When I say Kosovo Uprising (1944) then you say...? Germans? No. The Red Army? No. Who? In this video
we're gonna talk about the forgotten Kosovar Uprising. An uprising that took place in 1944
and it was a battle between Tito's Partisans and the Kosovar Albanians. Keep watching!
The Kosovo region was taken over by Serbia in the First Balkan War of 1912-13. Although
it is beyond the scope of this video I do have to mention that Serbia has much history in the area.
Kosovo was the area were the Serbian medieval state was lost to the Turks in 1389. That – in
short – explains why the region is important for many Serbs today and why the Serbian government
sees it as a renegade region rather than an independent nation. In 1938 an estimated
70 per cent of Kosovo's population was Albanian, 20 per cent Serbian and the remainder belonged
to other nationalities. In the interwar period the Yugoslav government strengthened Serbian and
Montenegrin elements in society and discriminated the Albanian population causing much recentment.
Not surprisingly, when the first Axis units entered the region in April 1941 they were
celebrated as liberators. Albanian chieftains in Kosovo were willing
to work with the Germans. Albania itself was under Italian occupation since 1939.
That occupation zone was now extended. The bulk of Kosovo was annexed into Italian-held Albania.
This was due to the large concentration of Albanians living in that region. A
smaller part in the southeast was annexed by Bulgaria and the north of Kosovo was under
German occupation being part of the so-called Serbian Residual State, the rump Serbian state.
When the bulk of Kosovo was incorporated in Italian-held Albania, the decision was favored
by most Albanian Kosovars who saw it as the creation of a 'Greater Albania'. In September
1943 Italy surrendered and the Germans then rushed in to take over the Italian territories.
“An Albanian National Committee under German sponsorship was established on September 15,
1943, and governed until a formal Albanian government under a Regency
Council was established on November 3 and immediately recognized by Germany as the
official government. […] For the Germans, the Albanian government's main task was to
help maintain peace and order so that Germany could use manpower elsewhere”
Let's adress Kosovar collaboration. It does overlapse with the larger
topic of Albanian collaboration since the majority of the Kosovar population were
ethnic Albanians. I did make an elaborate video on that, see link in the end screen.
The Germans were assisted by Kosovar collaborator Xhafer Deva (serving as minister of interior,
part of the nationalist party Balli Kombëtar) who had briefly worked with the Germans before when
they marched in in April 1941. The Balli Kombëtar (also known as the National Front; the BK; or the
Ballists) had started as a resistance group, similar to the Chetniks in Yugoslavia. These
were liberal nationalists who were anti-communist. This greatly complicated the situation in Albania
as there were other resistance groups too: the communists and the Legality Movement. The latter
vowed to restory the monarchy under King Zog. Jürgen Fischer has this to say about the BK:
“Although the evidence of widespread collaboration is extensive, to condemn roundly all elements of
the BK as quislings would be a disservice to many. The principal danger of explaining BK
makeup and policy is the ease with which almost anything can be proved about them.
Most BK members denounced collaboration and whenever a BK member collaborated,
the organization would either deny that the offending party was even affiliated
with the BK or denounce them openly, but keep contact with them clandestinely.”
The Germans found the Kosovar Albanians more co-operative than those in Albania proper.
To Hitler it was proposed to "militarize" 120,000 to 150,000 Kosovo volunteers to
fight the Serbian and Montenegrin Partisans. This request wasn't granted. What was granted
was a scaled down version. Early 1944 an Albanian Waffen-SS division was set-up:
the SS “Skanderbeg” Division with around 6,000 recruits. Its morale was poor,
many deserted and others committed rape and pillage against the Serbian population
in Kosovo. They also arrested 281 Jews in Kosovo and these were deported by Germany.
Towards the end of that year the unit was disarmed and disbanded by the Germans.
Around that time Kosovo was important for the Germans. They needed to withdraw their troops
from Greece and Albania because of the advancing Red Army. The Partisans aided by Bulgarian units
(Bulgaria had switched sides by this point) advanced through the region. Do notice that
the Partisans were over the course of the war referred to as the National Liberation
Army (full name: National Liberation Army and Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia) and
from March 1945 known as the Yugoslav Army.
“The Partisans invaded the province hoping and expecting to be greeted with open arms by the
local people and treated as welcome liberators. It was a rude shock for Tito’s men when they
were met, on the whole, by at best sullen resentment, and at worst outright hostility.”
The Partisans (or Yugoslav Army) – initially sought a deal with those
suspected of collaboration – started to persecute Albanians as a whole. After an incident in which
a Partisan guard was killed there were to be 40 Albanians executed as reprisal. In another
source I read 300 innocent local Kosovar Albanian men were executed. Either way, Albanians in the
ranks of the Partisans protested and together with former collaborators an uprising occured.
“Although little is known of the political aims of the uprising,
the intellectual leader of the rebellion, Imer Berisha, advocated the union of Kosovo and Western
Macedonia with Albania. Official accounts spoke of fascists and collaborators being punished,
and of the rising being 'a final attempt to raise a counterrevolutionary rebellion by remnants of
the Ballists and other pro-fascist forces and a number of Albanians who had deserted from the
brigades of the NLA [National Liberation Army] of Yugoslavia and become outlaws'.”
Heavy fighting occured in Gjilan, Drenica and Trepca where former SS-Skanderbeg men led the
fighting. These were not small-scale skirmishes. Near Presovo some 1,500 Partisans fell casualty
to the fighting. Some units were overrun and annihilated, others severely mauled. Thanks to
German training and weapons left behind the rebels numbering 2,000 men managed to keep
30,000 Partisan troops at bay for two months. Tito declared martial law in February 1945. And
eventually he got the upper hand. Punitive actions occured afterwards. In once case 1,670 Albanians
were herded into a tunnel, which was then sealed off so that all were asphyxiated. These actions
were sharply criticised by the first Congress of the Serbian Communist Party in the spring of
1945. How many Albanians were killed in the revolt and after is hard to say, but it is safe to say
the death toll runs in the thousands. I read that Albanian resistance fighters were active
till in the 1950s. And that makes the Kosovo Uprising the last uprising for Tito to crush.
The Yalta Conference gave the final verdict when it decided to restore Yugoslavia with
its pre-war borders (with some additional territory in the west). The people of Kosovo
became subordinate to Belgrade once again. They became part of Tito's Yugoslavia. That
Yugoslavia began to fall apart after his death. If you like to learn more on that,
you can click right here. I wanna thank you from watching and best wishes from Pristina, Kosovo.