Wikipedia:Today's featured article/May 14, 2015
The 21st Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Skanderbeg (founded May 1944) was a German mountain infantry division of the Waffen-SS, the armed wing of the Nazi Party that served alongside the German armed forces during World War II. Composed of Muslim Albanians with mostly German and ethnic German Yugoslav officers and non-commissioned officers, it was named for medieval Albanian lord George Kastrioti Skanderbeg, who had defended the region of Albania against the Ottoman Empire. The division committed numerous atrocities in predominantly Serb areas, and rounded up Jews in Pristina for deportation to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on 14 May 1944. Its only significant military actions took place during a German anti-Partisan offensive in the German occupied territory of Montenegro in June and July. It was then deployed as a guard force in Kosovo, where it was quickly overrun by the Partisans. Reinforced by German Kriegsmarine (navy) personnel and with less than 500 Albanians remaining in its ranks, it was disbanded on 1 November 1944. Divisional commander SS-Brigadeführer und Generalmajor der Waffen-SS August Schmidhuber was later found guilty of war crimes by a Belgrade court and executed in 1947. (Full article...)