| الوصف: |
The defeat and incarceration of the bulk of the French Army after June 1940 justifies separate treatment on account of its sheer scale. Having taken some 1.8 million French servicemen as prisoners, the Germans removed around 1.5 million of them to Germany to augment the agricultural labour force inside the Reich where most remained for the duration of the war. Although the terms of the Geneva Convention were largely adhered to, the prisoners’ captivity was also influenced by the bilateral treaties between Pétain’s Vichy regime and Berlin. The Germans also engaged in some largely unsuccessful attempts to encourage the French prisoners to become civilians with the promise of better pay and conditions, and at the same time used them as bargaining counters with the Vichy authorities to extract much more useful civilian skilled industrial labour from France—the so-called Relève. With so many men held as hostages, the Vichy regime also saw the prisoners as an important domestic political issue and went to great lengths to offer protection to their wives and families. There were wartime repatriations and some escapes, but the majority of the officers and soldiers of 1940 remained in Germany until their liberation |
