In 1944, Europe remained under Nazi occupation. Germany had suffered heavy losses after more than four years of war, but still controlled vast territories beyond its borders. With troops needed to defend front lines, police occupied lands, and fight resistance movements, the regime required more soldiers and increasingly relied on manpower from the countries it controlled.
New units were formed from local recruits, placed under German officers, and sent to defend the occupation. In the Balkans of southeastern Europe, one such unit was created mainly from Albanian recruits from Kosovo. Nazi propaganda presented it as a new and powerful mountain division, but most of its soldiers would desert, and the formation collapsed after only six months. Before its demise, its members helped deport Jews and kill prisoners and unarmed civilians.
This is the story of the 21st Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Skanderbeg, the crimes committed by its men, and the deadly consequences that followed for its soldiers and commanders.
The conditions that made the division’s creation possible began before World War II. On April 7, 1939, fascist Italy invaded Albania, a country on the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea, and placed it under Italian control. World War II began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. The conflict reached the western Balkans on April 6, 1941, when Germany and its partners attacked the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and forced its surrender in less than two weeks.
After Yugoslavia’s defeat, most of Kosovo, a former Yugoslav region, was annexed to Italian-controlled Albania. Together with several neighboring provinces, it formed Greater Albania, an expanded territory meant to unite areas with large Albanian communities. Many Kosovo Albanians wanted the region to remain unified and feared it would be placed under Yugoslav rule again after the war. Italian authorities, and later German ones, exploited these hopes and fears to gain local support and recruit men into their forces.
Local armed groups were recruited to fight the Chetniks, royalist Serbian fighters, and the Yugoslav Partisans, the communist-led resistance movement commanded by Josip Broz Tito. The occupation also deepened old conflicts between communities in the region. Some Albanian collaborators drove their Serbian neighbors from their homes, seized their property, and killed civilians or those suspected of supporting the resistance without evidence of combat involvement.
Italy surrendered to the Allies on September 8, 1943, ending Italian rule over Albania and most of Kosovo. That did not end foreign control. German forces quickly moved in to replace the Italians and occupy their former territories. Germany presented Albania as an independent state, although its government depended on German support and the presence of German troops in the country. The new occupiers wanted to turn local support for the idea of Greater Albania into soldiers for their war.
In September, Albanian nationalists founded the Second League of Prizren. This organization supported cooperation with the German occupiers. One of its most prominent figures was Xhafer Deva, a politician from the city of Mitrovica in northern Kosovo. In November 1943, he became Minister of the Interior in the German-backed Albanian government. Deva used his position to help recruit Kosovo Albanians to fight the Partisans. His role was to provide local support and find recruits, while the Germans handled their organization, training, and command.
This suited the plans of Heinrich Himmler, head of the Nazi paramilitary SS organization, which enforced racial policy and ran the concentration camp system. Its military branch, the Waffen-SS, formed divisions that fought alongside the Wehrmacht, Germany’s regular armed forces. A battalion of several hundred Albanian soldiers was already serving in the 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar, a German-led formation composed mainly of Bosnian Muslims.
In February 1944, Adolf Hitler approved Himmler’s proposal to create a separate Albanian division. The division was established on May 1, 1944, under the name 21st Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Skanderbeg. It was named after Albania’s greatest national hero, Gjergj Kastrioti Skanderbeg, a 15th-century Albanian leader known for fighting the Ottoman Empire, which ruled most of the Balkans at the time. Nazi propaganda used his image and Albania’s double-headed eagle alongside SS symbols to attract recruits.
Most soldiers were Muslim Albanians from Kosovo, although a smaller number were Catholics. Muslim recruits reportedly swore an oath on the Quran, pledging to wage a jihad presented as a holy war against unbelievers. Germans provided most of the officers and technical specialists, drawing personnel from Germany and German-speaking communities in southeastern Europe. The commander was August Schmidthuber, an experienced officer who had served in the Prinz Eugen division, a Waffen-SS formation recruited largely from ethnic Germans living in Yugoslavia.
Despite its name, the Skanderbeg division never reached the planned size of a full division. At its peak strength, it numbered about 6,500 men, many of whom received only six weeks of training before being sent into combat.
The division was involved in crimes against civilians less than two weeks after its formation. On May 14, 1944, its soldiers raided the homes of Jewish families in Pristina, today the capital of Kosovo. They arrested 281 Jews, including local residents and refugees who had fled to Kosovo from other occupied territories. The prisoners were then handed over to German security authorities. Most detainees were later transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northwestern Germany, where many died from starvation, disease, overcrowding, and lack of medical care. By helping carry out the arrests, the Skanderbeg division took a direct part in the Holocaust, Nazi Germany’s campaign to persecute and murder Europe’s Jews.
The arrests of Jews were not the division’s only crime. Across Kosovo, its soldiers killed Orthodox Serbian civilians and looted and burned their homes. Skanderbeg soldiers became increasingly despised by their German officers for their lack of discipline and widespread looting. Schmidthuber himself complained about the men under his command, saying of the Albanian soldier: “During the attack, he only advances as long as he finds something to steal or plunder. For him, the war ends when he seizes a goat, a plowshare, or a sewing machine wheel.” His criticism focused on the damage this behavior caused to military discipline and combat effectiveness, not on the suffering of civilians who were robbed or attacked.
This lack of discipline and violence accompanied the division in its first major battles. In the summer of 1944, German commanders sent the Skanderbeg division to northeastern Montenegro as part of an attempt to prevent the Partisans from advancing toward Serbia. The poorly trained division struggled against experienced opponents, suffering losses as the operation quickly began to fall apart. The German-led forces then turned against villages they accused of supporting the resistance.
On July 28, soldiers from Skanderbeg entered the settlement of Velika along with the 14th Regiment of the Prinz Eugen division and local auxiliary units. Most local men had already left the village or were hiding in the surrounding forests. Those who remained were mainly women, children, and the elderly. This did not stop the men of Skanderbeg. The attackers moved through Velika, killing civilians in their homes, gardens, and fields. Some victims were shot where they were found, while others were thrown into burning buildings.
One survivor, Devna Vutic, later recalled how a division member killed her son and tried to kill her as well. She said: “He fired immediately, hitting my son Borislav who was in my arms, and hitting me in my right arm. The soldier who shot me entered the house, stayed there briefly, then came out. When the soldier left the house, he reloaded his rifle, approached me to within two steps, and looked me directly in the eyes. I turned away so I would not see him fire, but I could not escape. He fired several shots. I remember that only the fifth bullet brought me down. Then I lost consciousness.” Within about two hours, at least 428 people were killed, including around 120 children. Some estimates put the number of victims as high as 550.
Even as members of the Skanderbeg division took part in the Velika massacre, the division was already falling apart as a military force. Failed battles in Montenegro left it weakened, with more than 400 men fleeing or going missing before the operation ended. During the second half of August, the remaining forces fought around Debar, a city in the western part of present-day North Macedonia, but again failed to defeat the Partisans. German commanders concluded that the unit was only fit for basic guard duties.
Some members were then assigned to guard chromium mines near Kosovo, where one Skanderbeg regiment reportedly lost its men in clashes with Partisans, while desertions continued to reduce the division’s strength. On September 1, 1944, the division’s collapse turned into open mutiny. Soldiers stationed in Tetovo and Gostivar, two cities in western present-day North Macedonia, rebelled, killed German officers and personnel, and fled with their weapons and uniforms.
Germany was by then losing the war. The Red Army, the armed forces of the Soviet Union, was approaching the Balkans while Romania and Bulgaria abandoned their alliance with Germany. By early October 1944, the division’s strength had fallen to about 4,900 men, fewer than 1,500 of whom were fit for combat. Heinrich Himmler tried to fill the shortage with German sailors withdrawn from Greece, but these reinforcements could not turn what remained of Skanderbeg into an effective division. In October, the remaining forces fought around the city of Gjakova in western Kosovo and covered the withdrawal of German troops from the area.
The division’s collapse as a military formation did not stop its crimes against prisoners and civilians. Schmidthuber ordered his forces to burn more villages and kill more people. In the autumn of 1944, division members shot or hanged 131 resistance fighters. On October 24, General Alexander Lohr, commander of Army Group E, the German command responsible for military operations in Greece and the southern Balkans, ordered all Albanian soldiers still serving in the division to be disarmed and sent home.
On November 1, exactly six months after its creation, the Skanderbeg division was officially dissolved. Its German officers, specialists, and sailors were reorganized into a battle group under the command of Alfred Graf. They withdrew from Kosovo in mid-November and were later placed under the Prinz Eugen division as the German withdrawal through the Balkans continued. Although the new unit kept the name Skanderbeg, the Albanian division that Himmler had hoped would become the core of a much larger Waffen-SS force in the Balkans had ceased to exist.
The men responsible for its crimes would later face consequences. After Germany’s surrender, Heinrich Himmler, who had supported the creation of Skanderbeg, was captured by British forces. He avoided trial by committing suicide with poison on May 23, 1945. Both August Schmidthuber and Alexander Lohr fell into Yugoslav custody. From February 5 to 16, 1947, they were tried along with five other German leaders before a Yugoslav military court in Belgrade, Yugoslavia’s capital.
Schmidthuber was convicted of participation in massacres, deportations, and other crimes against civilians. Lohr was convicted of war crimes committed by forces under his command, including killing hostages and burning villages. Both men were sentenced to death. Schmidthuber was executed by hanging, while Lohr was executed by firing squad.
Skanderbeg lasted only six months and failed as a combat formation. Most of its recruits deserted, while those who remained proved ineffective in battle and suffered losses against experienced Partisan forces. Its military weakness, however, did not make it harmless. Its members helped deport the Jews of Pristina, killed prisoners, ambushed civilians, looted and burned villages, and took part in the Velika massacre. The division is remembered not for victories on the battlefield, but for serving the Nazi occupation, contributing to the Holocaust, and committing violence against people who could not defend themselves.