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Quoting Daniel Marwecki’s Germany and Israel: Whitewashing and State Building, pages 114–5:

‘SIEG! Dajan – Der Rommel Israels’ ran one headline in the tabloid Bild, published by Springer (cited in Sontheimer 2012), which probably does not require translation into English. The declaration of victory, written in capital letters, was followed by an equation of Israeli general Moshe Dayan with the Wüstenfuchs (‘desert fox’) Erwin Rommel, Hitler’s general in North Africa.

Rudolf Augstein, founder of the Der Spiegel, an Iron Cross holder for his services in the Wehrmacht and one of the most influential postwar German journalists, also wrote that Israeli soldiers ‘rolled like Rommel’ (Der Spiegel 1967). Augstein knew of the German contribution to the Israeli success: ‘An effective tank corps was the prerequisite for the lightning victory in the lightning war (Blitzsieg im Blitzkrieg). Germany delivered these weapons two years ago in a triangular trade with the U.S. and Italy’ (Der Spiegel 1967).

To understand how it was possible to pay Israel compliments by comparing its army to the Wehrmacht, its military campaign to the 1939 invasion of Poland, and Dayan to Rommel, one needs to return to some of the points made in the previous chapters.

Postwar West German society saw itself primarily as a victim of the war. [Fascist] crimes, if explicitly recognised, were generally attributed to a small circle of perpetrators, namely to Hitler and his entourage. While the Wehrmacht destroyed Europe, killed millions and made the death camps logistically possible, postwar Germany generally perceived the Wehrmacht as having a ‘clean sheet’ with regards to [Axis] crimes. This was more or less the case until the Wehrmacht exhibition of 1995 caused a public stir.

While Erwin Rommel backed Hitler’s power seizure, he was implicated in the 1944 assassination attempt against him and consequently forced into suicide. Thus, Dayan could be ‘Germanified’ by inserting him into a specifically German ‘anti-Nazi’ tradition: that of [Axis] supporters who turned against Hitler in 1944 because of looming defeat in the war.

The conflict constellation in the Middle East made possible two intersecting forms of German guilt deferral. The first was the identification of German soldiers with Israeli ones, thus effectively blurring the historical relationship between German perpetrators and Jewish victims.

The second was the perceived rôles of ‘true’ Nazis that could be attributed to Israel’s Arab adversaries. The trope of ‘Arabs as Nazis’ holds a particularly salient meaning in the German context, as one cannot escape the suspicion that it is used for the purpose of relief: a transposition of the historical German rôle of the [Fascist] perpetrator onto the present-day Arab.

(Emphasis added.)