The liberation of Tirana

On the morning of 17 November 1944 the last German units withdrew from Tirana, and the Albanian capital was taken over by the partisans of the National Liberation Army, the armed wing of the movement led by the communists and their leader Enver Hoxha. So ended the battle for the city, which according to Albanian historiography lasted nineteen days and nights – from 29 October (some studies give 28 October). The statement found in war chronologies that the Germans “gave up Tirana, liberated by local partisans” is broadly accurate: neither Allied troops nor the Red Army took part in the fighting, and the Germans did not leave the city voluntarily but broke out of encirclement and withdrew northwards. It should be added, however, that the withdrawal from Albania was already a foregone conclusion – the Wehrmacht was then abandoning the whole of the southern Balkans – and that the liberation of the capital was at the same time a seizure of power by a single movement, which was simultaneously fighting a civil war against Albanian nationalists and royalists.

Albania under two occupations

Albania came under foreign rule in the spring of 1939. After the Italian ultimatum, Mussolini’s troops landed on 7 April on the Albanian coast, King Zog fled the country and the crown passed to Victor Emmanuel III. Albania became an Italian protectorate, and after the partition of Yugoslavia in 1941 Kosovo and part of western Macedonia were attached to it – which for a time won the occupiers the sympathy of some Albanians.

After Italy’s surrender in September 1943 the Germans disarmed the Italian divisions in Albania within a few days, captured the headquarters of the Italian army group in Tirana and took control of the towns and the coast (Operation Achse). Instead of direct administration they proclaimed Albania’s “independence”: power was formally assumed by a regency council including Mehdi Frashëri, and successive governments – among them those of Rexhep Mitrovica and Ibrahim Biçaku – operated within limits set by the German military. The interior minister was the Kosovo-born Xhafer Deva; under him came the police, who on 4 February 1944 took part in killing several dozen inhabitants of Tirana suspected of anti-fascist activity (English-language studies speak of 86 victims). For the Germans Albania was above all a rear area: it secured the flank of the troops in Greece and supplied chrome, of which several tens of thousands of tonnes were shipped to the Reich in 1943–1944.

Three camps of Albanian resistance

The Albanian resistance was divided from the start. The Communist Party of Albania (PL) was founded in Tirana on 8 November 1941 with the help of emissaries from the Yugoslav communists; its secretary was Enver Hoxha, a teacher from Gjirokastër. In September 1942, at a conference in the village of Peza, the communists set up the National Liberation Movement, formally open to all opponents of the occupation, and in 1943 a regular National Liberation Army. One of its ablest commanders proved to be Mehmet Shehu, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and later for many years prime minister and the second man in the state.

Alongside the communists there were two nationalist organisations. Balli Kombëtar (the National Front) of Midhat Frashëri was a republican and anti-communist movement, strong especially in the south. Legaliteti, led by Major Abaz Kupi, gathered supporters of Zog’s return, mainly in the mountainous centre and north. In the summer of 1943 the communists and Balli Kombëtar reached an agreement at Mukje to fight together, but the communists soon repudiated it – according to their critics on the instructions of Yugoslav advisers, according to themselves because the agreement accepted the idea of a “Greater Albania” including Kosovo. From the autumn of 1943 a civil war was fought in the country alongside the struggle against the occupiers. Some Balli Kombëtar units, and later certain Legaliteti groups as well, cooperated with the Germans against the partisans; others remained neutral. The assessment of this collaboration is still disputed in Albania: for decades communist historiography portrayed all nationalists as traitors, while the émigrés portrayed the communists as Belgrade’s tool.

From Përmet to Berat

In the winter of 1943/1944 a German offensive against the partisans, supported by Albanian government formations and some Balli Kombëtar units, brought the National Liberation Army to the brink of defeat; in January 1944 the Germans also overran the headquarters of the British military mission. In the spring, however, the partisans recovered. At the end of May 1944 a congress at Përmet set up the Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation as an organ of power, and its executive committee – headed by Hoxha, who was also commander-in-chief of the army with the rank of Colonel General – acted in practice as a government. The congress also barred Zog from returning to the country.

In the summer of 1944 the partisans, supplied by air and sea by the British Special Operations Executive, routed the Balli Kombëtar forces in the south and crossed the Shkumbin river into central and northern Albania. According to English-language studies, by October 1944 they numbered some 70,000. British liaison officers with the nationalists, among them Julian Amery, complained that weapons from Allied airdrops were being used by the communists to fight their political opponents rather than the Germans. At the end of October these missions were evacuated to Italy; Abaz Kupi, who was refused a place on a British boat, escaped from the country on his own. In Albania, as in Yugoslavia with Josip Broz Tito, London backed the strongest armed force rather than the one politically closest to it.

On 20–23 October 1944 the second session of the Anti-Fascist Council met at Berat and transformed its committee into the Provisional Democratic Government of Albania, with Enver Hoxha as prime minister and minister of defence. At a party plenum held in Berat at the same time, the Yugoslav emissary Velimir Stojnić sharply criticised the leadership of the Albanian communists – the first sign of the quarrel that a few years later would divide Tirana and Belgrade. When the battle for the capital began, then, the communists already had a government ready, waiting only for a city in which to sit.

The German retreat

Albania’s fate, however, was largely being decided outside the country. With the Red Army’s entry into Yugoslavia and the liberation of Belgrade, General Alexander Löhr’s German Army Group E had to withdraw hastily from Greece – it left Athens on 12 October, and at the beginning of November its last units left the Greek mainland. General Ernst von Leyser’s XXI Mountain Corps, occupying Albania, was to cover this retreat from the west and then itself withdraw northwards through Shkodër into Montenegro. For that it needed an open road from the south of the country through Tirana and Shkodër. The defence of the capital was therefore not meant to hold it at all costs but to gain time for the columns streaming in from Greece and southern Albania.

Nineteen days of fighting

The attack on Tirana began on 29 October 1944. It was carried out by the I Corps of the National Liberation Army; Albanian and English-language studies name Hoxha and Mehmet Shehu, then commanding the 1st Division, as directing the fighting. At first two brigades (the 1st and 7th) went into action; in the final phase, according to Albanian military history, there were as many as eleven. According to the same sources there were more than 8,000 Germans in and around the city, with artillery and armour, although the numbers of German tanks given in some studies seem greatly exaggerated. The partisans had no heavy weapons, so the fighting took the form of attritional clashes for individual districts, buildings and the hills around the city.

For two weeks the partisans gradually tightened the ring around the centre, cutting the roads out of the city. Some of the civilian population left the city, some helped the fighters, and food and water ran short. On the morning of 16 November the brigades launched the final assault. The 1st Brigade took the Officers’ House and the area around the clock tower and the theatre, and the 8th Brigade fought its way along Kavaja Street and linked up with it, trapping the Germans in the very centre. They held out longest in the ministry buildings, the bank and the town hall, and in the Hotel London, on whose site the National Historical Museum stands today. On the night of 16/17 November the German command judged further defence hopeless: under cover of darkness the soldiers broke out of the encirclement, assembled at the airfield and from there set off through Vorë and Laç towards Shkodër, harried by partisan fire along the way. By the morning of 17 November Tirana was free of Germans.

The losses on both sides are known mainly from Albanian studies and must be treated with caution. Albanian military history gives 127 partisans killed and 290 wounded, and on the German side at least a hundred killed and 365 prisoners, as well as several hundred vehicles and wagons destroyed or captured; other publications speak of about 2,000 German dead. More recent research, based on the reports of British and American liaison officers, draws attention to the darker side of the victory: the partisans as a rule took no wounded prisoners; according to these accounts several hundred wounded German soldiers were killed in the military hospital in Tirana; and the fate of more than a hundred Germans who surrendered to the American mission near Tirana and were handed over to the partisans remains unknown. For decades these allegations could not be investigated in Albania.

To Shkodër and beyond

After the fall of Tirana the German withdrawal from Albania was nearing its end. The partisans took one town after another in the centre and north of the country, and on 29 November 1944 they entered Shkodër, the last large town abandoned by the Germans. That day was celebrated in communist Albania as Liberation Day, the day after Independence Day (28 November, the anniversary of the 1912 proclamation). It is often stressed that Albania – along with Yugoslavia – was the only occupied country in Europe to drive out the Germans without the participation of the ground forces of the great powers. There is much truth in this, though it is worth remembering that the Wehrmacht’s withdrawal from the Balkans was decided above all by the Soviet advance in Romania, Bulgaria and Serbia, and that the partisans hastened and hampered a retreat they could not have forced on their own. Von Leyser’s corps reached Podgorica, where in the second half of November it was halted by Yugoslav partisans supported by British artillery and had to withdraw by a longer route through the mountains of Montenegro and Bosnia.

The Albanian brigades did not stop at the border. Before the end of 1944 some of them entered Montenegro and Kosovo, fighting alongside Tito’s army. In Kosovo, which was to go back to Yugoslavia, this embittered the local Albanians; at the turn of 1944 and 1945 the Yugoslav communists bloodily crushed an anti-Yugoslav uprising there.

Significance

For the course of the war the liberation of Tirana was a secondary episode: the Germans were leaving Albania anyway, and the battle did not change the fate of Army Group E, which in the following months withdrew through Yugoslavia. For Albania itself, however, it was a turning point. On 17 November 1944 what entered the capital was not just an army but the ready-made apparatus of power of a single party. Hoxha’s provisional government moved from Berat to Tirana and in the months that followed crushed the remnants of Balli Kombëtar and Legaliteti or forced them into exile. A special tribunal, whose members included communist activists without legal training, in 1945 sentenced former ministers, “traitors” and “enemies of the people”, some of them to death; many executions were carried out without trial. The elections of 2 December 1945, with a single list of the Democratic Front, gave it more than 90 per cent of the vote according to official figures, and on 11 January 1946 the People’s Republic of Albania was proclaimed. Zog never returned to the country.

Yugoslav influence, already visible at the Berat plenum, almost turned Albania into a satellite of Belgrade in the first post-war years. After Tito’s break with Stalin in 1948 Hoxha turned against Yugoslavia, and the pro-Yugoslav interior minister Koçi Xoxe was executed in 1949. Relations with the West were poisoned as early as 1946 by the Corfu Channel incident. In the following decades Hoxha also broke with the USSR and China, and Albania became one of the most isolated and repressive states in Europe, covered with hundreds of thousands of concrete bunkers. Hoxha ruled until his death in 1985. Throughout those decades the memory of November 1944 served to legitimise his rule – and that is why only after the fall of communism in 1990–1992 could Albanian historians begin to describe the liberation of Tirana both as a victory over the occupier and as the beginning of a dictatorship.