margaret says that her father hated Nazis as
much as Sylvia hated Jews.
* * *
Salinger’s job as a CIC agent confronted him every day with Nazi spies and
collaborators and later with Nazi Party members, but oddly enough the word “Nazi” actually
appears in only one of his letters from abroad and in only three of his works of fiction.
Even though Salinger uses the word so rarely, it has two different meanings. In “For
Esmé––With Love and Squalor” it refers refer to a member of the Nazi Party whom Sergeant
X arrests. And in a 1945 letter from Germany, he mentions that he has signed a post-war
contract with the CIC to “hunt Nazis” that have gone into hiding. In both cases the word
Nazis refers to members of the Nazi party, the National Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter
Partei. But in “Last Day of the Last Furlough” and in The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger calls
J.D. Salinger and the Nazis
all German soldiers Nazis. This is a use of the term that was common among American,
British, and Canadian troops in World War II.
Strictly speaking, though, German soldiers were not Nazis because members of the
Armed Forces, the Wehrmacht, were not allowed to be in the Nazi Party. But it still made
sense to call them Nazis because after the war was over, a large majority showed no remorse
and spoke favorably of the Nazi regime. Felix Römer has established this fact in his book
Kameraden where he examined clandestine recordings that the CIC made of conversations
among some ten thousand German prisoners of war at Fort Hunt, Virginia.1
* * *
In this book, I discuss fourteen early Salinger stories plus The Catcher in the Rye.
These stories and the novel all contain characters who were soldiers in the US Army during
World War II, and they all reveal––directly or indirectly––Salinger’s attitude toward the
Nazis.
As I read through Salinger’s wartime stories, it struck me how different they are from
Hemingway’s war stories and novels (In Our Time, 1924; A Farewell to Arms, 1929; For
Whom the Bell Tolls, 1940) and from the World War II novels of the German Nobel laureate
Heinrich Böll (The Train was on Time, 1949; And Where Were You, Adam, 1951). Unlike
Hemingway and Böll, Salinger never shows his characters actually firing their weapons at
the enemy, even though some of them come under fire from the Nazis. This peculiarity of
Salinger’s wartime stories is obviously due to the fact that he was not a combat soldier.
* * *
J.D. Salinger and the Nazis
Next I want to offer an explanation of my reasons for writing this book. The main
reason is that I love Salinger’s fiction. This is why I wrote two previous books about
Salinger. A second reason is that I have a personal interest in what he has to say about the
Nazis. For one thing, my father was a member of the paramilitary SA (Sturm Abteilung) from
1933 to1935, a member of the Nazi Party from 1937 to 1938, and an officer in the Nazi
Army from 1938 to 1945. For another thing, I myself was subjected to Nazi indoctrination
when I was a child.
While doing the research for this book, I found out that it was Salinger’s Twelfth Infantry
Regiment that took my father prisoner at the end of the war. My father told me that during
the last days of the war he was in command of a number of dispersed units near Bad Tölz,
Bavaria. When he tried surrender those troops to the US Army on May 4, 1945, an American
patrol machine-gunned his jeep killing his driver and taking him prisoner. From the combat
history of Salinger’s regiment I learned that on May 4 and May 5, the regiment was rounding
up Nazis by the hundreds in the Bad Tölz area. On May 5, the day following my father’s
capture, “twelve German trucks loaded with enemy soldiers drove into the [twelfth
regiment’s] column to surrender.”2 These must have been the ragtag troops under my father’s
command.
Amazed by this coincidence, I sent Salinger my father’s picture and his Nazi ID
papers (Soldbuch), and I asked him if he, Salinger, was part of the CIC team that interrogated
my father. Salinger responded: “Can only tell you that it is most improbable that I might
have known or known of your father. His surely valued photograph and Army record-book
are enclosed in this envelope.”3
J.D. Salinger and the Nazis
I found Salinger’s response puzzling at first, but then I learned from CIC manuals that
enemy soldiers of officer rank could be interrogated only by American officers. This means
that Salinger could not have questioned my father because Salinger was not an officer but a
staff sergeant and my father was a lieutenant colonel.
0.1: Lieutenant Colonel Karl Alsen.
J.D. Salinger and the Nazis
And here is the story of my own indoctrination with Nazi ideas. My father had
nothing to do with it because for most of the war he was stationed in Bordeaux, France.
When I was five years old my mother and I were evacuated to the Sudentenland after our
house in Nuremberg was bombed out, and I began to attended a kindergarten in Tachau (now
Tachow in the Czech Republic). In that kindergarten I had to say a Nazi prayer every
morning. It was an old Catholic prayer in which the name of Jesus Christ was replaced with
the name of Adolf Hitler:
Händchen falten Fold your little handsKöpfchen senken Bow your little headUnd an Jesus Christus denken. And think of Adolf Hitler.
My mother was upset when she found out about the prayer. As she told me later, there was
nothing she could have done about it without attracting the attention of the Gestapo. But she
was even more horrified when she found out that the kindergarten teachers had told me to
greet all adults I met in the street by raising my right arm in the Nazi salute and shouting
“Heil Hitler.” To this my mother responded by saying that while I was in the kindergarten, I
had to do what the teachers told me, but on my way home I had to do what she told me. And
she told me not to do the Hitler salute. That was in the Fall of 1944.
Fifteen years later, I did my military service in the post-war German Army , the
Bundeswehr, which was still using some Nazi-era weapons. For instance, we were trained on
the MG 34 and the Mg 42, the two standard machine guns of th Nazi Wehrmacht, and some
of us got the chance to fire blanks with the 81 mm mortar which plays an important role in
Salinger’s Hürtgen Forest story, “The Stranger” (See Chapter 8).
But not all our weapons were from the Nazi Wehrmacht; some came from thr US
Army. For instance, the handgun we were issued was the same .45 caliber M1911 A1 that
J.D. Salinger and the Nazis
Salinger was thinking of using to a fire a bullet through his left hand when he had his
nervous breakdown (See Chapter 11).
* * *
Another explanation I want to offer concerns the material that I analyze in this book. I
focus primarily on Salinger’s fiction, on all stories published and unpublished, on
unpublished letters and on other statements Salinger made that relate to his attitude toward
the Nazis. I also quote from the daily reports of Salinger’s CIC detachment, from other
military records, and from several military histories.
I organized the book chronologically and I discuss Salinger’s fiction in the order of
the wartime and post-war events that form the backdrop of his stories, beginning each
chapter by establishing the historical and biographical context. Two special cases are the
autobiographical stories “A Girl I Knew” and “For Esmé––With Love and Squalor.” Both
stories have a first part that takes place before D-Day and a second part that takes place after
the war. I therefore discuss each of these stories first in the context of Salinger’s experiences
before the D-Day invasion and again later in the context of Salinger’s experiences during and
after the war.
* * *
Finally, I want to clarify the purpose of this book. That purpose is to explain the
complicated reasons for Salinger’s initial unconcern about the Nazis, for his brief anti-Nazi
patriotism, and for his final non-judgmental attitude. That non- judgmental attitude made
Salinger all but ignore the holocaust and marry a German woman four months after the end
of the war.
J.D. Salinger and the Nazis
As I demonstrate, these changes in Salinger’s attitude toward the Nazis have a lot to
do with three military disasters he was involved in. In fact, he almost got killed during one of
them. These disasters were caused by the incompetence and arrogance of American
commanders and resulted in several thousand unnecessary casualties among the soldiers of
Salinger’s Fourth Infantry Division. Moreover, Salinger’s nervous breakdown a week after
the end of the war helps explain why he later suggested that there was no big difference
between the “bastards” in the US Army and in the Nazis.
J.D. Salinger and the Nazis