Poland summons US Ambassador over FBI head's Holocaust remarks

(Vatican Radio) Poland's Foreign Ministry has summoned the U.S. Ambassador  after the head of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI, suggested Poles were involved in the Holocaust. The row overshadowed WWII commemorations in Poland, Hungary and Germany.

Click below to hear the report from correspondent Stefan Bos

The Polish Foreign Ministry told American Ambassador Stephen Mull that it wanted to "protest and demand an apology," after FBI director James Comey suggested that Poles were accomplices in the Holocaust. He made the remarks in a story on the need to educate about the Holocaust which was published by The Washington Post news last Thursday.

Comey said, "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."

However many Poles view themselves as victims of World War Two and the government has made it a point that concentration camps such as Auschwitz were run by Nazi-Germany.

Mull condemns remarks

In published remarks Ambassador Mull said Comey's words were "wrong, harmful and offensive," and didn't reflect the U.S. administration's views and that he would contact the FBI and Washington about the matter.

The controversy emerged on the day he attended the 72nd anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazi Germans, who transported tens of thousands of the residents, including many Jews, to a camp.

Additionally, it overshadowed the commemoration of the liberation of two Nazi concentration camps 70 years ago in Germany during the closing days of World War II.

Poland's first lady, Anna Komorowska, joined in remembrance activities Sunday at the site of the Ravensbrueck women's camp, attended also by Polish nuns, as many of the tens of thousands of victims who died here were Polish.

Ceremonies also were taking place at the former Sachsenhausen camp near Berlin where tens of thousands died as well, many of them Jews as well as others the Nazis didn't like.

Close Nazi ally

Sunday's ceremonies came while in Hungary, survivors rescued 70 years ago from a train taking them from one concentration camp to another paid tribute to US troops who liberated them.

About 2,500 Jewish prisoners, including some 560 children were taken from the Bergen-Belsen Camp in Germany to the Theresienstadt camp in what was Czechoslovakia when they were rescued.

The remembrance event came at a time of concerns over renewed anti-Semitism in Central and Eastern Europe where the Jobbik party in Hungary is gaining support, especially among young voters.

Last week 10,000 people attended the March of the Living in Budapest to remember the Holocaust, in which some 600,000 Hungarian Jews died and others. A Holocaust survivor asked the crowd not to forget what happened. "We have come here to remember the death marches under the motto March of the Living," he said. "The death marches recall words of complains in the Psalm saying "death ties have encircled me." Woes of the world of the dead...have come upon me"

Jewish Congress concerned

The head of the World Jewish Congress, President Ronald S. Lauder, strongly denounced the rise of anti-Semitism when he addressed participants in the March. He said "the March of the Living reminds us what happens when the world is silent,” when six million Jews, 600,000 of them Hungarians, were murdered. Hungary was also an ally of Nazi-Germany during most the war.  

Lauder criticized both the Fidesz party of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the opposition Socialists of not doing enough to halt the rise of the far-right Jobbik party, which has attracted many young voters.

He accused the non-Jobbik parties of "not giving them any hope." 

Lauder condemned a Jobbik deputy who recently spat on a Holocaust memorial in Budapest party calls in Parliament for lists of Jewish politicians. He said the party damages Hungary's image abroad. "Jobbik may think they are true Hungarians trying to save Hungary, but Jobbik hurts Hungary."

And he warned that "the Hungarian Jewish community is not going anywhere. We march today to say: We are here. We are alive. And here we will remain.”

Recent polls suggest Jobbik is the second most popular party behind Fidesz and is steadily closing the gap.

Lauder, a businessman whose maternal grandparents were born in Hungary, said in separate remarks that many younger voters were turning to Jobbik not because of anti-Semitism but because "they're looking for an alternative. They're looking for something different."