Bob Harmon by Daniel Burnstein
2/6/02 1 Interview 2/6/02 75-80 min. DB: February 6, 2002 at Seattle University. This is an interview with Bob Harmon by Daniel Burnstein. Bob, I wanted to ask you about a couple of remarks you made in your recent letter, well not too recent, but your letter from the year 2000 to Victor Davis Hansen. On page two in the top paragraph you said that “you all knew about the horrors of slave labor and from Kaiserslautern [ in the Bavarian Palatinate; ca. 40 miles west of Mannheim. Industrial city. Royal residence since Carolingian times. Frederick I built a castle there, circa 1152 AD ] on the concentration camps.” So could you clarify what you meant by that? CRH: About the camps? DB: Yeah, that you were well-informed about the horrors of slave labor and after Kaiserslautern on the concentration camps. [ March 1945, just before we crossed the Rhine ]. CRH: The slave labor we began to run into in France, and a lot of it was Polish and, because so many of our men spoke Polish, we had no trouble communicating with these people. So, it was interesting. You had a mixture of free Poles who had lived in France since before or, recently, after the first World War. In other words they had left Poland sometime, maybe when it was still occupied by Prussia, Russia, or Austria in the ancient RAP [ “RAP” = Russia-Austria-Prussia] breakup of Poland from 1795. And they had come and found themselves a home, so to speak, in France, and had been there maybe 40 or 50 years.
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