GERMAN OCCUPATION STAMPS - ALBANIA
(1939 - 1945)

This page was last updated
04-Apr-2023 06:21

BACKGROUND: With the fall of Czechoslovakia to Germany in 1938, Italy decided it too wanted a share of the spoils. Mussolini's Italian troops occupied Albania on Friday 7th Apr 1939 and set up a puppet government headed by Italian King Victor Emmanuel III. The Italians planned to use Albania as a springboard to invade Greece which they did on 28th Oct 1940. The campaign was an unmitigated disaster for the Italians with the Greeks not only repelling the invasion, but also moving into Italian occupied Albania.

With the Italians on the back foot, Hitler ordered German troops into the Balkans in April 1941 in an effort to shore up his southern flank, before the planned invasion of the Soviet Union. After successfully defeating the Albanian resistance and the Greeks and proceeding to occupy Yugoslavia, Kosovo and parts of Montenegro and North Macedonia, the region was amalgamated into a Greater Albania.



For the next few years Albanian and Greek resistance put up a relentless campaign against their Italian occupiers. When Italy surrendered on 8th Sep 1943 German troops moved in to fill the void and ruthlessly suppressed the resistance groups. Albania was liberated on 29th Nov 1944 without the aid of the Allies.

One noteworthy aspect of the Italian occupation was the lack of support from both Italians and Albanians to send their Jews to die in eastern Europe, as had been demanded by the Germans, and was the case in other occupied European countries, and by the end of 1945 Albania was the only country in Europe to end the war with a larger Jewish population than it had before the war.

During the German occupation there were two stamp issues, one in 1943 and the other in 1944