The decline of violence in discussions of the North Africa campaign, as well as the presence of North Africans themselves over the course of the 1950s, occurred alongside a greater emphasis on the German colonial empire of decades past.

Articles, stories, and narratives in Die Oase drew increasing connections between Afrika Korps veterans’ experiences of the Second World War in North Africa and those of earlier colonial soldiers elsewhere on the continent, particularly German Southwest Africa.

The increasing prominence of explicitly colonial experiences, particularly in what is now Namibia, operated in several interconnected ways. On the one hand, colonial narratives normalize the extraordinarily brutal and demoralizing combat waged in North Africa during the Second World War, subsuming the experience instead into a type of post-colonial nostalgia,²²⁵ and white, European, colonial solidarity.²²⁶

On the other, they obfuscated the murderous violence of German colonial warfare, which involved mass murder in both Southwest and Southeast Africa.²²⁷ The violence in these narratives, as it appeared, served to discursively unite the new European allies over a shared British and German colonial past.

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