The Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Sunday urgently summoned US Ambassador Stephen Mull to “protest and demand an apology,” saying the head of the FBI suggested that Poles were accomplices in the Holocaust.
FBI Director James Comey made the remarks in an article published on Thursday by the Washington Post describing what he called the need to educate people about the Holocaust. It was adapted from a speech he gave on Wednesday last week at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
“In their minds, the murderers and accomplices of Germany and Poland and Hungary, and so many, many other places didn’t do something evil. They convinced themselves it was the right thing to do, the thing they had to do,” Comey wrote.
The words raised a storm among politicians in Poland, where elderly people remember the brutality of the German occupation during World War II, when more than 6 million Polish citizens were killed.
Polish Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz said Comey’s words were “unacceptable” in Poland.
“To those who are incapable of presenting the historic truth in an honest way, I want to say that Poland was not a perpetrator, but a victim of World War II,” Kopacz said. “I would expect full historical knowledge from officials who speak on the matter.”
Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski aide Tomasz Nalecz called Comey a “blockhead” in a debate on TVN24, but added that the “stupidity of one official does not erase the friendship between Poland and the US”
However, Auschwitz survivor Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, 93, said that he was concerned that he could hear “stupid words” coming from a politician close to the US president.
After meeting with Polish Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Leszek Soczewica on Sunday, Mull said he would urgently contact the FBI and Washington about the matter.
Earlier on Sunday, Mull said in Polish that Comey’s words were “wrong, harmful and offensive,” and did not reflect the US administration’s views.
The meeting was held shortly after Mull attended ceremonies marking the 72nd anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazi Germans, who transported tens of thousands of the residents who remained in the ghetto to their deaths at the Majdanek camp operated by the Germans near the Polish city of Lublin.
Nazi Germany brutally occupied Poland from 1939 to 1945, and ran death camps in Poland.
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