[dfwgator]

You really know how to get my blood pressure up. ;)

-Poland was the only occupied country where aiding Jews in any manner was an automatic death sentence.

-There are more righteous Gentiles from Poland in Yad Vashem than from any other country.

-There was no “Vichy” Polish government, it was all occupied and administered by the Nazis, unlike Vichy France, where the French ran things on a day-to-day basis, under careful Nazi watch.

-No Poles served in the SS.

[colorado tanker]

All of Poland was annexed into Germany. Most of it was in an autonomous entity called the "General Government," administered by Germans. There was a general plan eventually to deport (in practice probably kill) most of the non-Jewish Poles to give Hitler his "lebensraum" for settlement of Germans. Hitler intended this area become as ethnically German as Germany proper. Millions of Poles died during the war. And, yes, aiding Jews, even giving them food, carried the death penalty.

Article and map:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Government