Chapter 5.: War, foreign occupation and people’s resistance,
5.1. Question 1: Exploitation of peculiarities
On 6th April, Mussolini rejected Zogu’s final proposal for a military treaty between Italy and Albania, adding that the only representative to the Albanian king that he would authorise from now on was General Guzzoni, the commander-in-chief of the Italian troops charged with the occupation of Albania.
The Rome ultimatum expired at midnight on 6th April, and an army of 23,000 men,215 supported by several units of marines and a large air force, disembarked on the Albanian coast on 7th April 1939. No serious preparations had been made for an opposition, and no leadership was offered. Many of the northern tribes did not lift a hand against the Italians, and the Mirdita actually disarmed Zog’s retreating troops. When it came to the test, the rulers of Albania abandoned their country to its fate. Zog and his followers fled hurriedly and took refuge in Greece. With the King gone, the fighters abandoned their positions, took the flight and returned to their native towns or villages (Kontis, 1997, p.336), so any kind of resistance was quickly broken. Within a few days Italian troops had overrun every bit of Albanian land and on 10th April they reached the frontiers of Yugoslavia and Greece. Once more Albania´s independence was brutally cut short after just two decades of troubled existence.
Once they had established themselves in Albania, the first task accomplished by the Italians was to find collaborators in order to proceed to the legalisation of their seizure of the country and the selection of a leader with the fascist seal. They had not worked out a special plan and they did not try to attract specific personalities, whose co-operation with the conqueror could work positively upon the feelings and attitude of more Albanians
215 P.A.A.A., B.dSS., Rintelen Mackensen für Oberkommando Heer, 07.April 1939, Albanien, Band 1, Mf. Nr. 19, R.N.:129, S.026.
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towards them. They simply tried to find people willing to help them bild a political-bureaucratic bridge between the conquerors and the Albanian people. As Neuwirth puts it: „Eine detaillierte Untersuchung des persönlichen Werdeganges der bekanntesten Kollaborateure zeigt, daß es keinen eindeutig zuordenbaren politischen Typus gibt, der für die Zusammenarbeit mit den Italienern prädesiniert war. Vielmehr kamen viele albanische Persönlichkeiten in den vier Jahren der italienischen Besatzung aufgrund der unterschiedlichen Motivationen in kollaborationistische Versuchungen […]“ (Neuwirth, 1996, p.33).
The Albanian collaborators chose some, in advance, from among the local dignitaries and proceeded to the legalisation of Albania’s Italian seizure. With their help, and with a list drawn up by the fascist authorities, a so-called “Constituent Assembly” was quickly fabricated. Its body consisted of 159 deputies, 68 large landowners, 25 tribal leaders, and 46 business people, as well as clerics from all donominations, a few intellectuals, officials, and officers; most of them distinguished only by the level of their servility toward the Italians (Fischer, 1999, p.36). On 12th April 1939, in the presence of the Count of Ciano, this body passed the plans which had been vetoed in Rome, “[…] abolished the regime and abrogated the Constitution, installed a puppet government presided over by the great landowner, Verlaci,216 proclaimed the union between Albania and Italy through
216The only name, which did not appear after 1924 is that of Shevket Bey Verlaci. Zogu, after his return in 1925, broke off his engagement with Verlaci´s daughter. This was, according to the Albanian customs, an affront to the bride´s family dignity and pride and led, according to Kanun of Lek Dukagjini, to a vendetta. It is true that, there were more than one attempt against his life by both sides. Sevket Verlaci himself was nearly killed in such an attempt. After that event, he withdrew in his Konak in Elbasan where he was under the protection of his armed bodyguards. His name appears in politics once again in 1939 (Busch-Zantner, 1939, pp.91-92).
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new contracts and decided to give the crown to the Italian King (Victor Emmanuel III) […]”217
The final act was played in Rome on 16th April 1939 at the Quirinale Palace: a delegation from the so-called assembly offered the “Skanderbeg crown” to Victor Emmanuel III, who saw the title of King of Albania added to his existing titles King of Italy and Emperor of Ethiopia. During this period, the Albanian state was transformed into a miniature version of the Italian Fascist state, with a mixture of Albanian personalities chosen at random and foreigners at the helm of state. A lieutenant-general represented the Italian king and the fiction of a constitutional monarchy was maintained.
On June the 2nd 1939, the “Statute of the Albanian Fascist Party” was published in Tirana; and according to which, as Kampner puts it: “The King was the suvereign of Albania, II Duce shaped its fate –these were the principles of the constitutional law”
(Kampner, 1941, p.431). By virtue of the “fundamental statute“ of the kingdom of Albania, Victor Emmanuel III, supreme ruler of the state of Albania, had been invested with legislative and executive powers.218 He appointed the former Italian Minister at Tirana, Jacomoni, as Lieutenant-General in Albania. The Albanian Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Albanian diplomatic representatives in Italy and other countries, and even the foreign diplomats in Tirana were withdrawn as being incompatible with the monarchy. A fascist Corporate Supreme Council was instituted by way of a Parliament. The Albanian army found themselves incorporated into the Italian army. The fascists were careful to leave the former military administration as it was, but did not fail to nominate Albanians, as well as a large number of Italian advisers, to important posts. And by taking these steps the Italians partly achieved their aim, namely to legalise their seisure of the country.
217 P.A.A.A., B.dSS., Pannwitz an D.N.B. Vertreter Dr. Horn, Tirana, 12. April 1939, Albanien, Band 1, Mf. Nr. 19, R.N.:25, S.040.
218About the rights of the King one can see: Kampner, 1941, pp.431-432 as well as Hadri, 1968, p.18.
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Their next target should have been to make the occupation’s basis as stable as they could.
The next card to play was that of the irridentist feelings of the Albanians. Because of the lack of a fully developed nationalism among the Albanian people, there was a quite strong irredentist sentiment, which both the conquerors tried to exploit but not to the same degree or with such a sucess. The Italians, already from the beginning of the war, started feeding the Albanian dream of a “Great Albania” and kept it alive through
“spontaneous demonstrations” (Fischer, 1994, p.370). “The outbreak of the Second World War had brought about, for what proved to be the last time, a brief union of Kosova with Albania during the years 1941 to 1943. In an effort to rally the Albanian people to her cause, Italy had promised the Albanians their national unity. The German-Italian agreement in Vienna of 1941 stipulated the formation of a “Greater Albania,” to include the large Albanian-inhabited areas of Yugoslavia and, to a lesser extent, Greece.
Italian –ruled Albania was given control of the Kosova region, together with those Macedonian and Montenegrin lands inhabited by Albanians” (Vickers, 1995, p.144). The Italians wished to exploit Albanian irredentist sentiment by insisting that the unification of all the Albanian-inhabited lands was conditional upon an Axis victory. But the result of this was that the most enthusiastic support for the Italian regime, came from Kosova.
Within Albania itself, however, there was considerable hostility towards the Italians as, as Fischer argues, on the one hand the Albanians knew that Kosova’s inclusion in Albania was the result of Yugoslavia’s destruction by the Germans, while on the other “sicherlich fühlten sich viele Albaner zu ihren Mit-Volksangehörigen in Kosova hingezogen, doch muß man bezweifeln, daß Irredentismus ein allgemeines Volksempfiden war. Zog hatte ihn wärhend seiner Regierungszeit als unrelistisch einzuschränken versucht. Und nach der italienischen Invasion kamen viele Albaner zu der Ansicht, daß revisionistische Bestrebungen sich einfach lächerlich ausnahmen, wenn sie doch unfähig waren, ihr vorheriges kleines und unabhängiges Land zu erhalten” (Fischer, 1994, p.371). The Italian policy proved once more to be ineffectual.
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