Comment –

REFLECTIONS OF NOVEMBER 1944 and 2024– Eighty years ago in Macedonia, the final combat operations against the Nazi German occupier came to a conclusion with a victory for the Macedonian partisan resistance, which by war’s end had been turned into the People’s Liberation Army of Macedonia (NOVM).

The Wehrmacht’s Germany Army Group E began a fierce fighting withdrawal from the Balkans. It’s mission was to keep the escape route open – between Athens-Salonika-Bitola-Skopje-Belgrade-Zagreb – back to the Third Reich to stop the Soviet Red Army steam roller, tidal wave, tsunami which was about to hit, hit hard and devastatingly from the East whilst the US and UK would hit The Third Reich hard from the West.

As the Germans surrendered or withdrew from Macedonia by late November 1944, a fierce battle was about to take place that would last another the year. This time in the west of Macedonia, where Albanian Nazi collaborator militia, the Balle Kombetar, made a desperate last stand, a fight to the death.

The Balli Kombetar was eventually defeated by Macedonian partisans aided by Albanian partisans to some extent.

2001 – HISTORY REPEATS?

An Albanian Neo Nazi militia, calling itself the NLA, drew inspiration from the WW2 Balli Kombetar and began a war against Macedonia. As the Macedonian armed and security forces, starting off badly, were poised to destroy the NLA at the Battle of Aracinovo the United States stepped in to the save the NLA from total destruction under the guise of “peace maker.”

In 2002 when I visited Macedonia, I was shocked to see German Army troops in western Macedonia, near Tetovo. Here were German troops in 2002 aiding and abetting Albanian Neo Nazis in Macedonia, which the Nazi German Army had done in 1942.

It was a shocking symmetry, parallel…. In all honesty, I never imagined in my wildest dreams, nightmares that Neo Nazism would ever make a comeback in the Balkans. But sadly it has with Western support.