In Albania, World War II began with its invasion by Italy in April 1939. Fascist Italy set up Albania as its protectorate or puppet state. The resistance was largely carried out by communist groups against Italy (until 1943) and then German occupation in Albania. At first independent, the communist groups united in the beginning of 1942, which ultimately led to the successful liberation of the country in 1944.
Background
In 1938, Germany annexed Austria and moved against Czechoslovakia without notifying Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in advance, so he decided in early 1939 to proceed with his own annexation of Albania. Italy's King Victor Emmanuel III criticised the plan to take Albania as an unnecessary risk.
Italy, however, issued an ultimatum to the Albanian government on March 25, 1939, demanding that it accede to Italy's occupation of the country. King Zog refused to accept money in exchange for countenancing a full Italian takeover and colonisation of Albania, and on April 7, 1939, Mussolini's troops, led by General Alfredo Guzzoni, invaded Albania, attacking all Albanian ports simultaneously. There were 65 units in Sarandë, 40 at Vlorë, 38 in Durrës, 28 at Shëngjin and 8 more at Bishti i Pallës. The original Italian plans for the invasion called for up to 50,000 men supported by 137 naval units and 400 aircraft. Ultimately the invasion force grew to 100,000 men supported by 600 aircraft.
In Durrës, a force of only 360 Albanians—mostly gendarmes and townspeople—led by Abaz Kupi, the commander of the gendarmerie in Durrës, and Mujo Ulqinaku, a marine official, tried to halt the Italian advance. Equipped only with small arms and three machine guns, they succeeded in keeping the Italians at bay for several hours. Then a large number of small tanks were unloaded from Italian ships and resistance crumbled. Within five hours Italian troops had captured the city. By 1:30 pm on the first day, all Albanian ports were in Italian hands.
Unwilling to become an Italian puppet, King Zog, his wife, Queen Geraldine Apponyi, and their infant son Skander fled to Greece and eventually to London. On April 12, the Albanian parliament voted to unite the country with Italy. The Albanian parliament voted to depose Zog and unite the nation with Italy "in personal union" by offering the Albanian crown to Victor Emmanuel III. The Italians set up a fascist government under Shefqet Verlaci and soon absorbed Albania's military and diplomatic service into Italy's. On April 15, 1939, Albania withdrew from the League of Nations, from which Italy had resigned in 1937. On June 3, 1939, the Albanian foreign ministry was merged into the Italian foreign ministry. The Albanian military was placed under Italian command and formally merged into the Italian Army in 1940. Additionally, the Italian Blackshirts formed four legions of Albanian Fascist Militia, initially recruited from Italian colonists living in Albania, but later also from ethnic Albanians.
Upon invading, Galeazzo Ciano tried to reinforce an impression of benevolence with a number of initial gestures aimed more at public relations than at addressing any of Albania's profound social and economic problems. One of Ciano's first moves was to distribute food and clothing in some of the poor areas and to release political prisoners. He personally distributed 190,000 gold francs to the needy in Tirana, Shkodra, Vlora, Gjirokastra, Saranda, Korçë and Kukës. Because the money was given directly to the poor, bypassing the usual bureaucracy, it did some good. The Italians also contributed greatly to infrastructure, agriculture, and chrome and hydrocarbon exploration, in which Albania was rich. The Italians hoped that extensive investment in Albania would bring both economic and political benefits. Despite a weak domestic economy, Mussolini guaranteed the Albanians 22 million pounds over five years for economic development, considerably more than the 8.2 million Rome had spent since the early 1920s.
Initial reports of Italian activity were quite favourable. American journalist Ruth Mitchell commented at the end of April 1939, "What a great improvement there is in the condition of the people already. The whole atmosphere had become brisker and more enterprising; now at least there is hope." Even the German minister Eberhard von Pannwitz, perpetually critical of the Italians, commented favorably on the Italian tempo, which he likened to the tempo in Austria after its annexation by Germany. The new construction projects brought in large amounts of capital and employed many Albanians. The government began permitting Italians to take technical positions in Albania's civil service, and also began allowing Italian settlers to enter Albania. This largely affected the Albanians' attitude towards the Italian invaders and the locals greeted them with more respect and amity.
Italian puppet state
In spite of Albania's long-standing protection and alliance with Italy, on 7 April 1939 Italian troops invaded Albania, five months before the start of the Second World War. The Albanian armed resistance proved ineffective against the Italians and, after a short defense, the country was occupied. On 9 April 1939, Zog I fled to Greece.
In an effort to win Albanian support for Italian rule, Galeazzo Ciano and the Fascist regime encouraged Albanian irredentism towards Kosovo and Chameria. Despite Francesco Jacomoni's assurances of Albanian support in view of their promised "liberation", Albanian enthusiasm for the war was distinctly lacking. The few Albanian units raised to fight during the developments of the Greco-Italian War (1940–1941) alongside the Italian Army mostly "either deserted or fled in droves". Albanian agents recruited before the war, are reported to have operated behind Greek lines and engaged in acts of sabotage but these were few in number. Support for the Greeks, although of limited nature, came primarily from the local Greek populations who warmly welcomed the arrival of the Greek forces in the southern districts.
One of Mussolini's plans for the Italian protectorate of Albania was to Italianize its citizens.
Communist and Nationalist resistance
Origin of Communism
Faced with an agrarian and mostly Muslim society monitored by King Zog's security police, Albania's Communist movement attracted few adherents in the interwar period. In fact, the country had no fully-fledged Communist Party before World War II. After Fan Noli fled in 1924 to Italy and later the United States, several of his leftist protégés migrated to Moscow, where they affiliated themselves with the Balkan Confederation of Communist Parties and through it the Communist International (Comintern), the Soviet-sponsored association of international communist parties. In 1930, the Comintern dispatched Ali Kelmendi to Albania to organise communist cells. However, Albania had no industrial working class on which the communists could rely for support. Paris became the Albanian communists' hub until Nazi deportations depleted their ranks after the fall of France in 1940.
Enver Hoxha's and Mehmet Shehu's early years
Enver Hoxha and a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, Mehmet Shehu, eventually rose to become the most powerful figures in Albania for decades after the war. The dominant figure of modern Albanian history, Enver Hoxha rose from obscurity. Born in 1908 to a Tosk landowner from Gjirokastër who returned to Albania after working in the United States, Hoxha attended the country's best college-preparatory school, the National Lycée in Korçë. In 1930 he attended the university at Montpellier in France, but lost an Albanian state scholarship for neglecting his studies. He subsequently moved to Paris and Brussels. After returning to Albania in 1936 without having earned a degree, he taught French for years at his former lycée and participated in a communist cell in Korçë. He later went to Tirana and when the Albanian Communist Party was formed in November 1941, he was appointed as the general secretary of the party, a post he kept until his death in 1985.
Shehu, also a Tosk, studied at Tirana's American Vocational School. He went on to a military college in Naples but was expelled for left-wing political activity. In Spain Shehu fought in the Garibaldi International Brigade and became a commander of one of the brigade's battalions. After the Spanish conflict was over, he was captured and interned in France. He returned to Albania in 1942 and soon became a prominent figure. During the conflict, he won a reputation for his command abilities with the partisans. In his memoirs published in 1984, British Special Operations Executive David Smiley wrote:
"Mehmet Shehu was a short, wiry, dark sallow-faced man of about thirty who seldom smiled except at other people's misfortunes. He spoke good English, was very capable and had far more military knowledge than most other Albanians.... He had a reputation for bravery, courage, ruthlessness, and cruelty--he had boasted that he personally cut the throats of seventy Italian carabinieri who had been taken prisoner. I got along with him at first, for as soldiers we had something in common; but he did little to conceal his dislike for all things British, and my relations with him deteriorated."
Beginning of Albanian Communist and Fascist parties and National Liberation Movement
After the invasion of Albania by Italy in April 1939, 100,000 Italian soldiers and 11,000 Italian colonists settled in the country. Initially the Albanian Fascist Party received support from the population, mainly because of the unification of Kosovo and other Albanian-populated territories with Albania proper after the conquest of Yugoslavia and Greece by the Axis powers in the spring 1941. Benito Mussolini boasted in May 1941 to a group of Albanian fascists that he had achieved the Greater Albania long desired by Tirana nationalists. The Albanian Fascist Party of Tefik Mborja had strong support among the population after the Albania annexation of Kosovo.
Several groups were led by Baba Faja Martaneshi, former gendarmerie officer Gani bey Kryeziu, communist Mustafa Gjinishi, and rightist politician Muharrem Bajraktari. An attempt to unite those groups in one organization was undertaken by Major Abaz Kupi, by now a democratic politician, who created an underground organisation called the Unity Front. This front, which increased in numbers within several months, was crushed in April 1941 after the defeat of Yugoslavia and Greece. Some of its members passed over to the collaborationist camp, some were arrested, and some others fled to the mountains. The warfare ceased for a while.
In November 1941, the small Albanian Communist groups established an Albanian Communist Party in Tirana of 130 members under the leadership of Hoxha and an eleven-man Central Committee. The party at first had little mass appeal, and even its youth organisation netted few recruits.
The resistance in Albania became active after the defeats of the Italian forces in the war with Greece, which started on 28 October 1940. Originally the slogan of building the "Greater Albania", into which the Italians promised to incorporate a substantial part of Greek Epirus (Cameria), allowed collaborationist authorities to mobilise several thousand volunteers for the army (besides regular troops). The collapse of the Italian offensive in Greece caused a crisis among the regular troops, who refused to take part in further fights, as well as in volunteer units, which dispersed; some soldiers made for the mountains. Eventually, the number of combat groups and partisan detachments, reinforced by deserters from the army, had grown to dozens, with over 3,000 men. In November in Lezhë, a town near the port of Shëngjin on Adriatic coast, mutinous soldiers who refused further service in Italian units fought a battle with an Italian punitive expedition, killing 19 and badly wounding 30 Italians, before retreating to the mountains. In the same month a partisan detachment laid an ambush for an Italian transport column en route to Gjirokastër. Several Italians were killed. On 17 May 1941 in Tirana a young man called Vasil Laçi attempted to assassinate king Victor Emmanuel III by shooting at him. However he failed and was shortly after executed.