NJË LËGIONËTRANGËRE MES SHQIPTARËSH: HISTORIA E BATALIONIT “ANTONIO GRAMSCI” (1943-1944)

• Published in: Studime historike no. 3-04; pp. 143 - 168
• Main Author: QESARI, Edon
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: Albanian
• Published: Center for Albanological Studies 2021; Qendra e Studimeve Albanologjike
• Subjects: Fascism, Nazism and WW II; Military history; Political history; Social history; WW II and following years (1940 - 1949); Battalion "Antonio Gramsci"; Mehmet Shehu; ideologizing; World War II; LAUNCH
• ISSN: 0563-5799

The aim of the publication is to explore the strategies the Albanian communist-led partisans deployed to convert to Communism a group of Italian militaries that joined the Antifascist resistance after Italy’s capitulation in September 1943. This tiny group, formed initially by less than a hundred noncommissioned officers, was called after the name of the Italian communist leader of Albanian roots Antonio Gramsci. The transition of these Italian militaries from Fascism to Communism sheds light on the way these secular religions operated, the way they were understood by both Albanians and Italians, and, depending on the degree of internalization, the sense of mission they equipped different subjects. It is thus intended, in addition to the textual ordering of the facts gathered through the archival documentation and dispersed memories, to provide a broader explanatory framework of the developments and circumstantial political nodes - and afterwards their use in both ideological and technical-military purposes - that engaged these men in a warfare guerrilla amid a population that hardly could sympathize with them from the beginning. Furthermore, microhistorical lenses have been used to analyse the development of the Italian-Albanian relations centred in this group of militaries, which was included as a special unit within the first brigade of the Albanian National Liberation Front.