Daily Mail: Head of the FBI claims that Polish people were 'murderers and accomplices' who helped kill Jews during the Holocaust - and Poland demands an apology
* US Ambassador Stephen Mull to receive summons for apology over FBI director James Comey's comments, foreign ministry spokesman said
* Comey wrote editorial opinion piece in Washington Post on April 16
* It said: 'In their minds, the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland, and Hungary and so many other places didn't do something evil'
* Poland's president Bronislaw Komorowski said Comey's comments were 'an insult to thousands of Poles who helped Jews'
Poland said it has demanded a formal apology from the United States after the head of the FBI allegedly claimed Poland shares responsibility for the Holocaust with Germany.
US Ambassador Stephen Mull will 'receive a note of protest and a summons for an apology' over the comments made by FBI director James Comey, foreign ministry spokesman Marcin Wojciechowski said on Sunday.
WNU Editor: A poor choice of words from the FBI Director .... there were Nazi collaborators in Poland (just as there were everywhere else) .... but the mass majority of Poles were not. The op-ed that has caused all of this controversy is here .... Why I require FBI agents to visit the Holocaust Museum (James Comey, Washington Post)
More News On Poland's Reaction To The FBI Director's Comments That Some Poles Were Accomplices In The Holocaust
Poland fury at Holocaust comment by FBI's James Comey -- BBC
Poland furious at FBI director over Holocaust remarks -- CBS/AP
Poland summons U.S. ambassador over FBI head's Holocaust remarks -- Reuters
Poland Summons U.S. Ambassador Over FBI Chief’s Holocaust Comments -- Wall Street Journal
Poland demands apology for FBI chief's comment on Holocaust -- The Guardian
Poland furious over FBI Holocaust comments, summons US envoy -- Deutsche Welle
FBI Director’s Washington Post Columnn Leads to Diplomatic Spat With Poland -- Slate
US envoy apologises to Poland over FBI chief's Holocaust claim -- AFP
FBI director got it wrong on the Holocaust -- Anne Applebaum, Washington Post
5 comments:
WNU Editor,
Some reading on the current subject:
http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/101123/nazi-collaborators-or-victims
Jay ... thanks for the link. I can spend all night talking about this subject. My father never talked much about his wartime experience in Poland. He saw one death camp .... and as he told me later .... it is a smell that he will never forget. But to him the Poles were mainly hiding as best as they could from the fighting ... and Soviet soldiers were given strict orders that Poles were to be treated as a liberated people .... not as an ally of Nazi Germany .... but he did encounter Polish prisoners who were in the Waffen SS.
On a side note .... during the occupation my father mentioned to me that he was astounded with what he saw in Germany. That after fighting the Nazis for almost 4 years .... when he finally ended up in Germany .... there were no Nazis around.
Comey's comment was pretty innocuous, and was truthfull,
The Polish "overreaction" is as the Tablet article noted, based in the Nationalist need to create an AltHistory, and is something that Stalin did all the time.
You can't learn from history, ( not that most humans learn anything from history, When Nationalist Myth replaces actual history.
So true about the present growth of nationalism in eastern Europe .... and while the Western press is more focused on "Russian nationalism", it is in places like Ukraine, Poland, etc. that the "hard-core" nationalism is starting to spread.
The mass majority in any country that wasn't an active war zone was just trying to get on with its life - or, more likely in Eastern Europe, to survive the increasingly heavy-handed German occupation.
About the no Nazis comment though... different people had different impressions. The Allies (including the Soviets for those purposes) would not have noticed it I suppose, but plenty of German intellectuals that were in Germany immediately after the war (and into the late 40s) did complain that the a large chunk of the population was still Nazi, "if Hitler came back today they would all be for him" (Ernst Wiechert, as quoted by Thomas Mann).
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