Europe. He subsequently held other ministerial posts and was Albanian ambassador to Greece and to the United States from 1922 to 1926. Quiet period Under the Zog regime in 1925, Mid'hat left public life and opened a bookstore in Tirana, and also worked as a pharmacist. He himself possessed an exceptionally large private library of some 20,000 volumes, the largest collection in the country at the time. With the rise of Germany and World War II looking inevitable, Mid'hat began forming Balli Kombëtar (the National Front) to use in the war to create Ethnic Albania. Balli Kombëtar presidency He was the leader of the Balli Kombëtar nationalist movement during the Second World War. Balli Kombëtar was a political organization that mainly fought for an Ethnic Albania and fought communist groups in alliance with the German occupation forces. During 1944 he joined the German Forces as an ally and fought the anti-nazi guerrilla groups. His cousin became the prime minister of Albania. After World War II and death In 1945, the communists won the war in Albania. Mid'hat escaped the communists by fleeing to southern Italy. The early years of the Cold War found Mid'hat Frashëri in the West trying to patch together a coalition of anti-communist opposition forces in Britain and the United States. In August 1949, he was elected as head of a "Free Albania" National Committee. He died of a heart attack at the Lexington Hotel on Lexington Avenue in New York and was buried in Ferncliff Cemetery in New York. His remains were reburied in Tirana in November 2018. His cousin, Mehdi Frashëri, served as Albanian Prime Minister under a German-backed Albanian Government. Legacy Mid'hat Frashëri was a man of short stature with a speech impediment. He was a beloved leader and also a bibliophile. His library, one of the finest in the Balkans, became the basis for the Albanian National Library. Frashëri's entire library of some 20,000 volumes, the largest in Albania at that time, was confiscated by the new regime. The library included significant albanological works inherited from Franz Nopcsa von Felsö-Szilvás. He was described by an Italian journalist as a man who dressed very properly with very clean white cuffs and very white hair. Although Frashëri was one of the signers of the Albanian Declaration of Independence in 1912, the Communists, after taking over in 1945, deleted his name from the official documents. Quotes