Was Hitler generous to the French after their defeat?

I don't have all of my facts straight but I'm pretty sure that after the French defeat Hitler allowed them to keep their navy and their colonies and allowed the southern half of France to be free though Germany later took that over as well. Did Hitler ever use the French navy to his advantage? Would about the 1 or 2 million French prisoners of war? Were they taken back to Germany and made to work in factories?

 

Generosity was not one of Adolf's qualities. He could have increased his demands,but with the risk that the French government would leave France and continue the war .

 

About the French POW (source : WWII stats)

1 may 1941:1,285 million

1 january 1942:1,148 million

1 january 1943:1,055 million

1 january 1944:0,941 million

1 january 1945: 0,920 million

 

If HItler had tried to take the French navy they likely would either have sailed to Britain or scuttled. Since he had considerable "influence" on Vichy France neither would have been to his advantage. Several of the details of the armistace seemed designed to humiliate France. Generocity is not the word I would use for his actions in this case.

 

Hitler took the most he could get. Considering the French still had their Empire and their Fleet, demanding more would have been too risky. Having half of the territory occupied and installing a puppet state in the rest would allow the French to save their their Empire while demanding less occupation troops. Hitler even satisfied the Italians, who despite not being able to get through the Alps front and suffered losses there could set at the Victors table and got Corsica , some territies in the Savoie, nice and Menton. They even got an a Base in Bordeaux.
The French fleet was divided into four parts : those who made it to the UK , those who made it to the Colonies, those who were in the 'Free" zone and those who crossed the Atlantic .

Could your May 1940 figure be 1 July 1940 , not May (the Battle of France only started on May 10th) ?

 

The navy was actually to be "beached" - eventually disarmed and broken up under the control of German and Italian "Armistice Commissioners". In the meantime, the navy's movements (apart from Darlan's taking them to North Africa...then the survivors back again!) were controlled by the Germans, as were any OTHER French military movements in the colonies.

So that was the FIRST hardhitting part of the Arnmistice terms - france couldn't really protect itself; and its inability to move forces as it would have liked meant that among other things she lost Indo-China to the Japanese in early '41.

The SECOND part was - that although the Germans "occupied" and controlled the slightly larger "half" of Metropolitan France and the Vichy government the southern part...Vichy had to PAY for the government and administration and policing of it all - INCLUDING the German-controlled bit!!!

But the worst part was that the "French government" - which in reality meant Vichy - agreed to pay ALL the costs of maintaining the German Occupation....and this was not set down specifically; so the Germans "charged" the French more and more for their "upkeep" as the war went on, extracted in terms of money, raw materials...and of course, forced labour by French workers transferred to Germany.

 

No one is saying that the terms were not harsh and getting worse as the war continued, but in comparison to any of the other nations defeated by Germany, the terms were less onerous overall.

Part of it certainly had to do with keeping the French fleet out of British hands and getting a complete end of hostilities, but I do suspect that some of it was due to his First War experiences and perhaps just a smidgen of respect for defeating a enemy he might have had qualms about defeating so easily. Just a smidge and it quickly eroded.

 

Belasar - I'm not sure about this; if you look at Holland, and Denmark, and Norway...even Belgium - each of them had a quite long "springtime" of Occupation when things weren't so bad and the Germans weren't so demanding...and what there was went hand-in-hand with a "hearts and minds" campaign, trying to get the locals on board through a nazification of domestic politics rather than outright domination - the Nasjonal Samling in Norway, the Belgian Rex party. etc...

In each of them the attempts fell apart, of course - but in some of them, like Denmark, the springtime lasted fully two years before the gloves came off...

 

Considering that the occupied countries were forced to subsidize the German war effort, mostly through food taxes, I wonder how fond the occupied thought of them Just before invading Russia, at least hundreds of trucks were taken from the French which had an effect of milk delivery and other food stuff for local consumption.