US seeks to calm Poland on FBI chief’s Holocaust piece

US officials Monday sought to tamp down a spat with Poland after the FBI chief suggested the country shared responsibility for the Holocaust with Germany, but dodged questions on whether he would apologize.

FBI Director James Comey “did not intend to suggest that Poland was in some way responsible for the Holocaust,” State Department acting spokeswoman Marie Harf said.

“This is something, obviously, we wanted to make clear today.”

Poland’s President Bronislaw Komorowski had called comments in a Washington Post opinion piece by Comey an “insult” to Poland.

On Thursday, Comey wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Post marking Holocaust Remembrance Day, explaining why he feels it is important that all FBI agents visit the Washington, DC, Holocaust Museum.

The crux of the matter for Comey, he explained in the piece adapted from an address he gave earlier that week, is that those carrying out the genocide were convinced that their actions were proper.

“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,” Comey wrote.

“In their minds, the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland, and Hungary, and so many, many other places didn’t do something evil,” he went on. “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.”

Warsaw reacted angrily, and Sunday summoned US Ambassador Stephen Mull to the foreign ministry to explain the remarks.

Mull told reporters afterwards that he had said the US position was that the Nazis bore sole responsibility for the Holocaust which left six million European Jews dead in World War II.

“The US recognizes and admires the brave efforts of countless Poles, Hungarians and others in occupied Europe in protecting their Jewish countrymen and women from Nazi genocide,” Harf told reporters.

“There are brave patriots, certainly humanitarians, who helped when their country was occupied, who helped protect some of their countrymen,” she said, adding that the Poles “bore a huge brunt of the barbarism of Nazi Germany.”

But she refused to say whether the State Department wanted to see Comey apologize for his remarks, after Mull offered an informal apology.

Poland’s government keenly watches the global media for descriptions of former Nazi German death camps as “Polish” because it says the term — even if used simply as a geographical indicator — can give the impression that Poland bore responsibility for the Holocaust.

Judah Ari Gross contributed to this report.