Walter Rauff - Persecution in North Africa

Persecution in North Africa

Rauff was later involved in the persecution of Jews in North Africa during 1942 and 1943, as part of the Nazis' long-term aim to export the Jewish Holocaust to the Near and Middle East (including the British Mandate of Palestine, British-occupied Iraq, French-occupied Syria, the Lebanon, Egypt, and Libya), and capture the region’s petroleum fields.

A month after German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s defeat of the British at Tobruk in June 1942, the SS set up a special extermination unit to follow in the wake of Rommel’s Afrika Korps. The unit was commanded by Rauff who was empowered to carry out "executive measures on the civilian population", the Nazi euphemism for mass murder and enslavement.

According to a 2007 German national television series, "Rauff’s mission to exterminate the Middle East's Jewish population was brought to an abrupt halt by the British 8th Army's defeat of Rommel at El Alamein in October 1942. Rommel was forced to withdraw the remnants of his army to Tunisia, where it sustained a bridgehead until May 1943, enabling Rauff's SS to start the persecutions locally. The MI5 file records that Rauff was posted to Tunis in 1942 as head of the Sicherheitsdienst, where he led an Einsatzkommando (an SS task force) which conducted a "well-organised persecution campaign against the country's Jews and Partisans". The Jewish community was particularly hard hit:

"More than 2,500 Tunisian Jews died in a network of SS slave labour camps before the Germans withdrew. Rauff's men also stole jewels, silver, gold and religious artifacts from the Tunisian Jews. Forty-three kilogrammes of gold were taken from the Jewish community on the island of Djerba alone."