In general, German policy was to organize volunteer military units among Nazi sympathizers in occupied countries. Of all the occupied nations only the Serbs, Greeks and Poles refused to form Nazi volunteer units. Rather than joining the Nazis, as the Albanians in Kosovo did, the Serbs organized the largest anti-Nazi resistance in Europe. Both the Communist Partisans and the Royalist Chetniks were mainly Serbs and both groups fought the Germans and their local allies throughout Yugoslavia.
The Germans recruited the 9,000 man Skanderbeg division to fight these resistance groups. But the Skanderberg’s Albanians had little interest in going up against soldiers; they mainly wanted to terrorize local Serbs, “Gypsies” and Jews. Many of these Kosovo Albanians had seen prior service in the Bosnian Muslim and Croatian SS divisions, which were notorious for slaughtering civilians.
What explained this passionate hatred for non-Albanians? A big factor was militant Islam. The Fundamentalist “Second League of Prizren” was created in September 1943 by Xhafer Deva, a Kosovo Albanian, to work with the German authorities. The League proclaimed a jihad (holy war) against Slavs. They were backed by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al Husseini, who was a leading Nazi, pressed for Hitler’s ‘Final Solution,’ and had Hitler’s approval to lead the murdering of all Middle Eastern Jews, once the time was ripe [13]. Albanian religious intolerance was shown by their targeting Serbian Orthodox churches and monasteries for destruction.[14]
No one is certain of the exact extent of human destruction suffered in Fascist-occupied Kosovo. Estimates range from 10,000 to 30,000 Serbs murdered. At least 100,000 were driven from Kosovo and replaced with “immigrants” from Albania.[15]
In justifying current Kosovo Albanian demands to secede from Serbia, the media has repeated, like a mantra: 90% of the population is Albanian. While this figure is most likely exaggerated (nobody knows for sure because Kosovo Albanians boycotted the census for years) the province has been largely Albanian. But a major cause of the current demographic imbalance was the Albanians’ success as Hitler’s willing executioners during World War II.[16]
And their attention was not limited to Serbs. Unknown numbers of Romany (”Gypsies”) were liquidated. And Kosovo Albanians, acting alone as well as under German direction, eliminated many of Kosovo’s Jews.
The definitive work on Hitler’s “Final Solution” in Yugoslavia [17] estimates that 550 Jews lived in Kosovo when Hitler took over Yugoslavia. 210 of them, or 38 percent, were murdered in Kosovo, mainly by Albanians.
In fact, the Skanderbeg division’s first operation was to act as an Einsatzgruppe [18] against the Jews, and its second was a similar extermination foray against the Serb village of Velika where more than 400 Serbians were murdered. [19]
Cedomir Prlincevic, head of the Jewish community in Pristina and an executive of the provincial archives, has explained to Emperor’s Clothes that the Jews who were not murdered outright were sent by the Skanderbeg division to the German death camps Treblinka and Bergen-Belsen. One train, on its way to the latter camp, took the wrong track and was intercepted by advancing Russian soldiers.
According to Mr. Prlincevic, were it not for that fortunate detour, the entire Jewish population of Kosovo would have been eliminated.
Although KLA supporters now claim that no Jews were killed in Kosovo and that Jews were sheltered by the Kosovo Albanians, such claims are false and should be treated the same way we would treat other Holocaust denials.
http://emperors-clothes.com/articles...on/rootsof.htm
From the article entitled “Nazis Love America” by Julia Gorin:
Further revealing the fascist foundations of today’s KKKosovo was a 1999 article by the New York Times’ Christopher Hedges, in Foreign Affairs Magazine:
Quote:
“The KLA splits down a bizarre ideological divide, with hints of fascism on one side and whiffs of communism on the other. The former faction is led by the sons and grandsons of rightist Albanian fighters - either the heirs of those who fought in the World War II fascist militias and the Skanderbeg volunteer SS division raised by the Nazis, or the descendants of the rightist Albanian kacak rebels who rose up against the Serbs 80 years ago. Although never much of a fighting force, the Skanderbeg division took part in the shameful roundup and deportation of the province’s few hundred Jews during the Holocaust.
The division’s remnants fought Tito’s Partisans at the end of the war, leaving thousands of ethnic Albanians dead. The decision by KLA commanders to dress their police in black fatigues and order their fighters to salute with a clenched fist to the forehead has led many to worry about these fascist antecedents. Following such criticism, the salute has been changed to the traditional open-palm salute common in the U.S. Army.
“The second KLA faction, comprising most of the KLA leaders in exile, are old Stalinists who were once bankrolled by the xenophobic Enver Hoxha, the dictator of Albania who died in 1985. This group led a militant separatist movement that was really about integration with Hoxha’s Albania. Most of these leaders were students at Pristina University after 1974, when Belgrade granted the province autonomy.
Freed from Yugoslav oversight, the university imported thousands of textbooks from Albania, all carefully edited by Hoxha’s Stalinist regime, along with at least a dozen militant Albanian professors. Along with its degree programs, Pristina University began to quietly school young Kosovar leaders in the art of revolution.
Not only did a huge percentage of the KLA leadership come out of the university, but so, ominously, did the ethnic Albanian leadership in neighboring Macedonia.”
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It certainly goes a long way to explain the seemingly flippant nickname of one of the six escapees in an August prison break. Lirim Jakupi, a leader of the Albanian National Army and tasked with destabilizing Macedonia, goes by the title “Commander Nazi.” The escapee has since been captured (after a shootout with Macedonian police).