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Defining the Internal Enemy: Detention Camps in Early Communist Albania, 1945–1950
Klejd Këlliçi
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8877-3590
University of Tirana, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Political Sciences
Pamięć i Sprawiedliwość, Vol. 36 No 2 (2020), pages: 138-152
Publication date: 2020-12-31
https://doi.org/10.48261/PIS203609
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Résumé
Albania was perhaps the only country to have more than tripled its population of Jews during the Second World War. It did so by hiding or refusing to hand them over to the occupying German forces. By the end of 1944 the Communist-led National Liberation Army gained power replacing the Germans and the former political interwar elites. Despite common knowledge, several armed and unarmed attempts were made by opposition groups to overthrow the regime from 1944 onward. Opposition came also as a response to the repressive policies that the communists conducted methodically in the early years of the regime. Repression consisted of arbitrary arrests, terrorist practices conducted by the then-formed State Security, commonly known as “Sigurimi” as well as a series of show trials against people accused of war crimes or collaboration with the enemy. Aside from these typical forms of revolutionary repression, the regime set up a series of detention facilities, in which the new above-mentioned “alien” class and enemy elements were placed. Such structures consisted of forced labour and concentration camps. This paper seeks to analyze the concentration camps, set up by 1945, in which the newly established regime placed families and relatives of those who opposed Communism. Unlike the labour camps, the concentration ones were reserved only for the elderly, females and children. They functioned from 1945 to 1950 and were born out of necessity, due to the inability to control parts of the country, and as a measure to deprive the insurgents of their social base. While in theory concentration camps functioned as a form of policing and social control, in Albania they partly functioned as hostage centers, where the family members of political prisoners or anti-Communist émigrés were placed. Despite their original function, concentration camps turned soon into death camps as their inmates begun to die of hunger, malnutrition and exposure. Such tragedy affected especially the elderly and children, who were the primary victims of such terrible conditions. The paper draws examples especially from the notorious Tepelena Camp. The site was improvised from derelict barracks, which served various occupant armies in WW2 just outside the small town. The paper tries to uncover the rationale of these detention facilities, taking in consideration both the ideological but also mere survival motives of the regime, combining even the inability of its violence apparatus to effectively deal with this population group.
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