Memorial to the Victims of the Wehrmacht Massacre of Borovë
Përkujtimore për viktimat e masakrës së Wehrmacht
A large memorial, a small museum and a remodelled cemetery in the south Albanian mountain village of Borovë commemorate the 107 village residents who were murdered by the members of the German Wehrmacht as part of »reprisal measures« carried out on July 6, 1943.
History
In the late afternoon of July 6, 1943, communist partisans opened fire on German troops, at the time stationed in Italian-occupied Albania, in the area of Borovë, close to the Greek border. 4 soldiers were lightly wounded. In a »reprisal action«, members of the 1st Mountain Division of the Wehrmacht attacked Borovë - which had been founded in 1912 and comprised 100 stone houses, an orthodox church and a school - and almost completely burned it down using flame throwers. Some of the village residents died in their houses; those trying to escape were chased back into the flames. The majority of those killed were small children, women and elderly people. This massacre is at times referred to as the »Albanian Lidice«, referring to the annihilation of the Czech village in 1942. It is considered the gravest crime of the Wehrmacht against Albanian civilians.
Victims
The memorial and museum are dedicated to the 64 female and 43 male residents of Borovë, aged between four months and 80 years, who were murdered by Wehrmacht soldiers on July 6, 1943.
In April 1939 the Kingdom of Albania became a »Protectorate« of Italy, which had been a dictatorship under Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) and his fascist party since 1922. Although Mussolini did implement »racial laws« in Albania, he refused to hand Jews over to the Third Reich. Albania had a small Jewish community. In 1930, there were 204 persons of Jewish faith registered as living in Albania. After the events of 1933 and 1938 a small number of refugees from Germany and Austria added to this figure, as did an unknown number of refugees who came to Albania from occupied Yugoslavia and Greece in 1941. After Italy had broken its alliance with Germany in 1943 and concluded a ceasefire with the Allies, Albania – like all Italian territories – was occupied by the Wehrmacht and SS. Once it became apparent that the Albanians were unwilling to cooperate with the Germans, in spring 1944 the SS deported more than 300 Jews from the hitherto Serbian province of Kosovo - annexed to Albania since 1941 - to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. In addition, 500 non-Jewish Albanians were deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp near Linz in Austria. Only 23 of them survived. The German occupation forces were assisted in these deportations by the SS »Skanderbeg« division, which consisted of Kosovan and Albanian volunteers along with forced recruits and was also deployed in the anti-partisan campaign. The division was named after a national hero, Prince Georg Kastriota (1405–1468), also known as Skanderbeg. He is celebrated for defending Albania against the Ottoman Empire. Yet most Christian and Muslim Albanians endeavoured to protect Albanian Jews. Faced with increasing Albanian resistance, the German occupying forces withdrew from the country in autumn 1944. The minimal research carried out into the Holocaust in Albania thus far has yielded contradictory results. The estimated number of victims ranges from under one hundred to over 200. A total of around 30,000 Albanians lost their lives in World War Two. Under the dictator Enver Hoxha (1908–1985), the communist resistance was the dominant feature of post-war remembrance. Decades after his death, this limited perspective was still apparent in a room in the monumental National History Museum in Tirana, as well as in the national military museum in the southern Albanian town of Gjirokastra, the birthplace of Hoxha and a UNESCO World Heritage site.
There are only few memorials to the victims of the Holocaust, though in recent years, the history of the Albanian rescue operations is increasingly being addressed. A new Holocaust memorial was inaugurated in Tirana in 2020. Moreover, a museum is to be built in Tirana in the near future that will tell the story of the Jews in Albania and also focus on the rescue operations during the Holocaust.
Remembrance
After the liberation of Albania in 1945, the victims were buried on the village cemetery. A small museum and a monumental Stalinist memorial were set up in Borovë. The memorial plaque states that the first Albanian resistance against the National Socialist regime came about in the village. Albanian composer Thoma Gaqi wrote the »Poema Simfonike Borova« symphony in honour of the victims. In the 1990s, the local authorities erected a perimeter wall for the cemetery using rubble from the burned down houses. In the meantime, individual gravestones were installed for the victims. In August 1999, the memorial complex was restored by Bundeswehr soldiers who were part of the KFOR peacekeeping force and reopened with a commemorative ceremony.
