A German Waffen-SS division formed in 1944 to recruit Albanians never came close to functioning as a fighting force, and...

A German Waffen-SS division formed in 1944 to recruit Albanians never came close to functioning as a fighting force, and over half its men walked away before it was even disbanded. The 21st Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Skanderbeg was formed on 1 May 1944 and garrisoned at Prizren in Kosovo. The Germans had planned for 10,000 to 12,000 troops, but the division never exceeded 6,000 to 6,500 men. Its rank and file were mostly Muslim Albanians from Kosovo, with a few hundred Catholic Albanians, while most of its officers and NCOs were German or ethnic German. The division took its name from George Kastrioti Skanderbeg, the 15th-century Albanian lord who spent more than two decades fighting the Ottoman Empire. Its symbol was a black Albanian double-headed eagle. Before it collapsed, the division carried out some of the most documented atrocities of the Balkan occupation. On 14 May 1944, members raided Jewish homes in Pristina, arrested 281 Jews, and handed them to the Germans, who deported them to Bergen-Belsen, where many were killed. Historian Noel Malcolm described it as "the most shameful episode in Kosovo's wartime history." In June 1944 the division executed more than 400 Orthodox Christian civilians at Andrijevica. On 28 July 1944, alongside the Prinz Eugen Division, it massacred around 550 Serb villagers at Velika in Montenegro. Despite, or perhaps because of, these operations, desertion gutted the unit. According to Wikipedia and German Federal Archives records, 3,425 men deserted between April and October 1944, more than half the division's total strength. By early October 1944 it had around 4,900 men on paper, but fewer than 1,500 were fit for combat. The division was disbanded on 1 November 1944, exactly 82 years ago today. Its German cadre was absorbed into the Prinz Eugen Division in January 1945. Its commander, August Schmidhuber, was convicted of war crimes by a Belgrade court and executed in 1947. The Nuremberg trials had already declared the Waffen-SS a criminal organisation. #WWII #WarCrimes #History