Opinion | Does the U.S. State Department Now Wink at Holocaust Distortion?

The distortion of Holocaust history and Holocaust memory is as egregious and as dangerous as Holocaust denial. Eighty years after the evidence set forth at Nuremberg should have made Hitler’s “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” an indelible part of society’s collective consciousness, the Holocaust continues to be the subject of blatant revisionism to suit one political agenda or another.

 A jaw-dropping speech delivered this past Thursday in Warsaw by Thomas Rose, the new United States ambassador to Poland, is only the most recent example. Addressing a conference on antisemitism organized by the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, Rose absolved Poland and the Polish people of any and all responsibility for the genocide of European Jewry during World War II. Poland, he declared, “has been burdened with the moral stain that was never its own, the persistent belief that Poland shares guilt for the barbaric crimes committed against it…It’s a grotesque falsehood and the equivalent of a blood libel against the Polish people and Polish nation.”

Rose, an Orthodox Jew and a former publisher and CEO of the Jerusalem Post, knows—or should have known—better.

Rose’s speech reiterated a narrative promoted by the Polish political far right that rejects any suggestion that Poland or Poles played any role whatsoever in the perpetration of the Holocaust. To that end, in 2018, at the behest of the then-ruling right-wing populist and national-conservative Law and Justice Party, the Polish parliament enacted a highly controversial law that criminalized claiming publicly that “that the Polish Nation or the Republic of Poland is responsible or co-responsible for Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich.”

“All the atrocities and all the victims, everything that happened during World War II on Polish soil, has to be attributed to Germany,” Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki told foreign reporters in February 2018. “We will never be accused of complicity in the Holocaust. This is our ‘to be or not to be.’”

Morawiecki’s assertion of absolute Polish innocence, like Rose’s, was categorically false. Moreover, Rose, an Orthodox Jew and a former publisher and CEO of the Jerusalem Post, knows—or should have known—better. While it is true that millions of Jews were murdered by Germans at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka and other death camps in German-occupied Poland, it is equally true that thousands of non-Jewish Poles were complicit in this slaughter. While Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust remembrance authority, has recognized more than 7,000 Poles as “Righteous Among the Nations,” thousands upon thousands of other Poles betrayed Jews hiding from the Nazis by handing them over to the Gestapo, profiteered from their deportation to ghettos and death camps and killed tens if not hundreds of thousands of Jews outright.

[Read: “Travel and Teshuvah: Our Tour Through Poland’s Contradictions.”]

Forty years ago, I criticized President Ronald Reagan when he said that the members of the notorious Nazi Waffen-SS buried at the German military cemetery at Bitburg “were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.” I said at that time that “The photograph of the president of the United States laying a wreath in the name of the United States at a cemetery which includes SS officers will be used and exploited by revisionist historians and neo-Nazis as proof that the president has forgiven the SS and it is now all right to forget.”

In a similar vein, Rose’s ill-advised and historically false whitewashing of the Polish role in the genocide of European Jewry is certain to be fodder for Polish and other antisemites who seek to trivialize (if not dismiss altogether) the Holocaust as a minor, essentially meaningless occurrence that does not warrant commemoration or remembrance. 

Why is all this important? For starters, because it undermines the legitimacy of Holocaust memory as conveyed by the cataclysm’s survivors. Such a speech discredits any Jewish survivors who testified that they were betrayed by Poles, or that members of their families were killed by Poles. 

In her groundbreaking book Such a Beautiful Sunny Day: Jews Seeking Refuge in the Polish Countryside, 1942-1945, historian Barbara Engelking quotes Chaja Comber, who had testified how a Pole beat her brother, telling him that “you’ve lived long enough,” and handed him over to German soldiers who shot him. “We watched the whole incident from our hiding place in the barley,” Chaja said.

Engelking also quotes Jankel Kopiec’s account of how in June 1943 a group of Poles attacked eight members of his family, who had found refuge with a peasant in southwestern Poland. “They robbed them of everything,” Kopiec recalled, “even took off the little child’s shoes, and led them out into the forest.” Kopiec then went on to describe how these Poles beat his brother “until he lost consciousness” and then “loaded him onto a cart, tied him up,” and turned him over to the Germans. Kopiec added that he found out subsequently that all the members of his family “had been shot to death in the Jewish cemetery.”

What Rose did in his Warsaw speech was to dismiss Chaja Comber, Jankiel Kopiec and all survivors who recounted similar experiences as liars. And he did so in his official capacity as an ambassador representing the U.S. government.

Such Holocaust distortion cannot be allowed to stand, not least because the views Rose expressed go counter to U.S. policy. The Global Guidelines for Countering Antisemitism, adopted by the Biden State Department in July 2024 and adhered to by the Trump administration, state unambiguously that Holocaust distortion constitutes “an especially pernicious form of antisemitism.”

One of the working examples provided by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in support of its definition of antisemitism is “Denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g. gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II (the Holocaust).”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has long been a champion on behalf of Holocaust remembrance and a fighter against all forms of antisemitism, including Holocaust denial and distortion. In a declaration commemorating the National Days of Remembrance of victims of the Holocaust, Rubio emphasized that “We must ensure the history, and the facts, of the Holocaust are not denied or distorted.”

Rubio must now be true to his word. At the very least, he must disavow Rose’s contemptible remarks and order Rose to recant and apologize publicly. Otherwise, very little, if anything, will be left of what has historically been a strong U.S. stand against outright Holocaust denial and distortion. 

Menachem Z. Rosensaft is adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School, lecturer-in-law at Columbia Law School and general counsel emeritus of the World Jewish Congress. His most recent book is Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz.

Top image: U.S. Ambassador to Poland Thomas Rose. U.S. Embassy Warsaw screenshot.