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Not necessary but if you were in Hitler's position would you leave a powerful and rearming France behind you before driving east?

Very true but he wanted both and, especially being a militaristic expansionist he wasn't going to risk leaving an unoccupied France behind him while he struck east.

If Hitler had managed to puppetize Poland then he would have gone after France next. Both to secure his western border and as SG mentioned there was the desire to regain Alsace-Lorraine. [Plus for the real fanatics 'avenge' the humiliation of the 1918 defeat]. Only after that would he be happy...

According to Tooze's "The Deluge" Konrad Adenauer, who was Mayor of Cologne at that time argued for the Prussian Rhineland to be separated from Prussia, in part because of its different culture and economic system. - The wiki article on him, see Konrad_Adenauer-Leader_in_Cologne, mentions this...