Maintaining control in a subdued country

From Louis Menard’s “From the Ashes: A new history of Europe since 1945” (The New Yorker [28 November 2005]: 168):

[Tony Judt, author of Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945] notes that France, a country with a population of some forty million, was administered by fifteen hundred Nazis, plus six thousand Germen policemen. A skeleton team sufficed in the Netherlands as well.