Truth Does Not Require Apologies

"To those who don’t know the historical truth, I would like to say today, Poland was not an aggressor but a victim during the Second World War." 
"We would expect officials discussing these matters to know this."
Polish Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz 
 
"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." 
James Comey, FBI director

James B. Comey, director of the F.B.I., in March. In a speech last week at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, he said,  Evan Vucci/Associated Press 

Poland would like to re-write history. They're not alone. Germany, whose Third Reich history is so indelibly etched in documents, in still-living memory, in first-hand accounts, in historical interpretation wedded to accuracy and truth, cannot re-write the barbarity it wrought when it sought to refashion the world in its Nordic Aryan conquering image, along with its dedication to a side-issue that systematically, and carefully-annotated in official accounts, destroyed the lives of six million Jews.

When Germany planned its extermination camps it had no wish to unduly soil German territory so it looked abroad for placement of these death-dealing places set to operate with maximum efficiency resulting in macro-deliveries to the Angel of Death. Where else but places where anti-Semitism was well entrenched, historically part of the culture, where regular pogroms targeting Jews were not unknown and where perpetrators were unlikely to find it repulsive that a technically-proficient extermination program would be set up to rid them of those eternal pests?

So Poland was chosen to host the greatest number of Nazi concentration camps, and it was also the country that had the greatest number of Jews living within it, so it was all very convenient. Poland was not alone, since Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany itself, Holland, Italy Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Russia and Yugoslavia were also distinguished by the presence of these death camps many of which were originally built to concentrate in one place political prisoners.

Poland protests, and always has, that the most notorious of the death camps that existed on its territory were not Polish death camps, they were German Nazi death camps designed to accomplish the Final Solution. They just happened to be on Polish soil because Poland was an occupied country under the yoke of the Third Reich; unwillingly occupied. But facts are always uncomfortable, and it is a fact that police and soldiers in Poland didn't at all mind delivering their Jews to the death camps.

On the other hand, France was a collaborationist country and there too, as in Hungary and elsewhere, the national police and armed forces became adept at rounding up Jews, placing them on transports and railcars and sending them off to the concentration camps where work made them feel as though they were free, until their souls accompanied their ashes in black detritus that emanated from those huge smokestacks to ultimately nourish the soil below.

And it was in Poland that Jews liberated from death camps returned to their former villages with a mind to resuming occupation in their homes, only to find them occupied by Poles, former neighbours who had availed themselves of whatever the Germans didn't take. And in their rage at the return of their former neighbours, mounted a pogrom to finish what the Germans clumsily left undone.

As the last German to be placed on trial, 93-year-old Oskar Gröning has stated, he was 'morally culpable', but not 'criminally responsible', for his part in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews while working as an 'accountant' in the Auschwitz death camp, counting up and accounting for the money taken from those same Jews before they were gassed to death by Zyklon B showers, or simply summarily shot, and their bodies reduced to ashes.