WARSAW, Poland (AP) – Obama did it, now the FBI director has done it, and each time it has caused huge offense to a U.S. ally: using language to suggest that Poles were accomplices in the Holocaust.
On Monday, Poles were waiting to see if FBI director James Comey apologizes – something Polish Foreign Minister Grzegorz Schetyna said he expected so the matter can be settled.
Comey said last week, “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. That’s what people do. And that should truly frighten us.”
Comey’s comments, probably just uninformed, are particularly offensive to Poles not only because they had no role in running Auschwitz and other death camps where Jews were murdered during World War II, but because they were themselves victims of the Third Reich. In all, 6 million Polish citizens were killed during the war, about half of them Jewish and the other half Christians, with many Polish priests, members of the intelligentsia and political resistance killed in Auschwitz and elsewhere.