Afrika Korps

• 1. Introduction

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  The Afrika Korps was born on the 11th of January 1941, not from a grand strategic vision, but from a crisis. Italian forces in North Africa had just been routed so thoroughly that their entire 10th Army was captured at the Battle of Beda Fomm. Germany's response was to send what the high command called a "blocking force" to shore up what remained of Italy's African colonies. Nobody planned for what came next. The man placed in command was Erwin Rommel, a general Adolf Hitler favored personally. Under Rommel, this improvised rescue mission would expand into a two-year desert campaign that stretched German and Allied forces across thousands of miles of sand, salt flats, and coastal roads. The Afrika Korps would fight under at least four different names, serve under Italian command, be redesignated, restructured, and then finally surrounded. How a holding force became one of the most discussed formations of the Second World War, and what its legacy actually looks like when examined without myth, is the story this documentary tells.

• 2. A Force Assembled in Haste

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  Rommel was not the first choice to command the force. Hitler had originally designated Hans von Funck for the job, but loathed him because von Funck had served as a personal staff officer to Werner von Fritsch, who had been dismissed in 1938. Rommel was confirmed as commander on the 11th of February 1941, just weeks after the corps itself was formally constituted. At the outset, the German blocking force consisted of little more than Panzer Regiment 5, assembled from the second regiment of the 3rd Panzer Division. These elements were organized into the 5th Light Division as they arrived in Africa between the 10th of February and the 12th of March 1941. Late April and into May brought reinforcements: elements of the 15th Panzer Division transferred across from Italy. With those two divisions in place, the Afrika Korps was technically subordinated to the Italian chain of command in Africa, not to Berlin directly. That arrangement was already strained by the time Rommel began pushing the British back across Cyrenaica.

• 3. Layers of Command

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  On the 15th of August 1941, the 5th Light Division was redesignated the 21st Panzer Division, and that same day a new headquarters formation called Panzer Group Africa was activated, with Rommel at its head. Command of the Afrika Korps itself passed to Ludwig Crüwell. The Panzer Group comprised the Afrika Korps alongside additional German units and two corps of Italian forces. It did not stay under that name long. On the 30th of January 1942, it was redesignated Panzer Army Africa. After the defeats at the Second Battle of El Alamein and the Allied landings in Morocco and Algeria known as Operation Torch, the organizational chart shifted again. The OKW added the XC Army Corps under Walter Nehring in Tunisia on the 19th of November 1942, then a 5th Panzer Army on the 8th of December under Colonel-General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim. On the 23rd of February 1943, the formation that had once been Panzer Army Africa was redesignated the Italian 1st Army under Italian general Giovanni Messe. Rommel was moved to command a new Army Group Africa overseeing both the Italian 1st Army and the 5th Panzer Army, and in March even that command passed to Arnim. The Afrika Korps, as a unit, changed hands nine times across ten commanders between February 1941 and the surrender in May 1943.

• 4. The Myth and the Record

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  Historians have long applied the phrase "War without hate" to the North African campaign, and the Afrika Korps developed a reputation among Allied soldiers and later writers for treating prisoners of war with a degree of respect unusual in the broader conflict. Maurice Remy quotes Isaac Levy, the Senior Jewish Chaplain of the Eighth Army, who said he had never seen "any sign or hint that the soldiers of the Afrika Korps are antisemitic." The Jerusalem Post review of Gershom Gorenberg's War of Shadows characterizes the Italians as far more brutal with civilians, including Libyan Jews, than Rommel's corps. Yet the picture is more complicated than any clean narrative allows. Robert Satloff documented in Among the Righteous that as German and Italian forces retreated across Libya toward Tunisia, Afrika Korps soldiers plundered Jewish property along the Libyan coast. Giordana Terracina records that the deportation of Cyrenaican Jews to the concentration camp at Giado was carried out under the corps and accompanied by shootings in Benghazi of Jews accused of welcoming the British. That violence, according to Satloff, only ended with the arrival of General Montgomery in Tripoli on the 23rd of January 1943. The Telegraph attributes much of the specific persecution of Tunisian Jews not to Rommel but to SS-Standartenfuhrer Walter Rauff, who stripped them of their wealth.

• 5. Jewish Communities Under Occupation

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  Albert Kesselring, Wehrmacht commander of the Axis forces in the Mediterranean theater, oversaw the deportation of thousands of Jews to Italy under the supervision of a Schutzstaffel and SD detachment attached to the Italian colonial administration. Gershom Gorenberg notes that Italian authorities bore primary responsibility for placing Jews in concentration camps in Libya, describing those camps as "not built to exterminate its inmates" yet with such meager food and water that survival was far from assured. The German consul in Tripoli was aware of these deportations, and according to Gorenberg, trucks normally used to resupply Rommel's forces were sometimes diverted to transport Jewish prisoners despite the acute logistical strain the German military was already under. Maurice Roumani's research draws a different thread: Libyan Jewish communities observed that German soldiers in daily dealings acted largely from pragmatic economic calculation rather than ideological hostility. Jewish merchants possessed goods the military needed, and a transactional arrangement developed. Roumani notes that by the end of the German presence in Libya, this economic logic had led German authorities to perceive Libyan Jews as less threatening than their counterparts in Europe. The contrast between that pragmatism on the ground and the persecution carried out through institutional channels captures the fractured reality of occupation.

• 6. Surrender and Aftermath

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  On the 13th of May 1943, the Afrika Korps surrendered alongside all remaining Axis forces in North Africa. The bulk of the prisoners of war were transported to the United States, where they were held at camps including Camp Shelby in Mississippi and Camp Hearne in Texas until the end of the war. The formations that had fought in the desert did not disappear entirely. Several divisions were reconstituted in Europe after the fighting in Tunisia ended: the 15th Panzer Division was re-formed as the 15th Panzergrenadier Division and served in Sicily, Italy, and on the Western Front; the 21st Panzer Division was rebuilt in France; the Hermann Goring Panzer Division fought in Sicily and Italy; and the 90th Light Division was re-formed as the 90th Panzergrenadier Division in Italy. The name Afrika Korps, meanwhile, had technically been the official designation of the force for fewer than six months. The officers and men kept using it for the full duration of the campaign anyway.