J.D. Salinger and the Nazis

Contents

Preface2-4

Introduction5-11

1. Salinger in Austria Before the Nazi Take-Over12-22

2. Continued Unconcern About the Nazis23-36

3. Ready to Kill Nazis37-43

4. The Slapton Sands Disasters 44-54

5. Under Fire from the Nazis55-66

6. Salinger’s Job as a CIC Agent67-76

7. The Saint Lô SNAFU and the Liberation of Paris77-86

8. The Hürtgen Forest Fiasco 87-99

9. Searching for Nazi Spies and Collaborators in Luxembourg 100-108

10. Visit to a Nazi Concentration Camp109-117

11. Nervous Breakdown118-132

12. Was Salinger’s German Wife a Nazi?133-149

13. Halfheartedly Hunting Nazis After the War150-163

14. American Bastards and Nazi Bastards 164-176

Conclusion177-182

Photo Credits183-185

Notes 186-197

Biliogrphy198-207

J.D. Salinger and the Nazis

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.”

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 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” (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 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 theArmed Forces, the Wehrmacht, were notallowed 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.

***

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, anAmerican 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 interrogatedmy 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

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.

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 faltenFold your little hands

Köpfchen senkenBow your little head

Und 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, andsome of us got the chance to fire blanks with the 81 mm mortarwhich 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 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.

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.