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21st Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Skanderbeg

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For other uses, see Skanderbeg (disambiguation).
21st Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Skanderbeg (1st Albanian)
Insignia of 21st Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Skanderbeg (1st Albanian)[1]
ActiveApril – November 1944
CountryNazi Germany Nazi Germany
AllegianceNazi Germany Nazi Germany
BranchWaffen-SS
TypeMountain infantry
RoleAnti-Partisan operations
Size6,000 – 6,500
Part ofXXI Mountain Corps
Nickname(s)Skanderbeg
EngagementsOperation Draufgänger
Commanders
Notable
commanders		August Schmidhuber

The 21st Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Skanderbeg (1st Albanian) was a German mountain infantry division of the Waffen-SS, the armed wing of the German Nazi Party that served alongside but was never formally part of the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. The division was developed around the nucleus of an ethnic Albanian battalion which had briefly seen combat against the Yugoslav Partisans in eastern Bosnia as part of the 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar (1st Croatian). Composed of Muslim Albanians with mostly German and Yugoslav Volksdeutsche (ethnic German) officers and non-commissioned officers, it was given the title Skanderbeg after the 15th-century Albanian lord George Kastrioti Skanderbeg, who defended that region of Albania against the Ottoman Empire for more than two decades. Skanderbeg never reached divisional strength, being at most a brigade-sized formation of around 6,000 to 6,500 troops. It was responsible for killing, terrorizing, and expelling thousands of Serbs and Montenegrins from Kosovo.[2][3] Its only significant action was Operation Draufgänger, a German anti-Partisan offensive in Montenegro in July 1944. Following that operation, the unit was deployed as a guard force at the chromium mines in Kosovo, where it was quickly overrun by the Partisans, leading to widespread desertion. Reinforced by German Kriegsmarine personnel and with only 500 Albanians remaining in its ranks, it was disbanded on 1 November 1944. The remaining members were incorporated into the 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division Prinz Eugen. After the war, divisional commander August Schmidhuber was found guilty of war crimes by a court in Belgrade and was executed in 1947.

History

Background

The division was named after Albanian national hero George Kastrioti Skanderbeg, who fought the Ottoman Turks in the 15th century.

On 7 April 1939, five months prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, the Kingdom of Italy invaded the Albanian Kingdom. The country was overrun in five days, and the Italian King, Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, subsequently accepted the crown offered by the Albanian parliament. The Royal Albanian Army was incorporated into the Royal Italian Army and a viceroy was appointed to administer the country as a protectorate.[4] After the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia on 6 April 1941, Italian Albania was expanded to include adjacent parts of Yugoslavia incorporated mainly from the Yugoslav banovinas (regional subdivisions) of Vardar and Morava.[5] Kosovo was annexed to Albania, and Albanians there enthusiastically welcomed the Italian occupation.[6] Although officially under Italian rule, the Albanians in Kosovo controlled the region and were encouraged to open Albanian schools, something that had previously been prohibited under Yugoslavian rule.[7][8] The Italians also gave the inhabitants Albanian citizenship and allowed them to fly the Albanian flag.[9] Kosovo Albanians then sought retribution against Kosovo Serbs as they were angered by the presence of Serb and Montenegrin settlers in the region[6] and by the mistreatment that Albanians had experienced at the hands of the Serbs during the Balkan Wars, the First World War, and while the area was part of Yugoslavia.[3] The Italians subsequently cleared the area of most Serbs and Montenegrins who had settled in Kosovo during the inter-war period,[8] while Kosovo Albanians attacked Serb and Montenegrin colonialists and burned an estimated 30,000 of their homes.[9]

Albania remained occupied until Italy surrendered to the Allies in 1943.[10] In August of that year, faced with the imminent collapse of the Italian war-effort, Nazi Germany deployed the 2nd Panzer Army to the Balkans to take over areas previously occupied by Italy. One of the Italian areas seized by the Germans was Albania, where the XXI Mountain Corps of Colonel General Lothar Rendulic's 2nd Panzer Army had been deployed. Based in the Albanian capital of Tirana were a Wehrmacht plenipotentiary general and a special representative of Heinrich Himmler, SS-Brigadeführer und Generalmajor der Waffen-SS und Polizei Josef Fitzthum. The Germans took control of all Albanian forces that had been collaborating with the Italians prior to their capitulation, including the Balli Kombëtar. They strengthened the Albanian army and gendarmerie, but quickly decided the troops were unreliable.[11]

In 1943, a number of Albanians from Kosovo and the Sandžak region were recruited into the 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar (1st Croatian). They were used to form Battalion I/2 (later I/28).[12]

Formation

In February 1944, Adolf Hitler approved the creation of an Albanian Waffen-SS division that was to serve only inside Kosovo.[7] It was meant to be one of three Muslim Waffen-SS divisions serving in the Balkans, the other two being the 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar (1st Croatian) and the 23rd Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Kama (2nd Croatian).[13] Himmler's goal was to expand Waffen-SS recruiting in the Balkans and form two corps of two divisions, with one corps to operate in the region of Bosnia in the Independent State of Croatia and the other in Albania. These corps would then be combined with the Volksdeutsche 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division Prinz Eugen and together would form a Balkan Waffen-SS mountain army of five divisions.[14] In March 1944, Bedri Pejani, the chairman of the Second League of Prizren, an organization created after the Italian surrender to advance the interests of Kosovo Albanians, proposed to Hitler that a force of 120,000 to 150,000 Kosovo Albanian volunteers be raised to fight the Yugoslav and Albanian Partisans. Pejani asked the German leadership to give the Albanians equipment and supplies to fight the communist insurgency, and requested the expansion of the borders of the puppet state of Albania. These requests were not fulfilled.[11] However, in April 1944 Himmler ordered the establishment of a new Albanian volunteer division,[10] which was subsequently named after the medieval Albanian warrior George Kastrioti Skanderbeg.[15] Himmler saw the Muslim Albanians as a potential source of manpower in Germany's war against the Yugoslav Partisans,[10] who were having difficulty recruiting Kosovo Albanians to join their ranks.[7][3] The Germans found that Kosovo Albanians were more cooperative than Albanians in Albania itself,[11] mainly because they feared a return to Yugoslav rule.[7] Consequently, many of the division's recruits were Albanians from Kosovo. However, the quality of most of these recruits was poor, with only 6,000 being considered suitable to receive training.[10] The SS had initially envisioned a force of 12,000 men.[7] On 17 April, the Albanian battalion of the 13th SS Division was transferred via rail directly from combat in Bosnia to Kosovo to form part of the Skanderbeg division. The head of Waffen-SS recruitment, SS-Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger, reported to Himmler that the Albanians "... were quite sad about leaving."[16] On 23 May, Fitzthum reported the failure of Albanian units used in operations against the Partisans, and that he had dissolved four Albanian battalions organized by the Wehrmacht. He described most Albanian army and gendarmerie officers as "totally corrupt, unusable, undisciplined and untrainable."[11]

File:Skanderbeg.JPG
A recruiting poster of the 21st Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Skanderbeg (1st Albanian).

Operations

The division was founded as the 21. Waffen-SS Gebirgsdivision der SS Skanderbeg (albanische Nr.1)[17] in April 1944 as part of the XXI Mountain Corps. All of the division's officers, non-commissioned officers, and specialists were German.[18] The division was placed under the command of SS-Standartenführer (Colonel) August Schmidhuber,[19] who was promoted to SS-Oberführer (senior colonel) in June. Estimates of the size of the division range from 6,000[17] to 6,500[20] men. In June 1944, the division engaged in large-scale field maneuvers between the towns of Berane and Andrijevica in Montenegro.[21] In July, it took part in Operation Draufgänger against the Partisans there. Afterwards, some members were charged with guarding chromium mines near Kosovo before the area was overrun by the Partisans. In the ensuing clashes, one of the division's regiments lost more than 1,000 men and many Albanians deserted.[17]

Most of the Muslim Albanian members of the division seemed to be interested only in settling scores with their Christian Serb adversaries, which resulted in numerous atrocities.[10] The Germans had to disarm battalions of the division in the towns of Peć and Prizren as a result.[7] On 21 May 1944, members of the division raided Jewish homes in Pristina and arrested 281 Jews and handed them over to the Germans, who sent them to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where many were killed.[22] In general, members of the division were better known for murdering, raping, and looting in predominantly Serb areas and for arresting Jews than for participating in combat operations on behalf of the German war-effort.[23] In addition to indiscriminately killing Serbs and Montenegrins, members of the division were responsible for the expulsion of up to 10,000 Slavic families from Kosovo as new Albanian settlers arrived from the poor areas of northern Albania.[24] The arrival of these Albanians was encouraged by the Italian authorities in Kosovo, and it is estimated that as many as 72,000 Albanians were settled or re-settled in Kosovo during the war.[9]

By September 1944 the division numbered less than 7,000 men, which was less than one-third of its intended strength.[18] Within two months of its initial deployment, 3,500 men had deserted. Himmler brought in 3,000 to 4,000 Kriegsmarine (German navy) personnel to make up the numbers. However, this had little effect on the division's fighting ability.[25][10] By the beginning of October 1944, the division's strength had fallen to about 4,900 men, fewer than 1,500 of whom were fit for combat.[17] As a result, Schmidhuber held his men in contempt, and he, his superiors, and Fitzthum explained their failure to create an effective security force by denigrating the Albanian culture and military reputation.[26][27] Later, less-involved members of the Wehrmacht stated that the principal issue regarding the unit's reliability may have been that the Germans did not work closely with the Albanians at the local level.[26] On 24 October, Generaloberst Alexander Löhr, the commander of Army Group E, ordered that all Albanian members of the division be disarmed and released.[18] On 1 November 1944, the division was disbanded.[17] At the same time, Albanians in Kosovo took up arms against the Partisans when they learned that the region would not be unified with Albania after the war, despite earlier Partisan promises. Atrocities occurred when 30,000 Partisans were sent to Kosovo to quell Albanian resistance in the region.[15] Between 3,000 and 25,000 Kosovo Albanians were killed in the violence.[28] Claims that the number of Albanians killed were as high as 36,000 to 47,000 have been shown by historians such as Noel Malcolm to be greatly exaggerated.[2]

Aftermath

The remaining German troops and former naval personnel were reorganized as the regimental Kampfgruppe Skanderbeg under the command of SS-Obersturmbannführer Alfred Graaf. The unit withdrew from the Kosovo region in mid-November along with the rest of the German troops in the area.[18] Many Serbs and Montenegrins then took revenge against the region's ethnic Albanians, especially collaborators and former members of the division.[2] When Kampfgruppe Skanderbeg reached Ljubovija on the Drina river, it was placed under the command of the 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division Prinz Eugen, which was securing the river crossings in that area.[29] Kampfgruppe Skanderbeg held the towns of Zvornik and Drinjača during the first half of December 1944 as part of the Ljubovija bridgehead. The division withdrew across the Drina and fought its way northward, towards Brčko on the Sava river, where it relieved the Wehrmacht forces holding the town.[30] In late December the assault gun battery of Kampfgruppe Skanderbeg was committed to the Syrmian Front at Vinkovci,[31] and the remainder of the Kampfgruppe was deployed to Bijeljina.[31] In January 1945,[32] the naval personnel were transferred to the 32nd SS Volunteer Grenadier Division 30 Januar,[17] and the remnants of the former division were reorganized as the II battalion of the 14th SS Volunteer Mountain Infantry Regiment of the 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division Prinz Eugen. On 21 January 1945, Schmidhuber was promoted to SS-Brigadeführer (brigadier) and placed in command of the 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division Prinz Eugen.[32] After the war, he was found guilty of war crimes and was hanged in Belgrade on 27 February 1947.[33]

Insignia

A collar patch depicting a helmet with a goat's head device was manufactured but there is no evidence that it was ever used. Photographs exist of a cuff band showing the title Skanderbeg, and members of the cadre staff were photographed wearing an Albanian arm shield depicting the black Albanian double-headed eagle on a red field.[17] Many of the division's Muslim members wore traditional grey-coloured skull caps instead of the standard SS field cap.[10]

Order of battle

The principal units of the division were:[17]

  • 50th Waffen Gebirgsjäger (Mountain Infantry) Regiment of the SS (1st Albanian)
  • 51th Waffen Gebirgsjäger Regiment of the SS (2nd Albanian)

The division never reached full strength, and it is unknown how many other constituent units of the division were ever formed.[19]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Keegan 1970, p. 139.
  2. ^ a b c Bideleux & Jeffries 2007, p. 526.
  3. ^ a b c Mojzes 2011, p. 95.
  4. ^ Lemkin 2008, pp. 99–100.
  5. ^ Lemkin 2008, pp. 260–261.
  6. ^ a b Judah 2002, p. 27.
  7. ^ a b c d e f Judah 2002, p. 28.
  8. ^ a b Tomasevich 2001, p. 151.
  9. ^ a b c Ramet 2006, p. 141.
  10. ^ a b c d e f g Williamson 2004, p. 128.
  11. ^ a b c d Tomasevich 2001, p. 153.
  12. ^ Lepre 1997, pp. 48–49.
  13. ^ Longerich 2012, p. 677.
  14. ^ Lepre 1997, p. 223.
  15. ^ a b Judah 2000, p. 132.
  16. ^ Lepre 1997, p. 165.
  17. ^ a b c d e f g h Williamson 2012a, p. 38.
  18. ^ a b c d Tomasevich 2001, p. 154.
  19. ^ a b Williamson 2012b, p. 18.
  20. ^ Abbott 1983, p. 27.
  21. ^ Frank 2010, pp. 84–85.
  22. ^ Shay 2007, p. 34.
  23. ^ Mojzes 2011, pp. 94–95.
  24. ^ Poulton 2003, pp. 127–128.
  25. ^ Williamson 2012b, p. 19.
  26. ^ a b Fischer 1999, p. 186.
  27. ^ Judah 2002, pp. 28–29.
  28. ^ Judah 2002, pp. 27–28.
  29. ^ Kumm 1995, p. 236.
  30. ^ Kumm 1995, p. 239.
  31. ^ a b Kumm 1995, p. 245.
  32. ^ a b Kumm 1995, p. 255.
  33. ^ MacLean 1996, p. 141.

References

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