The U.S. Ambassador to Poland has apologized for remarks made by FBI Director James Comey in a Washington Post article last week that suggested Poland was complicit in the Holocaust.
The April 16 opinion piece, entitled "Why I require FBI agents to visit the Holocaust Museum," was adapted from a speech Comey delivered at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
It included the following passage:
"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."
Immediately after the publication of the speech, Poland's Ambassador in Washington, Ryszard Schnepf, wrote a letter to Comey over the "unacceptable" suggestion that "Poland shared responsibility for the Holocaust."
According to a statement published Saturday on the Polish Embassy website, the letter "[protested] against the falsification of history, especially for accusing Poles of perpetrating crimes which not only did they not commit, but which they themselves were victims of."
On Sunday, U.S. Ambassador to Warsaw Stephen Mull tweeted that he "regretted" the suggestion, which he described as "untrue" and "malicious," adding that he would be working to fix the situation.
Strasznie żałuję sugestię że Polska była odpowiedzialna za Holocaust, która jest nieprawda, szkodliwa,i obrażliwa.Będę pracował aby naprawić
Mull told reporters he would attend a meeting on Sunday afternoon at the Polish foreign ministry, Reuters reported.
"Suggestions that Poland, or any other country apart from the Nazi Germany was responsible for the Holocaust are wrong, harmful and offensive," Mull said in Polish, according to Reuters.
"I think that Comey's wider message was that there were many people in the world that aided the Nazi criminals, or there were people who did not respond sufficiently, ... also in the United States."
Radosław Sikorski, the Polish Marshal of the Sejm, a position akin to Speaker of the House, thanked Mull for his comments:
Thank you,@SteveMullUSA for your professional response. Polish-American alliance and friendship will survive this :) http://t.co/bgJOELIgV7