Praise for Comey

Sincere congratulations to FBI Director James Comey: He was completely right this time. Poles and Hungarians can be angry all they want.

What did the head of the FBI say at the Washington Holocaust Museum that angered Warsaw so much that they demanded an apology from the U.S. administration? His quote: “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.”

Of course, it’s true that the Polish government had nothing to do with the genocide committed against the Jews on its territory. Poland didn’t even exist, since its territory was occupied by Germany. Unlike Vichy France and the Quisling-controlled Norway, there was no collaborationist government in Warsaw.

But many Poles are guilty because not only did they cooperate with the Nazis, but some continued their pogrom after Nazi Germany’s surrender. Because of this, half of the Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust fled Poland to Germany, settling in the Western-occupied zone.

It has long been known that the anti-Semite Horthy resisted German pressure to liquidate the Hungarian Jews. However, this cannot completely absolve Hungary for the suffering of almost 600,000 Jewish citizens after the Arrow Cross Party came to power in March of 1944. In Hungary today, the Communists are lumped together with the Arrow Cross members, a local version of the Nazis, under whose authority Hungarian Jews were exterminated. Something similar is going on in Croatia, and, in Serbia, they marked the 70th anniversary of the defeat of Fascism by rehabilitating Draža Mihailović [leader of the collaborationist Chetniks].

Director Comey, after receiving a note of protest from Warsaw, absolved the Polish government of blame for Nazi crimes, since the country was occupied.

The only thing I resent is that he didn’t also accuse the Americans and the British at the Washington Holocaust Museum: not for complicity in crimes, but for inaction. They knew that the Arrow Cross Party was sending Jews directly to Auschwitz. Everyone knew it all the time, but the Western Allies did nothing to prevent it.

This is a good opportunity to commend Germany, which yesterday joined other European states and Pope Francis in calling the Turkish massacre of 1.5 million Armenians 100 years ago a genocide. Head of State Joachim Gauck recalled that the authorities in Berlin ignored their diplomats’ reports about the crime being committed against the Armenians in order not to jeopardize relations with Istanbul.

The Nazis banned an Austrian novel about the massacre. Nevertheless, the book reached readers in the Jewish ghettos in the 1930s, a herald of what was to come for them.

As the German president said, it’s impossible to escape guilt through the “denial, repression or trivialization” of history.