UC Davis

This dissertation argues that the Anglo-German imperial struggle for North Africa during the Second World War fit the schema of “total war” far more closely than is generally understood, both in conception and in soldiers’ lived experiences. Only after 1945 did the North Africa campaign become the sanitized conflict of British and German popular memory, dominated by the story of a “desert war” waged in an empty landscape. Wartime records reveal the German war in North Africa to be no aberration from the trend toward the totalization of warfare on the Eastern Front. Radicalized and racialized violence and brutality dominated both British and German soldiers’ experience of the war, and were perpetrated against soldiers, prisoners, and civilians alike. Surveilled soldiers’ conversations reveal that the North African environment worsened the violence of warfare, rather than alleviating it.

However, over the years following the war’s conclusion, the narrative of the war transformed from one of enemy soldiers locked in desperate, existential combat into one of respectable and even sympathetic opponents in a more limited struggle: a chivalric “war without hate.” Likewise, the desert environment came to signify something quite different: an enemy in and of itself in a unique “desert war.” The built environment and North Africa’s inhabitants, ubiquitous in wartime accounts, disappeared, replaced by the narrative of “empty” space. The metamorphosis of the North Africa campaign from total warfare into an edifying story of European comrades in arms required deliberate diplomatic, political, and cultural work by members of the VDAK, the Traditionsverband for former Afrika Korps soldiers, and their British allies. This work helped to cement the Cold War alliance, aided German remilitarization, shaped the mythology that continues to surround the Wehrmacht and the figure of Erwin Rommel, and enabled reconciliation with the former British enemy on the basis of a common, European, imperial past.