User:Calthinus/Hashoah b'-Albaniah

1943-1945
When Italy surrendered to the Allies in September 1943, all concentration camps in Albania were dissolved. Shortly after, the Germans invaded and occupied Albania, and most Italian soldiers in the country surrendered to the Germans. German forces then began to target for extermination all Jews living in Albania and the Albanian-dominated regions of occupied Yugoslavia. The Jewish community in western Macedonia, which had remained untouched under Italian occupation, was targeted and several groups of Jews were dispatched to extermination camps. Their property and belongings were later taken by many organizations, institutions and private individuals.

The Germans arranged for Albania's administration to be reorganized shortly after occupying the country. On 15 September, the Albanian National Committee was established under German sponsorship. It governed until a Regency Council was established and recognized by Germany as the official government of the country on 3 November 1943. Xhafer Deva, a Kosovo Albanian ally of the Germans in the region, was then appointed the Minister of Interior of Albania. Deva later founded the Nazi-aligned Second League of Prizren in Kosovo, which declared holy war against Slavs, Gypsies and Jews and sought to create an ethnically cleansed Greater Albania. Beginning in September 1943, Jews in Albania, foreseeing the arrival of German troops, dispersed from cities into the countryside where they were concealed by rural Albanians under the customary hospitality laws; some Jews feigned conversion to either Christianity or Islam while still maintaining a Jewish identity. With a new administration in place in 1843, the Germans demanded that Albanian authorities provide them with lists of Jews to be deported. The local authorities did not comply and even provided Jewish families with forged documents.

In the spring of 1944, the Nazi occupiers again asked for a list of Jews; upon hearing the grave situation, two of the local Jewish leaders sought the council of Mehdi Frasheri, a government official, for help; Frasheri referred them to Xhafer Deva, who apparently on the one hand had a "good reputation for protecting Jews" yet on the other "had become known for the terror he exercised across the streets of Tirana along with his hordes". Xhafer Deva, then the interior minister of the Albanian quisling government, reportedly told two Jewish delegates that he had the list, and agreed that he would protest the matter with the Germans. He refused to hand the list over to the Germans and rejected their requests to gather Jews in one place, purportedly because of the Albanian besa custom of hospitality. To the Germans, Deva argued that he would not hand over the list as he would not accept "interference in Albanian affairs". Deva informed the leaders of the Jewish community that he had successfully refused the German request afterward. In June 1944, the German government asked for the list of Jews again, and the Albanian collaborationist government refused yet again.

The situation in Albanian-dominated Kosovo was quite different. There, Deva began recruiting Kosovo Albanians to join the Waffen-SS. The 21st Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Skanderbeg (1st Albanian) was formed on 1 May 1944. The division was better known for abuses against ethnic Serbs than for participating in combat operations on behalf of the German war effort. On 14 May, members of the division raided Jewish homes in Pristina, arrested 281 native and foreign Jews, then handed them over to the Germans. On 23 June, 249 of these were taken to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where many were killed.

About 210 Jews from Kosovo perished during the war. This represents a fatality rate of about forty percent. An official Yugoslav state report published in 1964 recorded 74 Jewish wartime fatalities in the region. Approximately 600 Jews were killed in Albania, Kosovo and other Albanian-controlled territories during the war. At least 177 were killed at Bergen-Belsen. A somewhat greater number, as well as several hundred refugees, hid and survived with the assistance of the local Albanian population. Albania saved virtually all of its native Jews and Jewish refugees from other countries. Albania is together with Denmark and Bulgaria the only European countries where the majority of Jews were saved. Kosovo had a survival rate of 62%, the second-highest in Yugoslavia, compared with only 10% in Macedonia and 12% in Serbia.

To Analysis section
Opinions differ among scholars as well as in public discourse with regard to how to interpret the higher survival rate of Jews in Albania, as well as the different outcomes in Albania and Kosovo.

Some experts have attributed the "exceptional difference" in Albania to the besa, a traditional code of honor that was an important part of the culture of the Albanian highlands, which among other things obligated Albanians to provide shelter and safe passage for anyone seeking protection, especially if they had given an oath to do so, while failure to do so results in loss of prestige for the man. Testimony from survivors and Albanians who rescued Jews has shown that many individual Albanian rescuers explained their own actions according to the besa. Traditionally, Albanian historiography of the events has also emphasized the role of the besa, along with other Albanian cultural values and at the turn of the century the view was also adopted by foreignors; however the narrative emphasizing the besa has come under criticism as an "almost folk explication" that is in fact "thoroughly limited", with Monika Stafa arguing that "Albanian popular virtues" on their own could not possibly have successfully resisted the power of the Nazis' almost mathematical execution of their racial philosophy.

Instead, Stafa argues, the outcome must also be attributed to a more complicated combination of factors including the obstruction by collaborationist officials of attempts by Nazis to obtain information pertaining to Jews in the country, the inaction of Italian occupiers, and the actions of individuals, especially those in positions of power. Anti-Semitic legislation was often not enacted in Albania by the Italian authorities ; and Fischer notes that when it was in 1940, it was applied in a half-hearted way, with not a single Jew expelled and Jews sent into the countryside to stay with Albanian families, while during the Italian period Jews felt little need to hide their identities and celebrated traditional holidays publically. Stafa also stressed the importance of the repeated refusal of Albanian collaborationist authorities to hand over the list of Jews, noting that across countries, obstruction of attempts by Nazis to obtain comprehensive lists about the local Jewish presence was associated with a 10% increase in survival rate. Fischer notes that the situation was different in Kosovo, where anti-Semitic legislation stigmatizing Jewish identity was in fact decreed and enforced, while Kosovo also differed from Albania proper in that Nazi Germans did obtain the lists regarding Jewish presence, despite some effort by officials in Pristina to prevent it from falling into their hands.

Fischer noted that the Nazi Germans accepted the Albanian collaborationist refusal to hand over the lists and the lack of an organized German effort to hunt down Jews in the area was in part because of the policies of German officials such as Hermann Neubacher who insisted on maintaining the appearance that Germany was allowing Albania "relative independence". When Xhafer Deva refused requests to hand over the lists, he denounced the request as "a flagrant violation of their agreement and interference in Albanians' internal affair", and after one last request in June 1944, requests stopped.

Mojzes argues that Kosovo Albanians, due to their historical experiences with Serbs and the Ottoman Empire and the "zero-sum game" with local Serbs, they tended to be more unfriendly towards local non-Albanians and many enthusiastically supported the Germans as a result, while disputing claims that Kosovo Albanians protected Jews after German forces took over territories that Italian authorities had controlled during the war, arguing that the protection that Jews received in Kosovo in the early years of the war was due more to the Italian authorities than to the local Albanian population. Mojzes argues that Kosovar Albanians welcomed the defeat and partitioning of Yugoslavia, and were particularly grateful to any power that offered them their "dream of Greater Albania", no matter who they were. In Albania proper, Mojzes argues that anti-Semitism was not widespread because there were very few Jews. Anti-Semitic legislation was applied in Kosovo, but not only half-heartedly at most in Albania. Fischer instead attributes relative Albanian tolerance toward Jews to "deeper religious tolerance" which was encouraged by Albania's religious diversity; he notes that, writing in the 1930s, American ambassador Herman Bernstein noted the lack of anti-Semitism in the country.