That is simply an astounding statement. You speak of Poland as if it were some sort of an ally of Germany. I do agree with you that many, maybe even most, Poles knew that something horrible was going on. But what in the world would you have the average Pole do?
Note that I am not talking about the relatively few collaborators. I'm talking about the average Pole, who lived under a brutal occupation. What would you have him do?
The film 1939: Battle of Westerplatte [Polish: Tajemnica Westerplatte] shows us how the German army crushed Poland by main force. ("Westerplatte still fights on"!)
Read the associated articles on Wikipedia to get a sense of what was going on.
Also, The Defense of the Polish Post Office in Danzig (Gdańsk) was another act of Polish defiance in the face of the Wehrmacht boot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_the_Polish_Post_Office_in_Danzig
When you talk to them, you get a picture of a lot of ethnic groups who made a calculated, sincere decision that being occupied by the Nazis was preferable to being occupied by the Soviets.
I’ve read couple of autobiographies of Jews who were from Poland and ended up in the camps and survived.
They tell of living in Poland with the Polish people all in same town and they were neighbors and friends before the WAR. When War started and got ramped up after a few years, Poles, their best friend and neighbors would turn them in for food, for housing, for clothes because they needed to feed and house their families. When Jews got arrested, Poles were there cleaning out their houses for jewels, furniture, food, gardens, etc.
Yes, some Poles did help the Jews but lot looked the other way for self-survival. Lot of Poles were captured and worked to death in the work camps to make clothes, bullets, boots for the Germans.
United States knew what was happening and we turned a blind eye as we didn’t want to get involved until our hand was forced
As a world, we all had a hand in the Holocaust.