Albania at War, 1939-1945

Foreword

Foreword Albania and its people have coursed this century in relative obscurity. That they have attracted so little attention stems in part from the country’s small size, population, and economy. Another reason is that Albania is the only nationstate in all of central Europe to have remained neutral in both world wars. Its abstention stemmed in large part from its immaturity as a political entity. At its creation in 1913, it was in many respects an arti¤cial state, inspired by Austria-Hungary’s determination to block Serbia’s access to the sea, rather than by the natural evolution of a common national identity, political culture, or centralized institutions. As a result, it did not actively participate in the ruthless, high-stakes competition that has determined the fate, identity, and agenda of the region’s other nations. At the Paris peace conference of 1919 it neither shared in the spoils awarded to Greece, Italy, Romania, and Serbia, nor in the punishment meted out to Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Turkey. Instead , Albania and its people entered the interwar period together with an assortment of emerging pre-national peoples, like the Croats, Slovenes, Bosniaks , Slovaks, and Ruthenes, who were caught in a kind of limbo between winners and losers. Without the leverage to represent their national interests, their fate was entrusted to those neighbors which had been enfranchised by the Paris peace settlement. Whereas the results were hardly catastrophic, this indifferent stewardship gave them a common interest with the Great War’s defeated nations. The discontents of the region’s defeated and disenfranchised nations were readily exploited by opportunistic European powers, most notably by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, prior to their defeat and replacement by Stalin’s Soviet Union. Professor Fischer shows how the two Axis hegemons exploited Albanian dissatisfaction with the country’s ethnically imprecise frontiers. Italy pandered to these frustrations both through anti-Greek rhetoric and Albania’s xi territorial expansion, ¤rst by border recti¤cations in the early 1920s, then by aggression against Greece and Yugoslavia in 1941. When Italy collapsed two years later, the German occupiers easily co-opted the Albanians. They readily forged a common front against the Serbs, both by showcasing their commitment to a “Greater Albania” and by assiduously promoting Albanian cultural development in Kosovo. Unlike the Italians, however, they also met more immediate needs by retaining better-quali¤ed political leaders from each of the country’s confessional groups, as well as by utilizing the greater experience and sensitivity of Austrian Germans who had served in the region under the Habsburgs. Most remarkable of all was the respect that the Germans showed for Albania’s independence and neutrality. Fischer’s narration and analysis of the German occupation rectify a halfcentury of amnesia and mythmaking by Marxist and nationalist historians by increasing our understanding of the reasonably constructive relationship between the Third Reich and wartime Albania. Moreover, his case study raises questions that might be usefully applied to other defeated or disenfranchised peoples of the interwar period whom Nazi Germany both helped and used for its own ends. Yet Hitler’s embrace proved fatal for his wartime collaborators. In Albania, traditional elites, nationalists, and even the proto-democratic forces that the Germans tolerated were judged guilty by association with the Nazi scourge. Like so many of the defeated or disenfranchised nations of interwar Europe, they were readily abandoned in favor of short-term advantages offered by the Allies’ wartime partners. In Albania’s case, this meant not only the Greeks, but the Communist partisans who had fought virtually alone against the Axis occupation; as in Tito’s Yugoslavia, Albania was readily consigned to a half-century of Communist rule, even though the Red Army had played no direct role in its liberation. For Albania, World War II may have been a catastrophe in terms of immediate wartime suffering and a half-century of totalitarianism. But, as Fischer demonstrates, it was the nightmare of World War II that transformed it overnight into a state with substantial centralized governmental institutions and a broadly based national identity. Once it has completed the turbulent transition from Communism, its transformation will be complete. Or will it? Watching the incremental progress of European nation-building has been like listening to a Bach fugue, with different groups of people raising their voices in succession. The French, Spanish, and British were the ¤rst, in a process completed by the end of the eighteenth century. Then came the Germans and Italians in...