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Albania
WORLD WAR II AND THE RISE OF COMMUNISM, 1941-44
Albania
WORLD WAR II AND THE RISE OF COMMUNISM, 1941-44
Between 1941 and 1944, communist partisans and
nationalist
guerrillas fought Italian and German occupation forces,
and more
often each other, in a brutal struggle to take control of
Albania. Backed by Yugoslavia's communists and armed with
British
and United States weaponry, Albania's partisans defeated
the
nationalists in a civil war fought between Italy's
capitulation
in September 1943 and the withdrawal of German forces from
Albania in late 1944. Military victory, and not the lure
of
Marxism, brought the Albanian communists from behind the
coulisses to center stage in Albania's political drama.
While
Albanian writers never tired of pointing out that the
communists
"liberated" Albania without a single Soviet soldier
setting foot
on its territory, they often neglected to mention that the
communist forces in Albania were organized by the
Yugoslavs and
armed by the West or that the Axis retreat from Albania
was in
response to military defeats outside the country.
Data as of April 1992
