Poland summons U.S. ambassador over FBI head's Holocaust remarks

Reuters ^ | April 19, 2015 | By Wiktor Szary

[Brad from Tennessee]

WARSAW (Reuters) - Poland has summoned the United States' ambassador in Warsaw over an article written by a top U.S. intelligence official on Poland's alleged responsibility for the Holocaust during World War Two, a foreign ministry spokesman said on Sunday.

The article by FBI director James Comey, published in the Washington Post earlier this week, prompted an outcry in Poland and drew condemnation in the media and from politicians.

A foreign ministry spokesman said on his Twitter account that the U.S. ambassador would be summoned to the ministry over the article, and that Poland would demand an apology.

Comey said in the article: "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."

Poland says the passage wrongly implied it was complicit in the Nazi genocide of European Jews.

Poland's ambassador to the United States said in a statement the remarks were "unacceptable", adding that he had sent a letter to Comey "protesting the falsification of history, especially ... accusing Poles of perpetuating crimes which not only they did not commit, but which they themselves were victims of."

Shortly after Poland's announcement, U.S. Ambassador in Warsaw Stephen Mull told reporters he would attend a meeting at the foreign ministry on Sunday afternoon. . .

[RobbyS]

The Jews were but the most distinctive ethnic groups in a region filled with ethnic groups who hated each others’ guts. Look at how the Christian Serbs and Christian Croats treated each other.

[onedoug]

Sounds like just another islamist facilitator in the American government to me. ALL under the enemy islamist in Chief.

[Gene Eric]

An Obama idiot... go figure.

[Stepan12]

The ambassador is right. Poland was complicit. They quite happily turned Jews in or killed Jews themselves, trying to escape (as the few survivors of the Sobbibor death camp revolt can attest. And why were the death camps in Poland and not in Germany? Because Poland was a very friendly place for such horrors as Auschwitz/Birkineau, Sobbibor, Treblinka; etc.? This is not to mention the Polish pogram at Kielce where survivors -- SURVIVORS of the holocaust were killed after World War II. Poland is trying to cover up its complicity in the holocaust. If I were them, I would be ashamed, too.

The Official Undezog Website

[fso301]

I can can see many posters didn't read The Black Book of Poland before weighing in.

[BeauBo]

What gets lost is that he did not say Poland or Poles,
he said “the murderers and accomplices of...”

So he was only referring to those individuals who did collaborate in the genocide - not the public or the Government. He was talking about how people rationalize heinous acts - it is a psychological study of criminal behavior, for which the FBI is famous.

I admit that I read his excerpt several times, before I realized that he was specifically talking about collaborators, and not all of Poland. It jumps out at you when you hear “Germany or Poland”, like they were on par.

[samtheman]

Germany was not an island of antisemitism in a sea of European enlightenment. Antisemitism was strong throughout Europe from the middle ages onward. Slavic antisemitism was particularly strong.

There was a lot of silent approval of and some active participation in the Holocaust in Poland.

The outrage of Polish authorities on this subject reminds me SOMEWHAT (not exactly equivalent) of the outrage of the Turkish government when anyone mentions the Armenian Massacres.

[Cronos]

Lepton “Poland” didn’t exist at the time, as they were a captive territory -- quite correct. In fact, unlike most other countries on the European mainland that were occupied by Germany, Poland never surrendered.

[Cronos]

Polish anti-semitism existed, yes, but it was

1. not the same level of bloodiness as in Western Europe
2. The Poles were themselves condemned to extermination, so supporting the Nazis was a no win game
3. Unlike in every other territory occupied by the Germans, in Poland if a Pole protected a Jew, the Pole and his family would be killed -- sent to concentration camps themselves, so a higher penalty
4. YET, the ethnicity with the largest numbers on the Yad Vesham (in memory of the righteous gentiles who protected Jews) is Poland

[Cronos]

Polish anti-semitism after WWII is a different beast - it was not collaboration with the Nazis. It was not sending Jews to death camps. It was not as bloody (though the death of even 1 person to prejudice is 1 too many). The topic here was the FBI accusing the Polish government of collaborating with the Nazis

[Cronos]

I would argue that Polish anti-semitism before the war was less than in France or England, leave alone Germany.

[lostboy61]

So in the USA we have freedom of speech and of the press. So the Polish can go piss up a Poll!

[Cronos]

RobbyS The Austrians are German.

ozzymandus: Austrians are German? No comment.

well, Austrians are part of the "German nations" along with Bavarians, Swabians etc. and would have been part of Germany if not for the Prussians and then after WWI Austria was due to join with Germany, but the allies didn't allow it.

Technically, they do speak a German dialect related to the other High German dialects like Bavarian or Swabian or Schweizer Deutsch -- I don't speak it but my German friends say that Swabian and Austrian dialects are difficult for a speaker of standard German to understand (though he wasn't clear whether it was the language itself or the accent)

Politically they are now separate but the Austrians and Bavarians have a distinctly different "culture" from northern Germans -- at least to me. More laid back and friendlier.

[Cronos]

The first group to put up placards denouncing German brutality towards Jews in Cracow was a right wing Catholic group that had called for Poles to boycott Jewish businesses before the war. If you read “Ordinary Men” about a German MP unit charged with liquidating Jews it’s quite clear that most Poles dragged their feet as much as possible to avoid helping the Germans, and many were shot for actively hiding them or helping Jews who were hiding. They may not have liked Jews, but they were not going to be accessories to murder if they could avoid it, and the Germans complained a lot about it.

I didn't know that

[mware]

Don’t the idiots sent to represent our country know even a little bit of European history.

[mware]

I live in a very rural area of South Jersey and during my youth I was next door neighbors to no less then 3 families from Poland, and Hungary who survived concentration camps.

Their stories would turn your hair gray.

[Cronos]

With due respect dfw -- I think it's only been complex since the mid-1800s with the rise of nationalism

Before that and especially in the old Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, Jews could live peacefully and they were supportive of the Polish kings and nobility even in times when Poland was invaded by Swedes, Russians, Germans and Turks

There were no pogroms in the commonwealth as in England or France or Germany.

[Cronos]

Sorry, but those were not ethnic Poles.

[hosepipe]

Nazi’s and modern Progressives come from the SAME school of thought..

[Yollopoliuhqui]

The dirty little secret of WWII was that almost every country on the planet had Nazi sympathizers and many of those sent entire divisions to fight for the Nazis- French, Ukrainian, Yugoslav, Bulgarian, Albanian, Dutch, Belgian, Arab, all wearing Wehrmacht uniforms, with a number of SS foreign battalions included.

The pool of collaborators, sympathisers and 5th columnists that these fighting troops were taken from often survived the war and constituted the hard right anti-communist Cold Warriors of the 1950’s. Yah, that’s right, in spite of the current weak headed revisionist tendency here on FR to wash their hands by claiming that the Nazi’s were “socialists”. Don’t make me laugh.

In the US, we had the German American Bund, and overtly Nazi political party. My dad was an America First Society member (”Keep America out of the war”) and a closet Nazi, unrepentant his entire life, lectured me often on the evils of black people moving into neighborhoods and bringing property values down. He voted Republican. My mom was Italian American and her family and friends were all fascisti. And we piss and moan here on FR about the lefties controlling academia, entertainment, media, news, etc. without once copping to the fact that fascist conservatism was defeated and we are part of that defeat even if we manage to anesthetize ourselves from the facts of our history as “conservatives”. This is why I am a libertarian with anarchist overtones.

The Nazi ubermensch game plan is alive and well in corporate and populist America. Read Anthony Sutton’s “Wall St. and the Rise of Hitler” and hundreds of similar books about monopoly capitalism’s seque into state capitalism and fascism. Too big to fail is Nazi, period.