structural:expansion
Civilians

Historian Richard J. Evans has stated that German soldiers in Tunisia raped Jewish women, and the success of Rommel's forces in capturing or securing Allied, Italian and Vichy French territory in North Africa led to many Jews in these areas being killed by other German institutions as part of the Holocaust. Anti-Jewish and Anti-Arab violence erupted in North Africa when Rommel and Ettore Bastico regained territory there in February 1941 and then again in April 1942. While committed by Italian forces, Patrick Bernhard writes "the Germans were aware of Italian reprisals behind the front lines. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, they seem to have exercised little control over events.

The German consul general in Tripoli consulted with Italian state and party officials about possible countermeasures against the natives, but this was the full extent of German involvement. Rommel did not directly intervene, though he advised the Italian authorities to do whatever was necessary to eliminate the danger of riots and espionage; for the German general, the rear areas were to be kept "quiet" at all costs. Thus, according to Bernhard, although he had no direct hand in the atrocities, Rommel made himself complicit in war crimes by failing to point out that international laws of war strictly prohibited certain forms of retaliation. By giving carte blanche to the Italians, Rommel implicitly condoned, and perhaps even encouraged, their war crimes". Gershom reports that the recommendation came from officers "speaking for Rommel", and comments, "Perhaps Rommel did not know or care about the specifics; perhaps his motivation was not hate but dispassionate efficiency. The distinctions would have escaped the men hanging from hooks."

In his article Im Rücken Rommels. Kriegsverbrechen, koloniale Massengewalt und Judenverfolgung in Nordafrika, Bernhard writes that North African campaign was hardly "war without hate" as Rommel described it, and points out rapes of women, ill-treatment and executions of captured POWs, as well as racially motivated murders of Arabs, Berbers and Jews, in addition to the establishment of concentration camps. Bernhard again cites discussion among the German and Italian authorities about Rommel's position regarding countermeasures against local insurrection (according to them, Rommel wanted to eliminate the danger at all costs) to show that Rommel fundamentally approved of Italian policy in the matter. Bernhard opines that Rommel had informal power over the matter because his military success brought him influence on the Italian authorities.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum describes relationship between Rommel and the proposed Einsatzgruppen Egypt as "problematic". The Museum states that this unit was to be tasked with murdering the Jewish population of North Africa, and Palestine, and it was to be attached directly to Rommel's Afrika Korps. According to the museum Rauff met with Rommel's staff in 1942 as part of preparations for this plan. The Museum states that Rommel was certainly aware that planning was taking place, even if his reaction to it isn't recorded, and while the main proposed Einsatzgruppen were never set in action, smaller units did murder Jews in North Africa.

On the other hand, Christopher Gabel remarks that Richards Evans seems to attempt to prove that Rommel was a war criminal by association but fails to produce evidence that he had actual or constructive knowledge about said crimes. Ben H. Shepherd comments that Rommel showed insight and restraint when dealing with the nomadic Arabs, the only civilians who occasionally intervened in the war and thus risked reprisals as a result. Shepherd cites a request by Rommel to the Italian High Command, in which he complained about excesses against the Arabic population and noted that reprisals without identifying the real culprits were never expedient.

The documentary Rommel's War (Rommels Krieg), made by Caron and Müllner with advice from Sönke Neitzel, states that even though it is not clear whether Rommel knew about the crimes (in Africa) or not, "his military success made possible forced labour, torture and robbery. Rommel's war is always part of Hitler's war of worldviews, whether Rommel wanted it or not." More specifically, several German historians have revealed the existence of plans to exterminate Jews in Egypt and Palestine, if Rommel had succeeded in his goal of invading the Middle East during 1942 by SS unit embedded to Afrika Korps.

According to Mallmann and Cüppers, a post-war CIA report described Rommel as having met with Walther Rauff, who was responsible for the unit, and been disgusted after learning about the plan from him and as having sent him on his way; but they conclude that such a meeting is hardly possible as Rauff was sent to report to Rommel at Tobruk on 20 July and Rommel was then 500 km away conducting the First El Alamein. On 29 July, Rauff's unit was sent to Athens, expecting to enter Africa when Rommel crossed the Nile. However, in view of the Axis' deteriorating situation in Africa it returned to Germany in September.

Historian Jean-Christoph Caron opines that there is no evidence that Rommel knew or would have supported Rauff's mission; he also believes Rommel bore no direct responsibility regarding the SS's looting of gold in Tunisia. Historian Haim Saadon, Director of the Center of Research on North African Jewry in WWII, goes further, stating that there was no extermination plan: Rauff's documents show that his foremost concern was helping the Wehrmacht to win, and he came up with the idea of forced labour camps in the process. By the time these labour camps were in operation, according to Ben H. Shepherd, Rommel had already been retreating and there is no proof of his contact with the Einsatzkommando.

Haaretz comments that the CIA report is most likely correct regarding both the interaction between Rommel and Rauff and Rommel's objections to the plan: Rauff's assistant Theodor Saevecke, and declassified information from Rauff's file, both report the same story. Haaretz also remarks that Rommel's influence probably softened the Nazi authorities' attitude to the Jews and to the civilian population generally in North Africa.

Rolf-Dieter Müller comments that the war in North Africa, while as bloody as any other war, differed considerably from the war of annihilation in eastern Europe, because it was limited to a narrow coastline and hardly affected the population.

Showalter writes that:

From the desert campaign’s beginning, both sides consciously sought to wage a "clean" war—war without hate, as Rommel put it in his reflections. Explanations include the absence of civilians and the relative absence of Nazis; the nature of the environment, which conveyed a "moral simplicity and transparency"; and the control of command on both sides by prewar professionals, producing a British tendency to depict war in the imagery of a game, and the corresponding German pattern of seeing it as a test of skill and a proof of virtue. The nature of the fighting as well diminished the last-ditch, close-quarter actions that are primary nurturers of mutual bitterness. A battalion overrun by tanks usually had its resistance broken so completely that nothing was to be gained by a broken-backed final stand.

Joachim Käppner writes that while the conflict in North Africa was not as bloody as in Eastern Europe, the Afrika Korps committed some war crimes. Historian Martin Kitchen states that the reputation of the Afrika Korps was preserved by circumstances: The sparsely populated desert areas did not lend themselves to ethnic cleansing; the German forces never reached the large Jewish populations in Egypt and Palestine; and in the urban areas of Tunisia and Tripolitania the Italian government constrained the German efforts to discriminate against or eliminate Jews who were Italian citizens. Despite this, the North African Jews themselves believed that it was Rommel who prevented the "Final Solution" from being carried out against them when Germany might dominate North Africa from Egypt to Morocco. According to Curtis and Remy, 120,000 Jews lived in Algeria, 200,000 in Morocco, about 80,000 in Tunisia. Remy writes that this number was unchanged following the German invasion of Tunisia in 1942 while Curtis notes that 5000 of these Jews would be sent to forced labour camps. and 26,000 in Libya.

Hein Klemann writes that the confiscations in the "foraging zone" of Afrika Korps threatened the survival chances of local civilians, just as plunder enacted by the Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union.

In North Africa, Rommel's troops laid down landmines, which in decades to come killed and maimed thousands of civilians. Since statistics started in the 1980s, 3,300 people have lost their lives, and 7,500 maimed There are disputed whether the landmines in El Alamein, which constitute the most notable portion of landmines left over from World War II, were left by the Afrika Korps or the British Army led by Field Marshal Montgomery. Egypt has not joined the Mine Ban Treaty until this day.

Rommel sharply protested the Jewish policies and other immoralities and was an opponent of the Gestapo He also refused to comply with Hitler's order to execute Jewish POWs. Controversial author Bryan Mark Rigg writes: "The only place in the army where one might find a place of refuge was in the Deutsches Afrika-Korps (DAK) under the leadership of the 'Desert Fox,' Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. According to this study's files, his half-Jews were not as affected by the racial laws as most others serving on the European continent." He notes, though, that "Perhaps Rommel failed to enforce the order to discharge half-Jews because he was unaware of it".

Captain Horst van Oppenfeld (a staff officer to Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg and a quarter-Jew) says that Rommel did not concern himself with the racial decrees and he had never experienced any trouble caused by his ancestry during his time in the DAK even if Rommel never personally interfered on his behalf. Another quarter-Jew, Fritz Bayerlein, became a famous general and Rommel's chief-of-staff, despite also being a bisexual, which made his situation even more precarious.

Building the Atlantic Wall was officially the responsibility of the Organisation Todt, which was not under Rommel's command, but he enthusiastically joined the task, protesting slave labour and suggesting that they should recruit French civilians and pay them good wages. Despite this, French civilians and Italian prisoners of war held by the Germans were forced by officials under the Vichy government, the Todt Organization and the SS forces to work on building some of the defences Rommel requested, in appalling conditions according to historian Will Fowler. Although they got basic wages, the workers complained because it was too little and there was no heavy equipment.

German troops worked almost round-the-clock under very harsh conditions, with Rommel's rewards being accordions.

Rommel was one of the commanders who protested the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre.