My family is in the United States because it fled Poland just before Nazi Germany invaded it, so this sort of propaganda (the idea that conquered nations were somehow complicit in the Holocaust) particularly irks me.
It especially irks me because Poland was erased as a nation in WW2. Germany slaughtered three million Polish Jews, and three million other Poles in the Holocaust.
More below the orange barbed wire.
BBC article
FBI Director James Comey wrote in the Washington Post that “Poland was complicit in the Holocaust.”
All of Poland is outraged, with the foreign minister calling the American ambassador on the carpet.
Mr. Comey’s remarks were on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Ambassador Mull noted that in no way does the United States consider Poland complicit in the Holocaust.
I’m outraged myself. Thanks, Mr. Comey, for propagating the "clueless American" meme, and the "victims of the Holocaust were the perpetrators of the Holocaust" meme. I am travelling to Poland in June; I doubt a single Polish-American tourist can reverse the damage of a senior government official.
Mr. Comey was first appointed as Deputy Attorney General under George W. Bush; he was appointed to his current position in 2013 by Barack Obama.
Comey’s article in the Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
From Comey's article:
Good people helped murder millions. And that’s the most frightening lesson of all — that our very humanity made us capable of, even susceptible to, surrendering our individual moral authority to the group, where it can be hijacked by evil. Of being so cowed by those in power. Of convincing ourselves of nearly anything.
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.
The Post’s rebuttal:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
From that rebuttal:
Germany also occupied Poland, but there was no Polish “Vichy.” During the war, there was no Polish state at all. Indeed, it was the absence of the Polish state that enabled the Germans to create a lawless, violent world, one in which anyone could be arbitrarily murdered, any Jew could be deported — and any Pole who helped a Jew could be shot instantly, along with his entire family. Many were. Millions of others died too – Polish intellectuals, priests and politicians were all Nazi targets.
Germany created in the western portion of Poland what it called the "General Government." The names Poland and Poles were prohibited in government edicts; the Nazi plan for the General Government was the eradication of everyone living there, to make it a colony of Germany.
Shame, Mr. Comey. I am waiting for your unconditional apology.