 FBI Director James Comey (Cliff Owen/Associated Press) 
 
 The Polish ambassador to Washington has protested, the Polish president has protested, the speaker of the Polish parliament (to whom I am married) has protested — and the U.S. ambassador to Warsaw has apologized profusely. Because James Comey, the director of the FBI, in a speech that was reprinted in The Post arguing for more Holocaust education, demonstrated just how badly he needs it himself. 'Falsification of history' 
 
 In the Washington Post article on Thursday, aimed at raising education about the Holocaust, Mr 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. They convinced themselves it was the right thing to do, the thing they had to do.” 
 
 There are a number of problems with that pair of weak sentences, starting with the vast difference between Germany and the rest. Millions of others died too – Polish intellectuals, priests and politicians were all Nazi targets. But that doesn’t mean that “in their minds” they “didn’t do something evil.” 
 
 Although the circumstances were different, Germany’s leading role is equally clear in Hungary. 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. Last month, on a flight home from Eastern Europe, I reread Viktor Frankl’s wrenching “Man’s Search for Meaning,” in which he seeks to find meaning in suffering and loving, among other things.
– Angry Polish leaders have demanded an apology from the US ambassador after some ill-judged remarks on the Holocaust from FBI Director James Comey. "In their minds, the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland, and Hungary, and so many, many other places didn't do something evil," Comey wrote in a Washington Post column. "They convinced themselves it was the right thing to do, the thing they had to do." Many Poles are infuriated by the suggestion they shared the blame for Nazi crimes, reports the BBC, which notes that around 6 million Polish citizens died during the 1939-45 occupation. "Poland was not a perpetrator but a victim of World War II," says Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz. "I would expect full historical knowledge from officials who speak on the matter." The American ambassador in Warsaw says suggestions that any country other than "Nazi Germany was responsible for the Holocaust are wrong, harmful, and offensive," adding that he thinks Comey's wider message was that there were people, even in the US, who "aided the Nazi criminals, or there were people who did not respond sufficiently," reports Reuters. In another Washington Post column, Anne Applebaum writes that it's wrong to call Poles "accomplices" because after the 1939 invasion of Poland, it was Germans who created "a lawless, violent world, one in which anyone could be arbitrarily murdered, any Jew could be deported—and any Pole who helped a Jew could be shot instantly, along with his entire family. Many were."