The Prisoner of War Question and the Beginnings of Collaboration: The Franco-German Agreement of 16 November 1940

Abstract

This article discusses the connections between collaboration and the prisoner of war question in the early Vichy period by tracing the evolution of the Franco-German agreement of 16 November 1940 and its repercussions on French POWs. Based on the Scapini Papers and French and German archival materials, the article argues that the agreement happened in the context of a voluntary policy of collaboration initiated by the Vichy authorities, who hoped that collaboration would trigger German concessions on the POW question, but did not push collaboration to ease the fate of the POWs. Hitler likely offered the agreement as a concession that would allow Vichy to demonstrate to the French public an apparent success of collaboration, detracting from some hostile German measures that occurred at the same time. Vichy took the bait because it hoped to win over the French POWs in Germany to Pétainist ideology and because it was eager to bolster its own legitimacy. But humanitarian considerations also played a role in the French consent to this agreement, which to some extent can be seen as preventive collaboration. Plausibly, the agreement and the framework it established, despite undeniable dangers, represented a lesser evil for the French POWs.

Collaboration and Its Political Functions

“…Yet, he never committed himself as to the future in any way, and kept reciprocity for favours rendered to the strictest minimum" (Burrin 1996, 85;Rousso 1991, 251). Thus, Vichy and Germany did successfully cooperate over prisoners of war (Scheck 2010), economic coordination (Burrin 1996, 232), and the imprisonment and deportation of Jews (Gordon 1993, 13). Nevertheless, on the issues of seeing Vichy as an equal partner, repatriating large numbers of French prisoners of war, moving the capital back to Paris, eliminating French "reparations" to Germany, or guaranteeing the sanctity of the French Empire, Germany did not budge.…”

Convenient and Conditional Humanitarianism: Evacuating French and French Jewish Children to Switzerland during the Second World War

“…As Raffel Scheck argues, the Germans did not agree to anything that did not work to their advantage; since France had to pay the Swiss government a daily fee for room and board at a hotel for every single prisoner, repatriating them to France stopped that particular financial haemorrhage, while also supplying Vichy-France (and hence, Germany) with an extra 30,000 able-bodied men to work for war industries. 30 From Pilet-Golaz and representatives of the Swiss Red Cross and Pro Juventute agreed that the only solution lay in involving the Swiss federal government, the only body that could raise sufficient funds and resources to successfully carry out these evacuations. 33 34 Although this new organization provided remarkable relief (over 5,000 children were evacuated in just the first three months of 1942), the old methods of the Swiss Coalition were soon revamped, remodelled and, to an extent, forgotten.…”

Uncertain Fates: Allied Soldiers at the Miranda De Ebro Concentration Camp

“…The Spanish consulate in Marseilles provided transit visas to any person holding a visa for Portugal; it carefully screened for members of pro‐Republican political parties or opponents of the Franquist regime. Meanwhile, on 11 November 1940, Spanish transit authorizations were further restricted as a result of the armistice with France and the agreements between Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler and the Spanish security chief and eventual ambassador in Berlin, Count Mayalde (1904–95), regarding cooperation between the Gestapo , the Spanish police, and other intelligence agencies of both countries . The aim of these agreements was to repatriate the maximum number of combat‐age Axis citizens while detaining Allied citizens in order to reduce the numbers of British and, eventually, US troops as much as possible.…”