Hungary joins Poland in rejecting FBI chief's remarks about Holocaust role of both countries

FILE - This is a Wednesday, March 25, 2015 file photo of FBI director James Comey as he gestures during a news conference at FBI headquarters in Washington. FBI director Comey has caused huge offense to a U.S. ally: using language to suggest that Poles were accomplices in the Holocaust. On Monday, April 20, 2015 Poles were waiting to see if FBI director James Comey apologizes _ something Polish Foreign Minister Grzegorz Schetyna said he expected so the matter can be settled. (AP Photo/ Evan Vucci, File) (The Associated Press)

FILE - In this July 20, 2014 file photo the new monument dedicated to the victims of the German occupation of Hungary during WW II is seen at Szabadsag (Liberty) square in downtown Budapest, Hungary. (AP Photo/MTI, Noemi Bruzak) (The Associated Press)

Hungary has joined Poland in denouncing remarks by FBI director James Comey about the Holocaust for their "astounding insensitivity and impermissible superficiality."

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.