The big difference between North Africa and the Soviet Union is that for the German Reich, North Africa was a secondary theater. No ideological objectives were involved, as was the case in the Soviet Union, where the aim was to destroy communist ideology and wipe out large sections of the population. The myth of the war in Africa is linked so closely to Erwin Rommel, Because basically Rommel represents what the German public wanted.

A swashbuckling general who seemed to be a man of the people, a military leader, who was loved by his troops and who successfully commanded large armoured formations from the very front. He was a kind of pop star of national socialism. In Erwin Rommel, Reich propaganda minister Josef Goebbels also had a willing colleague.

It was the kind of war you imagine in an adventure novel or an adventure film. Naturally, the appropriate pictures also inspired the nation. So in this respect, as a theatre of war, North Africa was tailor-made for propaganda purposes. To the British, it was a major theatre of war. For them, it was all about defending the British Empire.

Rommel and Montgomery were professional soldiers. Montgomery was the analytical type, while Rommel took a more aggressive approach to warfare. Casablanca made it quite clear that for Allied leaders, the only acceptable end to the war would be Germany’s unconditional surrender. This was a crystal clear signal to Berlin.

Elephants from Nazi Germany on a visit to the pyramids. As part of a world tour in 1934, the Hagenbeck Circus from Hamburg stopped over in Egypt. The formerly independent kingdom was under the protection of British troops. It wasn’t only in the 1930s that countries in North and East Africa had awakened desires in a European dictator with a craving for recognition.

Mussolini took over in 1922, and almost his first act was to tell the Italians they were the rightful owners of Corsica, Nice, Savoia, Albania, Tunisia, Ethiopia, and a land corridor linking it with Libya. Later on, he had an even bigger dream. The old Roman Empire as it existed nearly 2,000 years ago. To dominate all the lands adjoining the Mediterranean.

Mare Nostra. Our sea, they called it, just as the ancient Romans did. Fascism hadn’t produced the heaven on earth that he had promised them. So he pulled the old trick of launching a foreign war to divert attention from troubles at home. So Mussolini beat his chest like Tarzan and looked around for a worthy foe.

He found one. Ethiopia. A good country for the beginning of a glorious empire. Its army had no machine guns. Its army had no tanks. Its army did have an air force. Exactly one old airplane. One airplane against the nation which had developed the new theory of total air war. Of the blitz which would wipe out cities, destroy civilians, men, women and child.

In October of 1935, an incident was provoked at the little settlement of Walwal near the border of Ethiopia and Italian Somaliland. Italy’s honor had been violated. Refusing any arbitration… Mussolini moved the whole might of his army through the Suez Canal to overrun the undefended country. With massive air raids and the use of chemical weapons, the invaders forced Ethiopia to its knees and made the country part of the new colony of Italian East Africa.

North Africa was actually an Italian theater of war. Mussolini wanted to extend his own colonial empire. He wanted to join up Italian possessions in Libya with those in East Africa, so the Sudan and Egypt were to be occupied by Italy. The commander-in-chief of the Italian troops stationed in Libya was Rudolfo Graziani, a marshal who was regarded as extremely loyal to the regime and was seen as a fascist and who had considerable experience of colonial warfare.

Mussolini ordered him to take charge of an assault on Egypt and the Suez Canal, but Graziani was highly skeptical. He was aware of the modest capabilities of his forces. They were poorly motorized and had hardly any tanks or aircraft. So he kept postponing the campaign, saying repeatedly everything wasn’t quite ready.

Mussolini’s ally, Adolf Hitler, didn’t think much of the Italian leader’s ambitions in Africa. Following his successful campaign in France, the Fuhrer was planning his long-desired invasion of the Soviet Union. The last thing he needed was Rome going it alone. But the Duce couldn’t be stopped. Mussolini blew his top and gave Graziani explicit orders to attack.

And in September 1940 he did. But after a hundred kilometers or so, he brought his forces to a halt, saying there were logistical problems that prevented them from advancing any further. He then had his army take up defensive positions. What is interesting is that Graziani, whose only experience had been gained in colonial conflicts, and not in conventional warfare, established these defensive positions as if he were engaged in a colonial war.

They were all hedgehog positions, as if he were fighting indigenous tribes. He did not understand that against the British, who had a conventional army, this was completely the wrong tactic. Graziani was a convinced fascist. Even in the Italian colonial era prior to the Second World War, he had shown a willingness to employ criminal methods.

and to use incredible brutality towards the indigenous population. But it seems to have become apparent relatively quickly that he was not as proficient at commanding troops. The advance he began in Libya made hardly any progress and then came to a standstill. This was a major reason why his star began to wane.

The British saw how weak Graziani’s troops were and in late 1940 launched their own offensive against the Italians. In Operation Compass, they not only forced the Italian army back to Libya, the British also took Cyrenaica, part of the Italian colony of Libya, and threatened Italy’s colonial possessions in North Africa.

This was all extremely dangerous for Mussolini internally, because Libya was Italy’s most important colony. Thousands of Italian settlers lived there. At first, Mussolini also refused German help. He did not want to become dependent on the German Reich. But in February 1941, he had to request German assistance after all in order to prevent the collapse of his colonial empire in North Africa.

Hitler delayed for a long time in sending troops to support his Italian ally in North Africa. German Supreme Command attached far greater weight to achieving air superiority over the Mediterranean in order to cut British supply routes. And besides, German military planning was focused entirely on Operation Barbarossa.

But in the end, Hitler relented. Thus, in Operation Sunflower, the German Reich dispatched a blocking force under the command of Lieutenant General Erwin Rommel. It was comprised initially of just one armored division. A second was added later. This was then the German Afrika Korps. Rommel was not someone who could be categorized or labeled.

He was simply unpredictable. only where his military decisions were concerned. but also in all his other actions. On the one hand, Rommel was a substitute, as it were, for even more German troops. The German Reich was preparing for Operation Barbarossa, so there just weren’t enough troops available to send to help the Italians.

And on the other hand, there was also a diplomatic problem. Germany wanted to assist Italy, but the Italians of course had no desire to create the impression that they could never win without the Germans. So this diplomatic element has to be taken into account. Last but not least, however, there were simply not enough combat-effective German troops who could be spared from other areas.

German units landed in Tripoli on February 12, 1941. On the very first parade held in the Libyan capital, Rommel showed his Italian hosts and any British scouts who were present. Who would be running things in the future? That this operation came about at all shows perhaps the complete absurdity of the process from a Berlin perspective.

On the one hand, Germany wanted to assist its ally, but on the other, not to provide too much help because it didn’t have enough forces to spare. So it tried to compensate by sending a tank general like Rommel, whom propaganda had already presented as a war hero, but who had actually been told to act defensively.

So he was precisely the wrong man for the job. Rommel wanted to attack. He was a general for offensive, not defensive action. The Rommel legend goes back perhaps to 1937 when his book Infantry Attacks was published. An analysis of warfare from a high-ranking officer. An infantryman by trade who in World War I had been awarded the Pour le Mérite.

Then, of course, he commanded the 7th Armored Division, the Ghost Division, in the battle for France. So here we again have this tableau of war with integrated weapons, which alone guarantees successful campaigns, warfare characterized by dynamic advance without stopping. And then we have Rommel in North Africa, used initially to stabilize the Italians, a situation in which he can’t develop a momentum of his own.

So what does he do? He can’t develop a momentum of his own, so what does he do? he makes himself independent, and everything, then everything, develops its own dynamism. Rommel was a commander who as a rule was little concerned a by what his superiors thought of him and b by what his orders were if he disagreed with them.

He showed in France that he tended to favor his own assessment, that he didn’t regard the orders from high command as being all important. It was a similar situation in North Africa, where officially he was subordinate to Italian supreme command. But in fact, he did what he wanted. And since success proved him right, he created the latitude to do what he wanted to do.

When Erwin Rommel became the star of Nazi propaganda because of his success in North Africa and was rewarded with a field marshal’s baton, he voluntarily presented himself as a winner. North Africa was the ideal theater of war for Rommel because he was able to practice his military trade just as he wished without having to follow any political guidelines.

If we look at the joint conduct of the war by the Italians and the Germans, what is interesting is that there was no actual coalition leadership. There was no supreme command of any kind for North Africa. Nominally, Rommel was subordinate to Italian command, but in fact he had free hand to do what he wanted because he had Hitler’s backing.

The successful tactics of mobile desert warfare forced the British to retreat. Within two weeks, the Afrika Korps had advanced 800 kilometers. military leaders were shocked. and at the same time impressed, the legend of Rommel, the Desert Fox, was born. Rommel was clearly unwilling to fulfill the brief he had been given, to act defensively and support the Italians.

He never seriously intended to play this role. because he believed he had a good nose for identifying where the British were weak. Rommel placed his faith in attack. You can actually defend by attacking if you do it at the right moment, and history tells us whether or not the moment was right. At the time it perhaps was the right decision, but certainly not in the long run.

operations that were carried out in a flash. There was no rest for the troops. Despite the sandstorm, shortly after Derner and Micheli had fallen, the pursuit continued without rest. On the 12th, Tobruk was closed, Badia was taken. On the 13th of April, they were already over the Egyptian border in Obe-Solung.

But our strike forces were weak. In this way Rommel tried retrospectively, for Nazi propaganda, to play down the failure of his offensive, because the Field Marshal had clearly underestimated the length of his supply routes. So at first, the dashing advance seemed like a brilliant move by a superb command.

In my opinion in North Africa, Rommel simply caught the British on the wrong foot. I don’t think any of Britain’s military or even political leaders thought that the Wehrmacht would become active in North Africa. That was simply inconceivable. But when German units appeared there, the new situation had to be dealt with.

And they learned very quickly. The British forces stationed in North Africa to defend the empire’s interests were actually far superior to the Germans and the Italians. But at the time, an entire armoured division was being refitted in Cairo. And then there was the unpredictability of the new opponent. Rommel was a gambler.

He led from the front. But this meant that at times his staff had no idea where their supreme commander was, what he was doing and, in his absence, how all the other troops should be led. So, depending on who is being asked, opinions tend to regard Rommel as either an outstanding commander or as a gambler. who perhaps succeeded in a way that Hitler especially dreamt of as a German approach to warfare.

However, this approach is perhaps overrated because it would probably not have been successful in other scenarios different from those in the Second World War. Rommel, of course, took a different view and, in his report for Nazi Film Archives, shifted responsibility for the lack of support to German high command and to the inadequate equipment of the Italian troops.

To keep the front at the Egyptian border and to include Tobruk at the same time. We even tried to take Tobruk, but unfortunately all of this fails. And so this invasion of Tobruk, which had already led to the Wehrgetrei, unfortunately did not succeed, namely to take the fortress completely. The first step in the Syrenaica.

Rommel’s advance in Cyrenaica was swift, but it stopped at the fortress of Tobruk. The field marshal then made a serious error as commander. Instead of waiting until he had sufficient forces to make a concentrated attack, he ordered his troops to make an immediate mobile assault on a system of fortified positions.

As a result, he sustained his first losses. The German forces were repulsed. But Rommel didn’t say, OK. We’ll now wait. Instead, convinced by the fact that elsewhere he had always been successful in his military career, he decided to throw into the battle troops that had just arrived. So, bit by bit, the German reinforcements were sent into the fray with comparatively high losses.

And there were complaints from officers who had lost faith in Rommel. Within his own ranks, The unnecessary carnage at Tobruk earned this ambitious general criticism as a soldier of fortune. This also fueled repeated concern in the highest ranks of the Wehrmacht. In his journal, the head of the general staff, Franz Halder, noted that Rommel’s character deficiencies show him to be a particularly disagreeable figure, whom no one wishes to get into conflict with because of the brutal methods he employs.

and because of the support he enjoys at the highest level. When the German offensive came to a standstill at Tobruk in the spring of 1941 and Rommel committed serious leadership errors, Halder saw an opportunity to finally get rid of him. Numerous complaints had been received from many of his commanders that Rommel had completely lost control.

They said he had sent troops to the slaughter and was totally lacking in empathy as a leader. But that still wasn’t enough. So Halder came up with another plan, to give him the best general staff officers he had, thinking that they would curb him. Halder was confident that there would soon be friction between Rommel and his staff officers.

But he was wrong. Rommel got on very well with them. In fact, despite some friction, perhaps, he enjoyed an excellent symbiosis with them. In fact, with excellent minds behind him, officers who were able to plan everything with military precision, Rommel himself was able to command intuitively from the front.

during sandstorms, in hot weather, without water or with little water and very harsh nutrition. There are fierce battles in the Rasmus Dauers, especially in May, which are almost comparable to the battles of Verdun. But the German soldier… And besides him, the Italian comrades have survived these difficult times.

They have tried to repel the fortress in Turburg, or to remove us from the Egyptian border. Anyone who means well will say that Rommel always had a good nose for operational situations. So we can say that from his point of view, Rommel assessed the situation correctly. He identified the enemy’s weak points and exploited them.

But the fact that the offensive then came to a halt at Tobruk, even though the town was encircled, was largely because Rommel was short of supplies. Basically at Tobruk he was in a dilemma. What if he couldn’t take the town? He’d assumed he’d be successful. but he obviously hadn’t thought about how far the success would get him.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was annoyed at the course of the fighting and demanded counter-offensives, but he ignored all warnings about the effectiveness of the German anti-tank guns. Operation Battle Axe was supposed to turn the situation in Britain’s favour, but Rommel once again threw all his tanks into the attack, and he was successful.

The attack on June 15, 1941 was particularly serious. Here, Churchill had certainly hoped, after he had rolled about 500 tanks of the most modern kind against the positions at the Egyptian border, to overrun the weak troops that were there and to push through to Toburg. It is this battle that took three days to be a battle of destruction for the enemy.

At that time, 249 tanks were the enemy. …and fired at the heights of Obersolum. He didn’t give up the race. This was total exaggeration because in reality, German guns only knocked out 91 tanks. Overall, Rommel suffered greater losses than the British, but the enemy destroyed only a dozen of his tanks. In November, 18 November, it came…

To the next great battle. 750,000 men, as Churchill himself expressed himself in the House, had been set on march to finally defeat these Germans and Italians from North Africa, to take over Toburg, to take over the Sierra Leone, to advance over Tripoli to the French colony border. The plan that was set up by the enemy for this company was not bad.

And it would have been successful if the German troops had not led the battle in an extraordinary way, with this powerful superpower that could be described more than ten times. Operation Crusader got underway totally unnoticed by the Germans and Italians. Blanketed by sandstorms, British tanks suddenly appeared on the outskirts of Tobruk.

Crusader caught the Germans and the Italians at the worst possible time. From summer 1941, North Africa was actually no more than a secondary theater for the Germans because Operation Barbarossa… was in progress against the Soviet Union. Rommel was getting hardly any supplies, virtually no fresh material and hardly any new staff.

And in autumn 1941, supplies for the Axis troops were virtually non-existent. Yet it was precisely now that the British were launching their counteroffensive in the form of Operation Crusader. At first, the Germans were forced to retreat. Rommel tried at once to counterattack, but he just about managed to avoid being captured himself.

Although he was able once again to take much of the impact out of the British offensive, ultimately Rommel was forced to withdraw to Tripoli as the British regained control of Cyrenaica. We have been released from the enemy and have stood at the point where we wanted to stand again. At the end of the year 1941, we showed him the scene again with a few new tanks that had come from Europe.

We showed him that we are still the old ones who listen to where it goes and after the fight we set off again in the sandstorm. Because the conditions were not yet so good. This is a battle of life and death that Agadabia could risk. North Africa is a very dynamic war zone. North Africa was an extremely dynamic theater.

Success was rarely of long duration because the terrain was flat. There were virtually no natural obstacles. And when one side quickly conquered territory, it often lost it as well. This was because of the supply situation. troops could only be supplied adequately over a certain distance. The further east the German and Italian forces advanced, or the British westwards, the further they moved from their own supply bases.

This made it harder to support these troops while the retreating enemy got closer to its own supply bases, so it was now better supplied. This pendulum swung back and forth several times. On the airfield of the Führerhauptquartier, General Oberst Rommel is landing from Africa. To give the war in North Africa unlimited support, Rommel was delighted.

It must be stated quite clearly that in every respect, Erwin Rommel had made himself available to an unjust regime. He knew right from the start whom he was serving. After all, the crimes of National Socialism, the deprivation of rights, the brutal political persecution of political enemies, hardly took place in secret.

It all happened in plain view. So if he’d wanted to, Erwin Rommel could have known a great deal. His responsibility, of course, lies in the fact that he made himself available to Nazi propaganda. Therefore he helped ensure that the murderous criminal war in the Soviet Union and the extermination of European Jews ultimately took place in the background.

But Rommel himself stood in the foreground of propaganda. And that is how I view his historical responsibility. We seemed ready to jump, but we hadn’t yet. We were also ready. And we jumped earlier than the enemy. Maybe only a few days, but this little exciting time was decisive. Our first jump, which we had moved to the enemy at the age of 21, was so firm.

The enemy was prepared with one blow. The next morning we had already crossed 80 km through the enemy. We took Agadabia again and did not rest there. We went further 120 km into the desert. We pushed the Englishman more and more into the sand. Where he had supplies. But he knew exactly. Through our attack, we cut off the connection backwards and threatened to completely encircle and destroy it.

Shortly after the setback he suffered through Operation Crusader, Rommel immediately attacked again, but without consulting his Italian allies. He didn’t inform his superiors either. The Italians were taken totally by surprise that German units were attacking once again. They called for Rommel to be replaced, a request, however, that stood little chance of being met.

Still, there was much tension in the alliance between Germany and Italy. Rommel was seen as a burden. His success alone smoothed over the problems. In contrast to the Italians, Rommel’s Afrika Korps was delighted that their idol was back on the attack. On January 23, 1942, a soldier wrote in a letter home, At last we’re Rommeling forwards again.

When the Germans appeared, the British were surprised yet again. They were also frustrated because Although outnumbered, the German Afrika Korps had again achieved success against British forces. The British wondered what the reason for this was. So from about the middle of 1942, they tried to copy the German approach.

They mounted rapid armored thrusts to surround the enemy and so on. And up to a certain point, they were successful. But they failed to achieve a decisive victory. Ultimately, when it came to mobile warfare, On May 26, 1942, the Afrika Korps launched Operation Theseus to finally drive the British out of Tobruk.

After fierce tank battles, the Axis powers achieved a breakthrough. Like many operations carried out by the Germans and Italians, especially under Rommel, Operation Theseus, I think, shows that Rommel was quite capable of cunning and imaginative leadership. Stories abound of him lining up his formations, even including the field kitchen, in a wet shape to stir up as much dust as possible and surprise the enemy.

Perhaps not all of these tales are true, but many of them will be. And Rommel overcame operational deficits like too few troops, too few weapons and too few supplies by thinking of a solution. Tobruk, however, reveals a different picture of the war in North Africa. Rommel’s brutal deployment of his own forces with huge losses.

This shows that Rommel was never inclined to look at his losses if he was convinced that he had taken the right decision. Rommel’s ground offensive received massive support from the German Air Force. Its dive bombers especially succeeded in cutting British communication lines. In the ensuing confusion, German tanks were able to advance into the fortress without encountering any substantial resistance.

Our Stuka is falling on the fortifications and batteries and destroying the enemy’s resistance force. In front of endless captured columns, our troops are moving into Tobruk. Rommel and North Africa and his troops served Nazi propaganda as excellent distraction from the Eastern Front whenever things were not going too well.

And especially in the winter of 1941, the situation was in fact deteriorating for the Germans. So Rommel and his Africa Corps became even more important for German propaganda. Rommel was successful. He had forced the British back virtually to the Egyptian border. In doing so, he had also succeeded in capturing the fortress of Tobruk, the goal he had so lamentably failed to achieve the year before.

But now he had taken Tobruk and in doing so secured one of the greatest successes of his military career. He was made the Wehrmacht’s youngest field marshal. This was again just what Nazi propaganda was waiting for. It was able to utilize a major German success in North Africa. could be sent from North Africa.

Marshal Rommel, the winner of Tobog. At last, Rommel had control of a port, which would shorten the supply route for his next advance by two weeks. Numerous sunk ships are a witness to the safety of our Stuka. Nazi propaganda knew no bounds. It was actually a secondary theatre. On the other hand, though, it offered ideal conditions for creating a propaganda hero.

Pictures were broadcast which you would not otherwise expect from a theatre of war. Naturally, Rommel made himself available. When you look at the newsreels, you know that’s not someone who was forced to appear in the footage. It’s a figure who did it quite consciously and played an active role in the newsreels.

I think the North African theater of war was perfect for German propaganda in every respect. First of all, it was an exotic environment which produced impressive pictures. As a rule, the sun was always shining. And German troops were always tanned. They had dusty faces and looked dauntless. These were pictures the Russian steppe somehow couldn’t provide.

Cinematically, they weren’t of the same quality. What’s more, Nazi propaganda presented the conflict in North Africa as the kind of war the German people expected their soldiers to wage it, in line with the motto, up and over and at it. We soon defeated the French and now we are storming forwards in North Africa.

Naturally, the war scenario that was developing on the Eastern Front was far less suitable for broadcasting. Rommel wanted to take Egypt and the Suez Canal, the lifeline of the British Empire. Hitler hoped the Africa Corps would quickly prove victorious because, with the United States having entered the war, he feared that American forces would join the conflict.

And a final victory by Rommel over the Eighth Army would decisively undermine British morale. Rommel was many things. He was a commander who very often achieved success on the battlefield, by taking unorthodox decisions. To describe him as brilliant is a bit too sweeping. But he was definitely a commander who was greatly inspired in many ways.

At the same time, however, which is conveniently forgotten, he had fine staff officers who advised Rommel and worked closely with him. On the other hand, Rommel was also a propaganda general, a creation of Goebbels’ propaganda. I would tend to describe him more as Goebbels’ favorite general and less as Hitler’s favorite general.

Rommel was many things. It was propaganda that made him so popular and famous in the German Reich. Edition after edition of the Nazi weekly newsreel celebrated the advance of the Afrika Korps. One of Leni Riefenstahl’s cameramen was sent to the front to take spectacular pictures for cinemas back home. At the Libyan-Egyptian border, the British resistance has broken quickly.

A breach has been made through the wire fence at the border. Our troops remain hard on the heels of the British. The fortresses of Capuzzo, Solum and Halfaya have been taken. Look at Solum. In Cairo there is panic. In the gardens of official buildings, files are being burnt. Rommel is already planning a victory parade in the Egyptian capital.

Reality is usually bitter, so what do you do? You construct reality to suit your needs. This works in North Africa as long as Rommel is advancing. Then everything is fine and dandy. But that stops the moment reality really does become bitter. Then you can’t even seek refuge in a myth. So Rommel was not allowed to lose.

The moment he lost, he would be of no use whatsoever to propaganda. The advance of the Afrika Korps In June 1942, was also glorified in the British film Desert Victory, which contained captured original footage from German productions. Consequently, every effort was made to enhance the Field Marshal’s nimbus, even if the British did this simply to find an excuse for their own intermittent failings.

Rommel was not only a legend in the German Reich, soon he also became a legend to his British foes. Because of his unforeseen successes, he was built up to be a kind of superman, both by British propaganda or the British media and also by British troops themselves. When you read reports from British units, they all speak highly of Rommel, so much so that in the summer of 1942, Sir Claude Auchinleck, the Supreme Commander of the Eighth Army, felt prompted to issue an order stating that Rommel and his German troops were not supermen. It ended with a PS. I am not envious of Rommel.” So you can see that Rommel also enjoyed great respect with the British, partly, and this should not be forgotten, to conceal their own deficiencies. His much depleted army dug, blasted and wired itself in, and laid protective mines. Our front was one of discontinuous belts of minefields with strong points and machine anti-tank gun emplacements.

But it was as yet extremely slender. Here General Oginlek waited. Tobruk was just an intermediate stop on the way to El Alamein. Rommel understood the situation. His opponent had to be weakened. So he set out in pursuit. At this point, Perhaps even before Tobruk, there was a major discussion about whether Malta should be first taken to secure supplies.

But Rommel thought that the situation looked so advantageous that it had to be exploited on the battlefield. So, for the first time since the war began, he forced the British back over the border and deep into Egypt. He only came to a stop at El Alamein, about 80 to 100 kilometers west of Alexandria. On the front of the L’Allemagne, stronger forces are being deployed on both sides.