Reply To: Bolt Action Desert War Bootcamp

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@damon – I was under the GENERAL impression that Einsatzgruppen Afrika never really got off the ground, certainly not to the degree that Einsatzgruppen I-IV did out in Russia.  Could be wrong though, its a subject I’m not terribly well read on.

As far as Rommel’s role in these kinds of things, some good examples that speak to his credit can  be taken from the treatment of Major Leibmann’s Zionist Palestinian Volunteers captured at Bir el Harmat during the Gazala Offensive.  We’re going over this during some of the boot camp media.  Being all Jewish, Hitler ordered them executed as political refugees rather than prisoners of war, and Rommel is reported o have ignored the order.

This is a pattern we see with many traditional Wehrmacht officers of the old “General Staff” cadres.  By and large, their attitude was “I’m a solider, I follow orders, I took an oath.  Politics is none of my business.”  So they didn’t carry out many of these orders … but at the same time did next to nothing to stop what was happening.  So we’re left in something of a grey area, so far as I know.

As David Dowding writes in The Devil’s Virtuosos, “they took the path of the military Samaritan, and did their best to pass on the other side of the road.”