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. . .

[dfwgator]

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

Keep in mind that Poland also had a much greater burden in terms of the numbers of Jewish refugees than any other country in Europe before the war, we aren't talking about the Jews who had lived in Poland for centuries, but those who recently came from Russia and other areas, most of these Jews were poor, and did strain the Polish economy. I think it's easy to see from the perspective how strains between Poles and Jews can spring from such circumstances. There were good Poles and bad Poles, just like there were good Dutch and bad Dutch, good French and bad French, etc. Poland does seem to get singled out though, and that's probably attributed to the fact that by far, Poland had the lion's share of Jews in Europe.

[dfwgator]

And as someone menioned above, the Kielce Progrom was instigated by the NKVD, who wanted to drive a wedge between Poles and Jews in post-war Poland to make it easier for the Soviets to bring Poland into their orbit.

[SJackson]

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..................

Hungry was a member of the Axis powers. The Director could lump them with Italy, or France (Vichy). Poland's government, their only government, was headquartered in London. And early in raising the alarm about the slaughter of European Jews, only to be ignored. An to request bombing the rail lines, and dropping arms. To be ignored. I presume the Director missed European history in college. I hope he not only apologizes, but acknowledges his mistake. He should learn about abuse of authority on a breathtaking scale that in Poland it was Nazi authority.

Wouldn't it be nice if, instead of the usual sorry I offended anyone apology someone acknowledged they were wrong.

[pierrem15]

The only European country in the late Middle Ages or early Modern period where at least some Jews were elevated to the nobility, for bravery in battle against foreign invaders.

[pierrem15]

One of the more touching stories concerned a "Jew hunt" when the Germans looked for Jews hiding in a forest. They found a group and were checking their papers when they discovered one was a Pole. They offered to let him go.

He told them one of Jews was his wife, and if they were going to shoot her, they could shoot him also.

So they did.

The book "Ordinary Men" is based on thousands of pages of transcripts from a war crimes investigation in Hamburg in the early '60s, where almost a whole reserve police unit made up mostly of mainly men from Hamburg who survived the war and went back to Hamburg were interviewed and the interviews cross-referenced.

The focus of the investigation was, naturally, what the Germans did, but what struck me when I read it was how often stories of Polish passive (or active) resistance kept cropping up. For example, they complained that the Polish police would disappear or call in sick when a ghetto was liquidated-- they had to threaten to deport the Poles as well sometimes to coerce assistance. Anti-Semites or not, they weren't murderers.

As a side note there were also always a few German soldiers who simply refused to kill innocents (a favored trick was to close their eyes and raise their rifles when everyone else fired). They were assigned KP duty afterwards, but were mainly not subject to any other penalty.

[SZonian]

"As a side note there were also always a few German soldiers who simply refused to kill innocents (a favored trick was to close their eyes and raise their rifles when everyone else fired). They were assigned KP duty afterwards, but were mainly not subject to any other penalty."

Incidents like this were more wide spread than many would like to believe. Himmler himself noted the psychological impact this was having on his men, thus the impetus for the infamous death camps...

[pierrem15]

German SS camp guards were quite often "trained" or desensitized to brutality by being sent first to a concentration camp in Germany before being sent to a death camp in Poland.

Even then, as one SS man recounted in Shoah, many of them when the arrived at Auschwitz reacted by vomiting when they realized what was going on.

[pierrem15]

That's also my impression from reading Polish history-- antisemitism became more pronounced as the Poles came to identify themselves as a Polish speaking, Catholic nation after the partition. Even then a lot of the antisemitism took the form of trying to force the assimilation of Yiddish speaking Jews.

The Commonwealth was a cultural empire, made up of mainly Polish and Lithuanian speaking nobleman (Polish established itself as the main language of the nobility over time) made up of many ethnic and religious groups: Poles, Lithuanians, Jews, Germans, Catholics, Protestants and even a small contingent of Muslims. In the 17th century, many nobleman were Protestant.

The same struggle between the "cosmopolitan" understanding of the Republic (exemplified by Pilsudski) and the Polish nationalist vision (exemplified by Dmowski) was a real point of contention in Polish interwar politics, and there are still strong echoes of it in contemporary Polish politics in arguments between PiS (Kaczynski) and Civic Platform (Kopacz).

[pierrem15]

I also tend to resist the current understanding that implicates many Wehrmacht units in the Holocaust.

It's hard for me to imagine that combat units were pulled off the front lines to kill Jews, or that they had either the time or inclination to go chasing after Jews in a combat zone.

I think this is a confusion stemming from the fact that Wehrmacht reserve police battalions were often dedicated to rounding up and killing Jews.

So, yes the "Wehrmacht' was used in the Holocaust, but probably not many active combat units.

Reprisals, on the other hand, are a different matter.

[lbryce]

Not heavy enough.

[Cronos]

The dirty little secret of WWII was that almost every country on the planet had Nazi sympathizers

Not all -- Poland and Russia didn't -- because the Germans wanted to exterminate Jews and Poles and Russians

The French, Dutch, Belgians were collaborationist pigs

The Ukrainian, Estonian and Finns were looking at the Nazis as the lesser evil compared to the Bolshevik communists (and they were, horrifyingly enough, right)

the English and Americans Nazi sympathizers were scum

[Cronos]

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.

You talk about two separate things -- anti-Communism and whether Naziism was left or right

Yes, the Nazis were anti-communists, but they were and ARE in favor of big government -- so economically they are left, socialist.

[Cronos]

The Kielce pogrom of 42 Jews

-- horrifying yes, but not the same as collaborating with the Nazis.

Also your statement about Poland was complicit. They quite happily turned Jews in or killed Jews themselves, is false -- some Poles did, yes, but there was no Polish government which did this, not even a mayor (well, Poland was to be wiped off the map according to the German plan) and the Armie Krajowe (anti-German and anti-Soviet partisan fighters) on the contrary fought anti-semitism.

So, some Poles were complicit, but not "Poland"

[Cronos]

Stepan 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.?

Well,

1. firstly while the majority were in what is now Poland, all were not
2. Secondly, Poland did not exist from 1939 -- effectively it was wiped off the map -- they even stopped referring to it as Poland but split it up into different territories -- just as the Prussians and Russians did in the 19th century
3. Why were they built there and not in Germany proper? To keep the stink of death out of the German people's sight -- Hitler had started sending political dissidents, homosexuals, the mentally and physically handicapped, Gypsies and Jews to work and extermination camps located in Germany years before World War II began
4. Why built in the eastern territories?
   1. Because the Germans were and are efficient -- the majority of Jews lived in the lands of the former Polish Republic (50% of world Jewry), so kill them there, shorter transportation lines
   2. If you transport 3 million Jews from Poland to France, you will get world attention, much less than transporting them within the eastern territories
   3. Also, you had large populations of Poles and Gipsies -- more untermenschen -- so you could kill them in the same place -- German efficiency
5. Finally -- the Poles were to be wiped off as a nation, exterminated, so the land would have become German pastureland, so why not there?

[Cronos]

Quite right Pierrem -- as this Jewish history site notes

Until 1539, Jews had been under direct royal authority. Unlike in the West, where charters granted to Jews had time limits, in Poland such charters were permanent but had to be reconfirmed by each king. The Jews’ status was that of free subjects, who had freedom of movement, the right to bear arms and to participate in defending the towns in which they lived, and the right to own real estate. They had full autonomy but were subject to royal courts in lawsuits involving both Jews and Christians. As a result of these conditions, Jews were able to become quite prominent in the royal economy of Poland, not only as bankers and merchants, as the various charters suggest, but also as tax and toll collectors, as highly positioned administrators, and even as lessees of royal salt mines, on which the crown had a monopoly.

in the early period of their presence in Poland, Jews, like nobles, were required to supply riders in the event of war. At least for a while, then, Polish monarchs accorded Jews a status similar to that of the nobility

[Cronos]

The statue that always brings tears to my eyes (this isn't relevant to the thread as Janusz Korczak was Jewish) is this one

Why is this man not better known globally? To me he was a bigger hero than many names we know -- he went of his own free will into the gas chamber to ensure that his wards did not feel fear.

[Cronos]

Himmler was scary crazy — I compare him to Beria and Timur-e-Lang in his blood thirst. He was a real monster.

[Cronos]

Norman Davis gives a good explanation -- and I wouldn't call it so much anti-semitism as a clash of nations -- until the French revolution ideas of nationalism, your "nation" was separate from your country.

So you could have nations like Poles, Germans, Jews, Lithuanians, Roma etc. living in the same country -- the nation consisted of people, not land (which is also why Poland could survive, though it's "lands" have been moved a lot and which is why the Jews as a nation and Armenians as a nation have survived -- because they have a strong sense of self separate from land)

I personally believe that the roots of WWI and II lie in the French Revolution and the partitions of Poland -- the former is what created the idea that everyone in the same country must be the same nation. Until the revolution only 10% of France spoke "French" -- there was Breton, Catalan, Gallo, etc.

By the mid-1800s the French forcibly tried to eradicate those languages -- the English did the same with Gaelic, Manx, Cornish and the Prussians tried to do the same with Sorbian, Polish and the Russians with the other languages

And that's when you have the "national awakenings"

.

But then the problem in Central and Eastern Europe was that lands of nations overlapped -- heavily. I take the example of the Carpathian mountains -- the mountains were where Ruthenians lived, the shepherds were Wallachian, the farmers in the valley Polish, the merchants were Germans or Jews, there were Gypsies as well and Armenians.

Whose land was it? Really speaking it was everyones

Take the case of Vilnius, now the capital of Lithuania -- in 1918 it (like Lwow) a more than 75% Polish city, surrounded by villages and farms of Lithuanians. And it's history was Eastern Slavic in the distant past.

While the Jewish peoples had been in the same lands for a millenia.

[dfwgator]

Not to mention that the Nazis planned to ultimately exterminate the Polish race through either Germanization or sterilization.

There is an interesting theory as to why Poles were singled out. Look at how the Nazis treated Slovaks, which shared fairly similar race and cultural traits with Poles, why were they for the most part left alone?

A theory suggests that because Poles and Germans lived alongside each other for centuries, there was much cross-breeding, and therefore while Poles were considered Slavs, many also possessed Germanic blood which would make them capable opponents, and that they were so anti-Germanic in their thinking that they would always be a threat to Germany if not completely wiped out.

Hitler never even considered treating Poland like Slovakia, allowing some level of autonomy. He was hell-bent on destroying all vestiges of all Polish language and culture.

[Grzegorz 246]

Let the pointing fingers at country a, b, c, .... z for collaborating with “Nazis” begins... Ah sorry, it’s been happening since +80 posts... First people should think for a while how many Americans would have collaborated If US had been occupied. It’s not difficult to figure out that quite likely: millions. German state and partially 2 or perhaps 3 countries were responsible for the Holocaust, certainly not Poland, Holland or France.

In this case the major problem is that a guy is on a government payroll, even If he was right, it’s not his role to judge other nations in public. I doubt people in charge of German or Italian government agencies use to mock America for slavery, natives and so on.