Italy invaded Albania on April 7, 1939. Within five days, King Zog was in exile, the Albanian parliament had dissolved itself into an Italian protectorate, and the country that had existed for only 27 years lost its independence again. Over the next five and a half years, Albania would be occupied by two Axis powers, produce three competing resistance movements, fight a civil war layered inside the world war, rescue nearly every Jew on its soil, and emerge in November 1944 under the control of a communist partisan movement led by Enver Hoxha.
The war decided who would rule Albania for the next 46 years. The partisans’ victory was a military fact — they liberated the country without Allied ground troops. But the partisan victory was also a political fact: it sidelined the nationalists, exiled the monarchists, and installed a one-party state that would seal Albania’s borders until the regime collapsed in 1990–1992. For Albanian-American families, WWII is the hinge. Everything after — the dictatorship, the emigration, the community that exists in the United States today — turns on what happened between 1939 and 1944.
The Italian invasion: April 7, 1939
Benito Mussolini had been tightening Italy’s grip on Albania for years. Since the mid-1920s, Italian loans, Italian officers in the Albanian military, and Italian commercial concessions had made Albania a near-satellite. King Zog had accepted the money and resisted the control, but by early 1939 Mussolini wanted something more permanent. On March 25, Italy delivered an ultimatum demanding a formal protectorate. Zog refused.
On April 7 — Good Friday — Italian troops landed at Durrës, Vlorë, Shëngjin, and Sarandë. Albania’s army, about 15,000 men with outdated equipment, offered sporadic resistance. A few hundred defenders held out at Durrës for several hours. The port of Sarandë fell quickly. The Italians advanced inland against minimal organized opposition.
King Zog, his wife Queen Geraldine, and their infant son Leka fled overland to Greece on April 8, carrying the treasury gold. Zog would never return to Albania.
On April 12, the Albanian parliament voted to depose Zog and offer the Albanian crown to Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III. Shefqet Vërlaci, a landlord whose daughter had been engaged to Zog, was installed as prime minister of the puppet government. Albania was formally merged into a personal union with Italy. The country’s army, foreign policy, and customs were absorbed into the Italian state.
Casualties on both sides were limited — the fighting lasted only days — though exact figures remain disputed. The speed of the collapse reflected not cowardice but arithmetic: a state of 1.1 million people, with no allies and no defensible geography against a seaborne landing, could not stop a European power that had decided to take it.
The Italian occupation: 1939–1943
Italian Albania was a Fascist project. Mussolini wanted the eastern Adriatic shore, and he wanted it colonized. Italian settlers arrived — thousands by 1940. Infrastructure was built selectively: roads and ports that served Italian military logistics, not the Albanian interior. The puppet government rotated through compliant prime ministers (Vërlaci, then Mustafa Merlika-Kruja in 1941, then Eqrem Libohova and others) while real authority sat with the Italian viceroy in Tirana.
The Greco-Italian War
On October 28, 1940, Mussolini used Albania as the launchpad for his invasion of Greece — a decision that turned into one of the Axis powers’ most embarrassing early defeats. The Italian army, attacking south through the mountains of Epirus and Chameria, was stopped cold. The Greek counteroffensive pushed the Italians back into Albanian territory, and by December 1940, Greek forces occupied significant stretches of southern Albania, including Korçë, Gjirokastër, and Sarandë.
The Greco-Italian front stabilized through the winter of 1940–1941, with both sides dug in across the Albanian mountains. The front only broke in April 1941, when Nazi Germany intervened in the Balkans, crushing Yugoslavia and Greece in a three-week campaign. Albanian territory was the staging ground, the battlefield, and the casualty.
“Greater Albania”
After the Axis conquest of Yugoslavia and Greece in April 1941, Italy redrew the map. Kosovo, a strip of western Macedonia around Tetovo and Gostivar, and parts of Chameria were attached to Italian-controlled Albania — creating a “Greater Albania” that unified, for the first time in modern history, a majority of ethnic Albanian-inhabited lands under one administration. For many Albanians, this was the single benefit of the occupation: the borders that the 1913 Conference of London had drawn to exclude half the Albanian population were temporarily erased.
The benefit was real and it was cynical. Italy granted the unification as a tool for managing Albanian acquiescence, not as a concession to Albanian nationalism. And it created a political trap: supporting the territorial change meant, on some level, supporting the regime that had imposed it.
The resistance splits: 1942–1943
Albanian resistance to Italy organized late. For the first three years of the occupation, scattered acts of sabotage and individual defiance existed, but no coherent armed movement took shape until 1942. When it did, it fragmented immediately.
The National Liberation Movement
The Albanian Communist Party was founded on November 8, 1941, in Tirana, with significant organizational help from Yugoslav communist emissaries Miladin Popović and Dušan Mugoša. Its leader was Enver Hoxha, a 33-year-old schoolteacher from Gjirokastër who had studied in France and Belgium.
On September 16, 1942, at a meeting in Pezë, near Tirana, the party established the National Liberation Movement (Lëvizja Nacional-Çlirimtare, or LNÇ) — a broader front designed to attract non-communist patriots alongside the party core. The front was communist-led from the start, but it enrolled fighters from across the political spectrum through its local councils (këshillat nacional-çlirimtare). By the end of the war, the LNÇ would mobilize tens of thousands of armed fighters — the largest guerrilla force in Albanian history.
Balli Kombëtar
Balli Kombëtar (the National Front) was founded in November 1942 by Mid’hat Frashëri, an intellectual and diplomat from one of Albania’s most prominent families — the same Frashëri family that had produced Naim and Abdyl, heroes of the Albanian national awakening. BK was republican, nationalist, and anti-communist. Its program called for an ethnic Albania that included Kosovo and western Macedonia — the “Greater Albania” borders that Italian administration had temporarily created.
BK drew support from the southern Albanian landowning class and the urban intelligentsia. It opposed both the Italian occupation and the communist partisans, and it positioned itself as the democratic-nationalist alternative.
Legaliteti
The third movement, Legaliteti (“Legality”), was monarchist. Led by Abaz Kupi, a military officer from the north, it sought the restoration of King Zog and the 1928 constitution. Legaliteti had its strongest following in the northern highlands, particularly among the Gheg population that had historically supported Zog.
The Mukje conference and the break
In August 1943, delegates from the LNÇ and Balli Kombëtar met at the village of Mukje and signed an agreement to cooperate against the occupiers. The agreement broke down almost immediately over Kosovo. Balli Kombëtar insisted that the postwar order must include Kosovo within Albania. The communist leadership, bound by its alliance with Tito’s Yugoslav partisans — who considered Kosovo part of Yugoslavia — refused to commit.
The Mukje agreement collapsed, and from late 1943 onward, the Albanian resistance was effectively a three-way civil war fought inside a foreign occupation. The communists and the nationalists killed each other as readily as they killed Italians or Germans. Legaliteti, squeezed between the other two, eventually disintegrated.
The German occupation: September 1943 – November 1944
On September 8, 1943, Italy surrendered to the Allies. German forces, prepared for the event, moved into Albania within days. The transition was smoother than in most former Italian territories because Germany had already been increasing its military presence in the Balkans throughout 1943.
The Germans established a new puppet government under a succession of Albanian administrators: Ibrahim Biçaku, then Rexhep Mitrovica, then Fiqri Dine. The puppet regime was given a veneer of sovereignty — Albania was nominally “independent” again under German patronage, a formality that fooled no one.
Collaboration and resistance
The German occupation sharpened the internal Albanian split. Balli Kombëtar, which had fought Italy, increasingly cooperated with the Germans — partly to preserve the Kosovo territorial arrangement, partly because BK feared a communist victory more than it feared German occupation. Some BK units fought alongside German forces against the partisans. Other nationalists simply stood aside.
The Germans also raised the 21st Waffen Mountain Division of the SS “Skanderbeg” — a unit recruited from ethnic Albanians, primarily in Kosovo. The division was poorly trained, suffered mass desertions, and was operationally ineffective, but its existence remains one of the more uncomfortable facts of the period. It participated in roundups of Serbs, Roma, and Jews in Kosovo.
The communist partisans, meanwhile, fought the Germans and the collaborators simultaneously. The LNÇ organized Albania’s most sustained military campaign of the war, attacking German garrisons, supply lines, and communication routes across the country. British SOE (Special Operations Executive) officers and American OSS agents operated with the partisans, providing supplies, intelligence, and liaison with the Allied command in Italy. Major figures included Brigadier “Trotsky” Davies and Lieutenant Colonel Neil “Billy” McLean of the SOE.
The southern offensive
By the summer and fall of 1944, the military situation turned decisively. Allied advances in Italy and France pulled German forces away from the Balkans. The partisans launched a sustained offensive in the south, liberating towns in sequence. Gjirokastër, Përmet, Berat, and Vlorë fell to partisan forces between the summer and autumn.
The Jewish rescue
One of the most remarkable facts of the war in Albania is what did not happen: a Holocaust.
Albania was the only Nazi-occupied European country that had more Jews after the war than before it. Before the war, roughly 200 Jews lived in Albania — a small, long-established community in Vlorë and Tirana. During the Italian and German occupations, an estimated 2,000 additional Jewish refugees from Austria, Serbia, Greece, and elsewhere crossed into Albania and were taken in by Albanian families.
Albanian families — Muslim, Catholic, and Orthodox — sheltered Jews in their homes, provided them with false identity papers, and moved them between safe houses when the occupiers searched. The motivation, when survivors and rescuers were interviewed decades later, was consistent: besa. The Albanian code of honor that obligates a host to protect a guest with their own life.
The Italian occupation authorities, to their credit, generally declined to enforce anti-Jewish measures in Albania with the rigor that Germany demanded. When the Germans took over in September 1943 and began pressing for deportation lists, Albanian officials — including some who were collaborating with the occupation on other matters — refused to hand over Jewish population records. In Vlorë, the local government provided false papers. In Tirana, families moved Jewish refugees into the countryside where German control was thinner.
The results speak for the record: nearly every Jew in Albania survived the war. Yad Vashem has recognized 75 Albanians as Righteous Among the Nations. The rescue happened without an organized underground railroad or a centralized directive from a government-in-exile. It happened because individual Albanian families, across religious lines, decided that besa applied to the people at their door.
Liberation: November 1944
The communist partisans liberated Tirana on November 17, 1944. The last German rearguard units withdrew from Albanian territory by November 29 — the date that became Albania’s Liberation Day, celebrated for the next 46 years as the national holiday of the People’s Socialist Republic.
The liberation was genuine in one sense: Albania was freed from Axis occupation by Albanians. Unlike Yugoslavia, Greece, or France, no Allied ground army entered Albanian territory to fight the final battles. The partisans did it themselves, with British and American material support but without foreign boots on Albanian soil. That fact gave the postwar communist government a legitimacy claim that other Eastern European regimes — installed by the Red Army — could not match.
It was also the end of the road for the other two resistance movements. Balli Kombëtar’s leadership — including Mid’hat Frashëri — fled into exile. Many ended up in the United States, where they formed diaspora organizations that kept the anti-communist Albanian-American political tradition alive for decades. Abaz Kupi also fled, and Legaliteti ceased to exist as a movement. Hundreds of BK and Legaliteti fighters who stayed were tried, imprisoned, or executed by the new regime.
By early 1945, Enver Hoxha controlled the country. He was 36 years old. He would hold power for 41 years, through a Stalinist regime that banned religion, sealed the borders, built hundreds of thousands of concrete bunkers, and broke with every ally it ever had. The war that liberated Albania from fascism delivered it to a dictatorship that would last until the students marched in December 1990.
The war’s cost
Albania’s World War II killed an estimated 28,000 to 30,000 people — roughly 2.5% of the prewar population of about 1.1 million. Several hundred villages were destroyed. Livestock herds, the backbone of the rural economy, were decimated. Roads, bridges, and what little industrial capacity existed were wrecked.
The country entered the war as the poorest in Europe. It left the war poorer, with fewer people, and under a government that would isolate it from the Marshall Plan, from Western trade, and eventually from the communist bloc itself.
Why it matters to Albanian Americans
The Albanian-American community carries WWII in at least three ways.
The political split. The war’s internal divisions — communist vs. nationalist vs. monarchist — did not end in 1944. They followed the exiles across the Atlantic. Balli Kombëtar veterans and their descendants built organizations in the United States that defined one strand of Albanian-American political life for decades. The communist regime’s supporters — far fewer in the diaspora, but present — represented another. The tension between “which side was your family on?” is a question some Albanian-American households still handle carefully.
The emigration. The partisans’ victory put Hoxha in power. Hoxha’s regime made emigration a felony. When the regime fell in 1990–1992, the largest wave of Albanian emigration in history followed. A substantial share of today’s roughly 224,000 Albanian Americans counted by the Census — and the broader community of close to a million — trace their arrival to the door that opened when the system Hoxha built finally collapsed. The WWII outcome is the first domino.
The besa story. The Jewish rescue under besa has become one of the stories Albanian Americans reach for most often when explaining Albanian identity to people who have never heard of Albania. It is a story that is factual, sourced, and verified by Yad Vashem — and it communicates something about Albanian culture that no amount of demographic data can. When NAR talks about why counting Albanian Americans matters, the besa rescue is part of the answer: this is a community with a story worth knowing.