BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Hungary has joined Poland in denouncing remarks by FBI director James Comey which seemed to equate Germany’s role in the Holocaust with that of Poland and Hungary.
Hungary’s Foreign Ministry said Tuesday that Comey’s remarks delivered last week at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and then published in The Washington Post were defamatory of Hungarians. The ministry said it sent a written complaint to the U.S. Embassy in Budapest.
“The words of the FBI director bear witness to astounding insensitivity and impermissible superficiality,” the ministry said in a statement. “We do not accept from anyone the formulation of such a generalization and defamation.”
Comey, arguing for the importance of Holocaust education, said: “In their minds, the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland, and Hungary … 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 said in the speech which was also posted without any clarification on the FBI’s website.
Comey’s comments were particularly offensive to Poles. Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz said Sunday that Comey’s words were “unacceptable,” and that “Poland was not a perpetrator but a victim of World War II.”
In all, 6 million Polish citizens were killed during the war, about half of them Jewish and the other half Christians.
Frank Spula, head of the Polish American Congress representing at least 10 million Americans of Polish descent, said he would expect Comey to resign, arguing that a high-ranking official should face the consequences of such a statement.
“I personally think that he should be punished for these words, yes,” Spula, speaking from the U.S., said on Polish Radio 1.
Hungary’s role in the Holocaust, when some 550,000 Hungarian Jews were killed, was taboo during the communist era which ended in 1990, but is now subject of intense debate.
Commemorations last year of the 70th anniversary of the mass deportations to death camps like Auschwitz, where nearly half of the victims were Hungarian Jews, were marred by the unveiling of a statue marking Germany’s March 1944 invasion of Hungary. In protest, key Jewish groups stayed away from the government’s memorial events.
Critics see the monument, dedicated to “the victims of the German occupation,” as an effort by Hungary to downplay the role of Hungarian officials who helped carry out the deportations following orders from the Nazis after Germany, a former ally, took control of the country.
A “Living Memorial” — a fluctuating exhibit set up by protesters including pictures of Holocaust victims, candles and the Jewish tradition of stones left on graves — has remained opposite the disputed statue for over a year.
Still, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said in February that many Hungarians had chosen “evil over good, the shameful over the honorable” during the Holocaust, a rare acknowledgement of Hungarian responsibility.
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Monika Scislowska in Warsaw, Poland, contributed to this report.
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