While it wasn't as much of a muddy, bloody mess as Europe, World War II's North African
Campaign was certainly not the "clean" war some propagandists and historians claim it was.
While some sources speak of camaraderie between Axis and Allied forces,
notably between Germans and British soldiers, it was still a war. Many soldiers and civilians
lost their lives, and the campaign was not without its atrocities and war crimes.
Of course, it's difficult to tackle this topic without first tackling German field marshal Irwin
"The Desert Fox" Rommel. After all, he led the Afrika Korps against the Allies in North Africa,
and -- in no small part because of propaganda before, during, and after the campaign -- became
the face of this entire "clean war" myth, which, indeed, is very much a constituent
of the myth of the clean Wehrmacht. In this video, we're going to discuss the myth in
greater detail, focusing on "chivalrous, honourable" Rommel and his Afrika Korps.
Before we delve any deeper, it's worth summarising the North African Campaign.
The campaign started following Italy's declaration of war on the 10th of June 1940,
soon after which British forces invaded Italian Libya and took Fort Capuzzo.
The Italians then waged a counteroffensive into Egypt and captured Sidi Barrini,
and this counteroffensive was met with yet another counteroffensive, known officially
as Operation Compass, in which the Brits and their allies all but obliterated the Italians.
Wishing to retain some sort of foothold, Hitler deployed Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps in
North Africa in February 1941. It was now very much Rommel against the British generals, and
following a series of battles, Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery was able to crush Rommel's
Afrika Korps in the Second Battle of El Alamein in October 1942, scattering its remnants into
Tunisia, where, after some battles yet, the Axis forces in North Africa surrendered. This victory
set the Allies up for the Italian Campaign, which eventuated in the collapse of Fascist Italy.
While Rommel made some pretty questionable orders back in France -- setting fire to
civilian housing and pretending to surrender to French troops
just to bait them into a trap, to name a few -- the atrocities and war crimes
he and his Afrika Korps committed in North Africa were largely against Jews and POWs.
Despite their defeat in El Alamein, the Afrika Korps retained a grip on North Africa until after
Operation Torch, and during this time, the Korps was anything but clean. In November, for instance,
the Korps participated in a massacre in the Libyan city of Benghazi, in which 67 Jews were slain. But
that was just the start. The Korps also advised their Italian allies on establishing concentration
camps in Libya, such as in the city of Benghazi itself, and deporting Jews en masse to Italy.
In these Libyan camps, some 3,500 Jews were detained, and some 600 of them perished.
While in Tunesia, a North African country between Alegia and Libya, Rommel allowed his
Korps to plunder Jewish Ghettos, such as those in the towns of Tunis and Sousse, and blackmail
Jews into paying some 90 million Francs towards the German war effort. On top of this, Rommel
had his men assist the Italians in establishing concentration camps and deporting Jews to Italy,
where they were forced to labour, similarly to what happened in Libya. Also while in Tunesia,
Rommel cooperated with notorious war criminal SS-Obersturmbannführer Walter Rauff, facilitating
forced labour and genocide. For some context, Rauff was one of the Nazis involved in the design
and implementation of mobile gas vans, in which victims suffocated for up to twenty minutes before
finally succumbing to the fumes. More to the point, the SS unit under Rauff's command was known
as Einsatzgruppe Egypt, and it was tasked with the eradication of Jews in Egypt and Palestine.
Einsatzgruppe, however, was small and therefore needed muscle to complete its disgusting task.
This is where Rommel and his Afrika Korps came in, forcing Jews to build fortifications for the Korps
and concentration camps for thousands of other Jews to die in. Even as far back as July 1942,
Rommel was giving orders to Rauff, telling him to murder all the Jews of Palestine
after the Afrika Korps had taken the state. Thankfully, Rommel never made past El Alamain.
Lastly, the Afrika Korps also murdered some 500 Jewish German and Jewish Austrian
POWs of the Jewish Brigade, an all-Jewish unit of the British Army. While Rommel's involvement
in this massacre remains unclear, these were troops under his command.
So if Rommel and his Afrika Korps did all this, why would anyone think they fought
a "clean" war against the Allies in the North African Campaign? The answer is many-layered,
though it mostly comes down to propaganda, on both sides, both during and after World War II.
During World War II, at least while the Germans were winning,
Rommel was a German hero, with his exploits were amplified or straight-up falsified
for the Nazi Party's minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, and other propagandists,
and he was sold as Hitler's favourite general and an all-round solid Aryan. It didn't take
long for Allied media to catch wind, painting Rommel as a "chivalrous, honourable" soldier
and a keen military mind, to whom losing was justified, and over whom victory was doubly sweet.
Rommel and Goebbels were stoked with this turn of events, with the propaganda minister writing,
"Rommel continues to be the recognised darling of even the enemies' news agencies." When things were
going bad for the Germans in other theatres of the war, Rommel and his Afrika Korps' victories in the
North African Campaign were equally as useful to the propaganda minister, who used North Africa
to distract the German people. And when the North African Campaign itself took a turn for the worse,
Goebbels saw to it that someone other than Rommel took responsibility for the defeat,
as to the German people, Rommel was "invincible," and Goebells had uses for him yet.
After Rommel was implicated in the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler -- whether he was actually
involved or not -- he took his own life, and Goebbels attributed the field marshal's death
to injuries he sustained in a "car accident" earlier that month -- another twist of the truth.
But the propaganda didn't end with Rommel's death nor the end of the war.
The idea of the "chivalrous, honourable" Desert Fox lived on in Allied nations,
and mostly because their propagandists needed to slap a new and lovable face on the defeated
Wehrmacht, whose rehabilitation they believed essential to staving off their next perceived
threat -- the USSR. In short, a West German Army couldn't be raised as additional shield
against the Soviets unless ex-Wehrmacht soldiers were free to fill the army's ranks.
Seeing as the Allies had only just demilitarised Germany, and seeing as the wounds of the Second
World War were very fresh, Allied propagandists knew they needed to paint the new German army
in a different light to win over the public. To this end, Rommel was basically used as (in the
words of historian Peter Caddick-Adams) an "acceptable face [for] German militarism";
for their intents, he was a "'good' German who stood apart from the Nazi regime."
Other works painting Rommel in this light soon followed, with some of the most notorious
including journalistic pieces, such of those of British historian Sir B.H. Liddel Hart;
biographies such as Rommel: The Desert Fox, published in 1950; other textual works such as
The Rommel Papers, which are supposedly the collective writings of Rommel himself,
and which Liddel Hart worked on with a former Wehrmacht officer;
and films, such as The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Western Allies were pretty much done
with Rommel. And it should come as no shock that it was from the 90s onward that the "chivalrous,
honourable" Desert Fox became a thing of myth more than fact, spearheaded by 1990s' journalistic
pieces and later publications and productions such as Maurice Philip Remy's Mythos Rommel;
the documentary of the same name, which was released in 2002;
and Ralf Georg Reuth's Rommel: Das Ende einer Legende,
which was published in 2004. These and other works poked holes in the veil and allowed us
to glimpse at the truth of Rommel, his Afrika Korps, and the "clean" North African Campaign.
Now, before we conclude, it's worth noting that we've only discussed the "atrocities
and war crimes" aspect of the Rommel myth, with his political stance and his skill as a commander
being the remaining two aspects to explore -- not to mention what he got up to after North Africa.
Also, in regards to the North African Campaign, it should be noted that "clean" needn't only
regard a purported absence of atrocities and war crimes, and the combat itself was tough,
only exacerbated by the desert environment and the logistical nightmares it occasioned. The desert
sun did not burn moral nor physical perversions away. Human beings were still horrible,
and you best believe they suffered a plethora of injuries, diseases, and other such stresses.
But we're interested to know -- did you know about the myths of Rommel,
his Afrika Korps, and the North African Campaign before this video?
Maybe you think what we've said is BS, and want to share evidence that contradicts us. Maybe you want
to share something that strengthens what we've said. Please do all this down in the comments.