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I think it’s a bit of a myth that somehow Hitler “spared” the BEF, he didn’t, it’s just that he thought they were already beaten and not worthy of too much attention.

The main enemy was the French army and they were at that time still fighting, Hitler was afraid that he might have already pushed his luck so he eased up the advance a bit to let his infantry catch up with his Panzers before striking the final blow against the French.

Goering promised him that his Luftwaffe could finish off what was left of the Brits on the beaches so he left Fat Herman to get on with it, a relatively cost-free option.

Unfortunately like every task the Luftwaffe was given; knock out the BEF, blitz England into defeat, supply the troops at Stalingrad, defend the homeland, they failed miserably.

Here’s a post that explains in detail what you said:

https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Hitler-halt-the-advance-on-Dunkirk-for-48-hours

Hitler never issued a halt order of the advance on Dunkirk, period.

It is a common misunderstanding, and a popular prop to support some wild theorizing about Hitler’s strategy - like Hitler really wanted to make peace with Britain and thought that letting the BEF escape at Dunkirk would make that more likely, or Hitler wanted the Luftwaffe to destroy the BEF at Dunkirk since it was a more Nazi branch of the military than the Wehrmacht - but there is scant evidence for the theories and a whole lot of evidence to show that Hitler’s commanders were the ones asking for a halt and that Hitler was not the micromanager of his armies he was later the in war.

Here’s what happened: the British and French counterattack at Arras on May 21, 1940 put a fright into German commanders. Though the counterattack had been pretty much a fizzle (some French troops barely got off the start line before running headlong into German spearheads and the British attack had been mauled), it had caught the German panzers with their pants halfway down.

The German armored divisions had outrun the slower infantry divisions and German commanders were worried about their flanks. Erwin Rommel contributed to the general angst among German commanders by claiming he was attacked by “hundreds” of British tanks at Arras and was in favor of sitting tight until the infantry caught up.

While the counterattack had been fended off, German commanders feared another attack at Arras.

General Ewald von Kleist, commanding Panzer Group Kleist, pulled out the 10th Panzer Division from Heinz Guderian’s XIX Corps’s advance on Boulogne and Dunkirk, put it into in reserve in case Britain and France renewed their attack at Arras. Kleist complained that his XIX and XIV corps weren’t strong enough to continue their advance until Arras was dealt with.

These moves were kicked up the chain of command to 4th Army’s Gunther von Kluge and on to Army Group A commander Gerd von Rundstedt. von Kluge ordered a halt on May 23. von Rundstedt approved of the halt and kicked it up to OKH where Field Marschal Walter von Brauchitsch and Hitler okayed the halt. OKH’s orders to von Rundstedt gave him the discretion of when to resume the advance.

von Rundstedt thought 36 hours would be enough for the infantry to catch up and stabilize the flanks but it took more than 48 hours before the panzers got rolling again on May 25, and they did so on von Rundstedt’s orders, not Hitler’s.

While the relative respite between May 23 - 25 gave the BEF, French and Belgian troops a little bit of breathing room, they were still in a dire situation with little hope.

So the halt order originated with the lower level Wehrmacht commanders, not Hitler, and wasn’t part of some elaborate double-flip fakeout move by Hitler in service of some grand strategy. Of course that didn’t stop surviving Wehrmacht generals from blaming Hitler after the war for all the bad decisions and taking credit for the good decisions, of which the halt before Dunkirk, with 20-20 hindsight, was judged a bad decision.