J. D. Salinger and the Nazis by Eberhard Alsen

Author:Eberhard Alsen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780299315788
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press

The reason Salinger’s CIC detachment did not arrest Nazi spies in the Echternach area was that the detachment did most of their work in Luxembourg City. After the Twelfth Regiment had repelled the attack on the town of Echternach, the Ardennes Offensive had passed Luxembourg by, giving the city up without a fight so that it was totally untouched by the war. While the Battle of the Bulge was going on for one more month some thirty miles to the north, it must have felt like peacetime in Luxembourg City. Having been previously billeted in cities that had been reduced to rubble, Salinger’s CIC detachment must have found Luxembourg City to be a paradise.

There seems to have been quite a bit of partying in Luxembourg City during the Battle of the Bulge. For instance, Leicester Hemingway mentions that he met J. D. Salinger at a party at a posh Luxembourg hotel. In his book My Brother Ernest Hemingway, Leicester reports that during that party Ernest was relaxing with a group of people that included “Jerome Salinger, who was a good CIC man for the division.”10 Leicester apparently got to know Salinger quite well because after the war he visited him in the Bavarian town of Weißenburg, where Salinger’s CIC detachment was posted with the Army of Occupation.

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