Budapest – Hungary has joined Poland in denouncing remarks by FBI director James Comey about the Holocaust for their “astounding insensitivity and impermissible superficiality.”
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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 and resorted to the generalization of Hungarians. The ministry said it sent a written complaint about the issue to the U.S. Embassy in Budapest.
Comey, arguing for the importance of Holocaust education, said that “In their minds, the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland, and Hungary … didn’t do something evil.”
About 550,000 Hungarian Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Hungarian officials helped carry out mass deportations done after Germany, a former ally, invaded in March 1944.
By their responses, Poland and Hungary show that Comey is correct and that these countries have never truly come to grips with their collective guilt. The rise of antisemitism and the xenophobic right in Europe is further testament to this failure.
Didn’t the Horthy Government fall to the Arrow Cross? Didn’t the Arrow Cross cooperate fully with the Nazi Party killing thousands? Wasn’t it the Arrow Cross who were responsible for the murders of Jews all along the Danube? Isn’t there a memorial there now? The Foreign Ministry would like to rewrite history. Oh, if only they could!
while the Hungarians never had the history of Antisemitism to the same level as the poles did, the majority of them were only too happy to cooperate with the Nazis, Eichmann yemach shemo said that the killing of the Hungarian Jews would not have been possible without the help of the Hungarian people.
That being said post war there was a Hungarian Jewish community until the 56ers came to america
My Parents were from Hungary and Poland and they told us children that the Hungarian police were called “Gendarmes” (Polish police were involved too) rounded up the the Jews in their shtetl gleefully and did not even need the help of the Nazis Y”M’S and the neighbours could not wait to rob their houses. We as a second generation of survivors feel their sadness too!