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.