Xhafer Deva

Xhafer Deva ( born February 21, 1904 in Kosovska Mitrovica, † 25 May 1978, California ) was a leading Albanian Fascist ministers in the since late 1943, German-occupied Greater Albania.

On September 19, 1943, he proclaimed the Second League of Prizren, which worked closely with the German Reich. The name derives from the League of Prizren, which nationalist Albanians wanted to free themselves from the Ottoman Empire in 1878. Their policy was aligned anti-Slav and aimed at the production of an ethnically pure Greater Albania. The chairman of the League submitted the Germans in March 1944 the proposal to establish 120,000 to 150,000 volunteers for the struggle against South Slav partisans. After long preparations was formed in April 1944, the 21st SS Volunteer Mountain Division Skanderbeg, one consisting of Kosovar Albanian volunteers unit. However, their strength was only 7,000 men; it was disbanded in October 1944.

At the end of the war, Deva, with the support of SS officer Josef Fitzthum attempted to build an anti- kommunisitischen state in Kosovo, but this failed. He fled afterwards in December 1944 on Croatia in his first exile in Vienna, and later to West Austria, where he stayed with other Albanian exiles until early 1947. Subsequently he moved to Italy to Damascus, which he left in 1956 for the U.S., where he stayed until 1960, first in Boston and New York. After he had taken a job in the administration of Stanford University, he organized from the anti-communist Albanian diaspora of Calaveras County. He was forced into retirement in 1972.

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