21st Waffen Mountain Division of the SS "Skanderbeg" (Albanian No. 1)
|
21st Waffen Mountain Division of the SS "Skanderbeg" (Albanian No. 1) |
|
|---|---|
 Troop registration |
|
| active | May 1944 until the turn of the year 1944/45 |
| Country |
.svg){kind=small} German Empire
|
| Armed forces |
 Armed SS
|
| Branch of service | Mountaineer |
| Type | division |
| structure | See outline |
| Butcher | Partisan war in Yugoslavia |
| commander | |
| list of | Commanders |
The 21st Waffen Mountain Division of the SS "Skanderbeg" (. Albanian No. 1) was a mountain - Division of the Waffen-SS during the Second World War . It consisted mainly of Albanians under German command.
The division was used primarily in the Balkans against the Yugoslav People's Liberation Army . The division existed as an independent unit until December 1944. Members of this group of troops committed war crimes against the civilian population in Kosovo and the neighboring regions . The unit was also responsible for the deportation of several hundred Jews from Kosovo to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp .
history
Positioning and organization
After the end of the Italian occupation of Albania in September 1943, the recruitment of Albanian soldiers for German units was initially forbidden on the initiative of the Foreign Office's “Special Representative Southeast”, Neubacher , in order to preserve the appearance of Albanian independence. Half a year later, however , Heinrich Himmler pushed through the establishment of an Albanian Waffen SS mountain division. The support staff should consist of German members of the SS divisions "Handschar" and " Prinz Eugen ", the division should tactically match the XXI. Mountain Corps are subordinate to the Wehrmacht . The three Kosovar Albanian politicians Xhafer Deva , Rexhep Mitrovica and Bedri Pejani had a decisive influence on this .
By order of April 17th, the Waffen-Gebirgs-Division of the SS "Skanderbeg" (Albanian No. 1) was established in the Peć / Priština / Prizren area on May 1st, 1944 . The Albanian collaboration government had sent a list of over 11,000 possible recruits to Berlin , of which the SS ultimately considered 9,275 men to be suitable. However, only 6,500 men were actually recruited for the division. There were also 300 Albanians who had previously served in the Croatian SS division "Handschar" . German officers and veterans added to the staff and served as cadres . Overall, the division had a team stand of about 8,500 soldiers and was in their line-up in two infantry regiments , an artillery regiment and a reconnaissance department , a message - Division , a tank destroyer - Division and a pioneer battalion divided. The commanding officer of the division was SS-Standartenführer August Schmidhuber .
The name was given in the same way as other associations recruited from foreigners. Divisions that consisted of members of the so-called "Nordic race" were referred to as SS divisions, and formations of members as racially or otherwise inferior groups were designated as weapon divisions of the SS.
Most of the Albanian recruits came from Kosovo and were exclusively Muslims. The reason for this were disputes between Muslim Bosnians and Catholics after the latter were included in the SS division "Handschar" . Reasons for the main recruitment in Kosovo were: In Albania the collaboration government had little support and large parts of the country were already ruled by the communist partisans. In addition, hostility to Bulgarians, Montenegrins and Serbs outside of Kosovo, which during the war was united with other areas populated by Albanians to form Greater Albania , was less pronounced. Kosovar Albanians were recruited for the SS Skanderbeg division because they were to be used against their Slavic neighboring peoples or the Yugoslav-dominated partisans in Kosovo. So the SS took advantage of the hostility among the Balkan peoples when they set up the new unit.
Deployment, War Crimes and Dissolution
The SS Skanderbeg division was to be used to fight partisans in Yugoslavia . During the summer it operated in Kosovo and the neighboring areas of Macedonia and Montenegro less as a military organization than as a terrorist organization against the civilian population. An unknown, but undoubtedly large number of non-Albanians and people suspected of having communist sympathies were murdered or driven from Kosovo within a few weeks. Schmidhuber reported in April 1944 that 40,000 Serbs had been expelled from Kosovo. The SS leader assumed that another 100,000 Serbs were to be expelled.
In May 1944 he ordered the establishment of the Pristina concentration camp as an "education camp " for politically, especially communist, suspects and guilty parties. Served volunteers from the SS Skanderbeg division were assigned as guards.
On July 28, 1944, members of the division murdered 380 residents, including 120 children, in the Montenegrin village of Velika, and set 300 houses on fire. The Jews in Kosovo, as far as they had not been able to flee, were captured and deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. In Skopje, the unit was subordinate to a camp to which the Macedonian Jews were brought before they were transported to German concentration camps. The violence of the SS unit was also directed against the Roma ethnic group .
The division was unable to achieve military success against the Tito partisans. At this point in time, the partisans controlled large parts of Kosovo, practically the whole of southern Serbia around Vranje and the neighboring Macedonian areas. In the division's operational area, the Tito partisans proclaimed the Republic of Macedonia on August 2, 1944.
The fighting strength of the Albanian division was low and many of its members said goodbye to the war that had already been lost. Due to the high desertion rate , it was decided in September 1944 to disband the division. As in the case of the Bosnian SS division “Handschar”, the German personnel formed a combat group, which then fought on in the association of the 7th SS volunteer mountain division “Prinz Eugen” .
In October 1944 the division was moved to Skopje . Bulgaria had left the war in August and the formerly Bulgarian occupied area now had to be controlled by German troops so that the routes of retreat remained open for the units in Greece . The troops now had to fight against the Bulgarians, who were now allied with the Soviet Union .
At the turn of the year 1944/45 the division no longer existed as an independent association. The remnants of the troop returned to Kosovska Mitrovica in January 1945 . Few soldiers reached Austria via Brčko in northern Bosnia until May 1945 , where they saw the end of the war.
From February to June 1945, Tito declared martial law on Kosovo to put down two major Albanian uprisings. The treatment of collaborators in post-war Yugoslavia took place in two different phases: In the first phase, prisoners from the ranks of the “Handschar” and “Skanderbeg” were severely punished; in the second phase from the late 1940s onwards, Tito and the high party officials tried to unite the South Slav population by restricting the punishments to those who had fought for the Germans to the last.
Aftermath
The SS Skanderbeg Division and the war crimes it committed were instrumentalized in the 1990s for the topic of historical politics and also for the Kosovo conflict .
In 1999 the journalist Chris Hedges charged that parts of the UÇK belonged to the fascist right because they were the sons or grandsons of members of the SS division or of " Kaçak " rebels of the 1920s. In contrast, Noel Malcolm pointed out that the number of descendants of SS division members was negligible, given the poor mobilization success - the division's peak was 6,491 men. Nor was a fascist ideology decisive for the mobilization, but mostly the desire to prevent Kosovo from returning under the leadership of Belgrade after a victory by the Tito partisans.
Franziska A. Zaugg, the author of the first monograph on Albanian SS units, emphasizes the function of interethnic experiences of violence in the border region Kosovo-Montenegro-Albania-Macedonia as well as the instrumentalization of these experiences of violence by the Germans when recruiting for the "Skanderbeg" division. In addition, on the German side there was a romantic, idealizing image of the Albanians as a death-defying fighter, created by folk scholars and Karl May's novels , which, of course, was turned into the opposite in the course of the war: at the end of the war, the Albanians were viewed by the Germans as unscrupulous slackers and looters .
structure
- Waffen Mountain Infantry Regiment of the SS 50 (Albanian No. 1) (I. - III.)
- Waffen-Gebirgsjäger-Regiment of SS 51 (Albanian No. 2) (I. - III.)
- Waffen Mountain Artillery Regiment of the SS 21 (Albanian No. 1) (I. - IV.)
- SS Mountain Reconnaissance Department 21
- SS assault gun division "Skanderbeg"
- SS-Gebirgs-Panzerjäger-Department 21
- SS Mountain Pioneer Battalion 21
- SS Mountain News Department 21
- SS medical department 21
- SS Economic Battalion 21
- SS division troops 21
- SS Mountain Field Replacement Battalion 21
Commanders
- April to May 1, 1944 SS Brigade Leader Josef Fitzthum
- May 1, 1944 to January 1945, SS Brigade Leader August Schmidhuber
- SS-Obersturmbannführer Alfred Graf (i. V.)
literature
- Chris Bishop: SS - Hitler's Foreign Divisions. Foreign Volunteers in the Waffen SS, 1940–45. Spellmount, Staplehurst 2005, ISBN 1-86227-289-1 .
- Albert Ramaj : Oppressed Jews in Kosovo in World War II. In G2W , (Zurich), 2/2007, pp. 20–21.
- Nicholas J. Costa, Shattered Illusions. Albania, Greece and Yugoslavia. Columbia University Press, New York 1998, ISBN 0-88033-418-5 .
- Bernd Jürgen Fischer: Albania at War, 1939–1945. Purdue University Press, West Lafayette 1999, ISBN 1-55753-141-2 .
- Laurent Latruwe, Gordana Kostic, La division Skanderbeg. Histoire des Waffen-SS albanais des origines idéologiques aux débuts de la guerre froide. Godefroy de Bouillon, Paris 2004. ISBN 2-84191-172-1 .
- Georg H. Stein, The Waffen-SS. Hitler's Elite Guard at War. Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1966. ISBN 0-8014-9275-0 .
- Georg Tessin : Associations and troops of the German Wehrmacht and Waffen SS in World War II 1939–1945. Volume 4. The Land Forces 15–30 . 2nd Edition. Biblio-Verlag, Osnabrück 1976, ISBN 3-7648-1083-1 .
- Franziska A. Zaugg: Albanian Muslims in the Waffen-SS: From “Greater Albania” to the “Skanderbeg” division . Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2016, ISBN 978-35-067-8436-0 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Franziska A. Zaugg: Albanian Muslims in the Waffen-SS: From “Greater Albania” to the “Skanderbeg” division . Paderborn 2016, ISBN 978-35-067-8436-0 , p. 193
- ↑ a b Zaugg 2016, p. 312
- ↑ Zaugg 2016, p. 195
- ↑ Zaugg 2016, pp. 269–272
- ↑ Zaugg 2016, p. 285
- ↑ Kosovo's Next Masters? Chris Hedges, Foreign Affairs, May / June 1999
- ↑ Response by Noel Malcolm, Washington Times, June 4, 1999 , on the Bosnian Institute, London website
- ↑ Zaugg 2016, pp. 298–310