What+actions+did+the+Germans+take+against+Gentiles?

The Germans had absolutely no tolerance for anyone who helped Jews during WW2 so as you can imagine the punishments were terrible. The Nazis hung up posters that stated the law and the punishments for helping Jews. The law was that if a person (a gentile) was caught aiding a Jew in any way, in a German occupied country (Poland, The Netherlands, Albania or Hungary) they would sometimes be brought to a "trial" to determine thir innocence. These trials were hosted by a German judge, with German Lawyers, and German everything, therfore these trials were ghastly unfair. So obviously almost every single person who was accused was pronounced "guilty". And when someone was found guilty they either shot or they were taken a concentration camp, sometimes they were taken with the Jew they were caught helping. These trials were always supposed to take place when someone was caught but a lot of the time they would just be shot on spot.[|Risk]

The reason that there were punishments in some places and some not was because the nations that had these harsh punishments were usually occupied by the German army. Obviously they have no jurisdiction in other countries so they cant punish the people of those countries. So it was a lot easier for gentiles to help Jews in those countries.

Peculiarly enough, the country with the most gentile efforts was the country with the most german occupation besides Germany itself, Poland has had over 6,000 recognized holocaust efforts. But one historian suggests that there might have been at least 1,200,000 Polish efforts to aid the Jews.[|Polish Gentiles]

The people who usually enforced these punishments were called the Schutzstaffel (SS for short), this name struck fear into the heart of basically every European in the enitere continent, the SS were brutal. One of their most common practices was to try and kill a mother and child with a single bullet, and as referenced to in Elie Weisels book "night" they would also used small children as target practice for their gunners by throwing them up in the air and rapidly firing.They were the main group of Nazis in the holocaust, if someone said something like "the Nazis burned down my house and took my neighbors away from their homes" they were probably talking about the SS. The SS is responsible for the death/torture of over 12 million people. Of all different types: Jews, Poles, Homosexuals, handicaps, Jehovah's Witnesses, Slavs and Prisoners of war. The SS had special divisions called Death Squads that were sent out to terminate possible threats which in this case would be the Zegota and Polish Underground, thankfully these two extremely important organizations were never discovered by the SS. If someone was suspected of aiding a Jew members of the SS would be the people that would go to the house and arrest/kill the person. [|SS]

Unfortunantly many Poles met theyre demise because of their heroic actions. Officially around 700 poles were honored with medals for giving their lives, but many sourcs point to the fact that the Germans killed 10s 0f 1000s of Righteous Poles for helping the Jews.[|Polish Gentiles]

I think that even though there were many Gentiles, the germans really prevented a true problem by enforcing these laws. As one can imagine most people do not want to risk their life to help someone they have no bearing to, so with the risk of being killed (which many gentiles were) not as many people were apt to help the Jews during WW2. Other than those laws not any specific action was taken towards the Gentiles [|Righteous among the Nations] - Andrew

This is a picture of a nazi shooting a mother and child, in this picture he is most likely shooting a Jew not a gentile but the concept is the same this is what would happen if a person was cought helping a Jew in a German occupied country.