FBI Director James Comey has found himself embroiled in controversy for a paragraph in his Washington Post article commemorating Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The paragraph which motivated the Polish to summon the American ambassador for an apology goes as follows:
"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."
So, I think it's not hard to argue that it's bad taste to mention Poland in the same breadth as Germany since the Poles suffered greatly under Nazi occupation ( I've heard ,but cannot confirm, that a fifth of the Poles died in WWII), but it seems technically correct to say that there were collaborators/facilitators in Germany, Poland, and Hungary. My question to /r/AskHistorians is to what was the extent did the Poles and Hungarians cooperate with the Nazis?
Further reading: Link to WWII FAQ
I don't really understand where Hungary fits in. They were in a completely different situation than Poland. Hungary was nether slavic, nor an occupied country (until '44).
They were an ally of Germany, with their own relatively autonomous government who had their own goals during the war (restoring greater Hungary). In '44 Germany occupied the country and installed the local fascists as a puppet regime. Hungary was very much involved in Operation Barbarossa.
In short, their government throughout the war was an ally of Germany and did this on their own accord, without being forced.
Poland on the other hand was an occupied country, their people branded as subhuman and marked for extermination. While there definitly was cooperation by some, with NS, this was nether widespread, nor goverment sanctioned and pretty much the exception, and not the rule.
So I don't understand why the are talking about two countries that were completely different during the war and group them as if they had a likewise fate.