Lompar, Rastko

Balcanica

English

Serbian Academy of Science and Arts Digital Archive (DAIS)

UDC 930.85(4–12)BALCANICASERBIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES AND ARTSINSTITUTE FOR BALKAN STUDIES BELGRADE2017Editor-in-ChiefVOJISLAV G. PAVLOVIĆDirector of the Institute for Balkan Studies SASAXLVIIIANNUAL OF THE INSTITUTE FOR BALKAN STUDIESE d itor ia l  Boa rdJEAN-PAUL BLED (Paris),  LJUBOMIR MAKSIMOVIĆ, ZORAN MILUTINOVIĆ (London), DANICA POPOVIĆ,  DRAGAN BAKIĆ, SPYRIDON SFETAS (Thessaloniki), GABRIELLA SCHUBERT (Jena),SVETLANA M. TOLSTAJA (Moscow)ISSN 0350–7653eISSN 2406–0801Reviews 385Franziska Zaugg, Albanische Muslime in der Waffen-SS: Von „Grossalbanien“ zur Division „Skanderbeg“. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 2016, 347 p.Reviewed by Rastko Lompar*In a book on international volunteers fight-ing for Franco during the Spanish Civil War, Judith Keene has sought to pinpoint what drove hundreds of people from France, Britain, Ireland, Romania and all of Europe to join the cause of the Spanish national-ists. She claims that they saw the Spanish Civil War not as an internal struggle of the Spanish people, but as a continuation of the Manichean battle between Left and Right beginning in 1917 and continuing into the twentieth century.1 Therefore many of those who had supported Franco later continued the “crusade” and joined the Waffen-SS to fight the “reds” on the Eastern front. The na-ture of their motives has been a matter of debate. Was this engagement an example of transnational fascist solidarity, which chal-lenged the solidarity monopoly of the Left, as the French right-wing philosopher Alain de Benoist claimed,2 a result of personal pragmatic interests or a deliberate collabora-tion aimed at furthering own national goals?The question of motivation is central to Franziska Zaugg’s book The Albanian Mus-lims in the Waffen-SS. In this monograph the author strives to answer a plethora of questions, such as what motivated Alba-nian Muslims to joins the SS, what tech-niques were employed by the Germans to bolster their ranks with Albanian recruits, and what was the image of Albanians in contemporary German public opinion and military assessments. Although the books is 1 Judith Keene, Fighting for  Franco: Interna-tional Volunteers in Nationalist Spain during the Spanish Civil War (London: Hambledon Con-tinuum, 2001), 2.2 Alain de Benoist, Komunizam i nacizam: 25 ogleda o totalitarizmu u XX. stoljeću (Zagreb: Naklada Zlatka Hasanbegovića, 2005), 54.primarily about Albanian enlistment in the Waffen-SS, the author chose the subtitle From “Greater Albania” to the “Skanderbeg” division, since without Albanian irredentism and bloody inter-ethnic violence the SS would not nearly have had such an appeal. The book is divided into three main parts, the first being an extended introduction to interwar Albanian history, the subsequent Italian occupation, the Second World War and, finally, the German occupation. The second part of the book revolves around the SS division “Skanderbeg”, and the third fo-cuses on the image of Albanians in contem-porary German discourse. One is impressed with the breadth of Zaugg’s research. This book is based on German, Italian, Yugoslav and Albanian documents, as well as the rel-evant literature in English, German and Ital-ian. The use of Albanian documents is all the more important since they were sealed until 1990 and therefore virtually unknown to the majority of readers.The introduction (pp. 33–40) outlines the developments in Albanian history from the earliest days to the Italian occupation. It is followed by the chapters on the Italian (pp. 40–87) and German (pp. 88–132) oc-cupations. Zaugg shows how the very util-ity of the occupation was a controversial question for the Italian ruling elites given that Albania was, as Vittorio Emanuele III put it, mere “four rocks” (pp. 47–48). In the end, the fascist regime followed its impe-rial ambitions and Albania was quickly oc-cupied. From that moment Zaugg follows the main dichotomy of Albanian society, namely the one between collaboration and resistance. She shows that regional and * PhD student, Department of History, Fac-ulty of Philosophy, University of Belgradehttp://www.balcanica.rsBalcanica XLVIII (2017)386confessional differences among the Alba-nians played a key role in making one or another choice. Northern Roman Catholic tribes were more eager than their southern compatriots in collaborating with the Italian occupiers. Likewise, the North remained virtually immune to the allure of commu-nism, which was much more common in south and central Albania due to the suspi-cious “Slavophilia” of the new doctrine (p. 68). The Italians set the example, which was later followed by the Germans, in recruit-ing the Blackshirt militia. They successfully instrumentalized the inter-ethnic struggle, and focused on Albanians from the fringes of the newly established “Greater Albania”. They were trained to be ruthless in fight-ing their neighbours, and they knew that the demise of the occupying force would spell doom for their hopes of unification into a greater Albanian state. The German reports on the Italian battles on the Greek and Yugoslav fronts are a testimony to the ruthlessness of the new recruits. After the occupation of Yugoslavia a puppet-state of “Great Albania” was created, and both the Italians and Germans aimed at gaining the support of the Albanians. The northern part of Kosovo, which was occupied by the Ger-mans, became a safe haven for all anti-Italian nationalistic Albanians. Also, the Germans had a clear reason for turning a blind eye to the pogroms of Serbs committed by their new allies, since they rightly saw numerous Albanian Muslims in Kosovo as a potential source of manpower.With the Italian capitulation and the subsequent German occupation the situ-ation only slightly changed. The Germans promised that Albania would be more self-governed and sought to out together a new Albanian government. Zaugg offers a detailed overview of the key German oc-cupying authorities and their mutual con-flicts and quarrels, which also plagued the German occupiers in Serbia and elsewhere. She highlights the primarily economic in-terests in the occupation and concludes that Kosovo was indeed better integrated into the German economic domain than Alba-nia. Zaugg also points to the occupiers’ fear that poor economic conditions in Albania might bolster the ranks of the emerging communist movement, and to their assess-ments that this situation resulted from the “lazy nature” of Albanians (p. 115).The next chapter (pp. 135–192) looks at the activities of high-ranking Albanian na-tionalists such as Xhaver Deva and Rexhep Mitrovica, who were instrumental in the process of recruiting Albanian Muslims to the Waffen-SS. They had been active since 1941 in oppressing the Serbian population by “massacres and plunder” (p. 143). In or-ganizing the Waffen-SS “Skanderbeg”, the Germans were aware of the shortcomings of a similar project, namely the Waffen-SS division “Handzar”. They realized that Al-banians and Bosnian Muslims could not be successfully integrated into a military unit and, more importantly, that deploying such a unit away from its homeland would inevitably result in mutiny and low morale. Therefore the SS “Skanderbeg” was created as an all Albanian, all Muslim unit to be used only in Kosovo and the surrounding regions. The key motivation for joining the unit was inter-ethnic hatred and the dream of living in a single ethnic state. Therefore, the fear of reprisals by Chetnik and Parti-san forces was often employed in German propaganda, as were the sufferings of fellow Muslims in Bosnia, Herzegovina and Mon-tenegro. The book contains a very detailed description of the division and its strength, both in manpower and in equipment. There is also a list of major military operations in which it participated. A special place is ac-corded to the establishment by the unit of the concentration camp in Priština.The third part of the book (pp. 293–310) shows how propaganda and ideology clashed with cultural prejudice in the de-piction of the Albanians by German writ-ers, journalists and soldiers. Starting her overview of the image of Albanians from http://www.balcanica.rsReviews 387Karl May’s Durch das Land der Skipetaren to the last military reports at the end of the Second World War, she convincingly shows how the initial euphoric prtrayal of the Al-banians as “natural born warriors” and a no-ble and freedom-loving people makes way to the less favourable reports of late 1944. In them, the Germans, faced with desertions and the inefficiency of SS “Skanderbeg”, bit-terly brand the Albanians as undisciplined Oriental tricksters who see war merely as plunder.Answering the initial question of mo-tivation, Zaugg concludes that Muslim Albanians were drawn to the SS because they believed that German victory in the war would be the only way to “accomplish the Greater-Albanian project”. Their rea-sons, therefore, were more pragmatic than ideological. They did, however, share some values with the Germans, namely anticom-munism, which, however, was somewhat “instinctive” and stemmed from traditional conservatism.Despite all its strengths the book some-what suffers from an oversimplified view of ethnic/state relations in the Balkans, which is inherited from the sources the au-thor used. For instance, the author draws an ethnic distinction between Serbs and Montenegrins while the distinction at that time was purely regional. Likewise, Zaugg classifies all inhabitants of the Bulgarian oc-cupation zone of Yugoslavia as Bulgarians. An example of this unfortunate choice is the description of one victim of Albanian terror as a “Bulgarian of Serbian decent”.In conclusion, The Albanian Muslims in the Waffen-SS is a valuable addition to the scholarship about the SS division and volunteers in the Balkans. It points out the key aspect of both the Italian and German occupation, and presents the dilemmas of both occupiers. It highlights the intensity of inter-ethnic violence and its aftermath. Zaugg provides the readers with a thorough and balanced overview of the Wafffen-SS division “Skanderbeg”.Boris Milosavljević, Slobodan Jovanović – Teorija [Slobodan Jovanović – Theory]. Belgrade: Balkanološki institut SANU, 2017, 651 p.Reviewed by Vojislav Pavlović*Most years since the beginning of the twen-ty-first century the Institute for Balkan Studies, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, pursued its publishing activity un-der the committed and caring guidance of Dušan T. Bataković. Among the last mono-graphs he signed as editor before his prema-ture death was a book by Boris Milosavljević devoted to Slobodan Jovanović.The title of this book does not quite reveal all that it has in store for the reader. The author was not inclined to the contem-porary practice of turning book titles into short abstracts and chose a terse one in-stead. But awaiting inside its covers is a jour-ney into a world long gone but not forgotten by its aficionados. Tracing the roots of the Jovanović family, the author writes about the cities of Ruma, Novi Sad, Šabac, Belgrade, about leaders of the First Serbian Uprising (1804), merchants, catechists, civil servants, high state officials, army officers, professors bound together by kinship, patriotism and earnest concern for the well-being of their country and society. It is a world which is no doubt familiar to the author, he feels respect and appreciation for it, and seeks to evoke it for the readers with exemplary scrupulousness; one might even say that he hopes his readers will grow fond of that relatively small, close-knit Serbian milieu. * Institute for Balkan Studies SASAhttp://www.balcanica.rs

Franziska Zaugg, Albanische Muslime in der Waffen-SS: Von „Grossalbanien“ zur Division „Skanderbeg“. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 2016, 347 p.

http://dais.sanu.ac.rs/bitstream/id/18964/18 Prikazi 7 Rastko Lompar.pdf

Franziska Zaugg, Albanische Muslime in der Waffen-SS: Von „Grossalbanien“ zur Division „Skanderbeg“. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 2016, 347 p.

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