Following the capitulation of Italy from the war, he helped form a provisional government under German occupation and set up the Second League of Prizren alongside other Albanian nationalists.

After the war, he moved via Italy to Damascus, where he helped publish an exile newspaper entitled Bashkimi i Kombit (Albanian: Unity of the Nation).

[6] Italian Albania was expanded to include adjacent parts of Yugoslavia incorporated mainly from the Yugoslav banovinas (regional subdivisions) of Vardar and Morava.

Eberhardt demanded that new municipal governments have to be formed and claim that Adolf Hitler will probably allow cleansing of Serbs from these areas, but any radical actions shouldn't be rushed.

[1] After the capitulation of Italy, Deva and Bedri Pejani, assisted by the German emissary Franz von Schweiger,[14] set up the Second League of Prizren on 16 September 1943.

[15] Between 4 and 7 December 1943, 400 soldiers of Kosovo Regiment commanded by Deva surrounded Peja and committed mass murder of local Serbs and Montenegrins, killing at least 300 people.

[23] With the Allied victory in the Balkans imminent, Deva was also involved in a last-ditch attempt to set up an anti-Communist government in Kosovo, and received large caches of weapons and ammunition from SS General Josef Fitzthum and Neubacher's special representative, Karl Gstottenbauer.

[25] He and his men also engaged in collecting food and radio equipment from withdrawing German soldiers[23] and attempted to purchase further weapons from them in order to organize a "final solution" of the Slavic population of Kosovo.

In the spring of 1944, the German occupiers again asked for a list of Jews, which had earlier been refused by Albanian collaborationist authorities; upon hearing the grave situation, two of the local Jewish leaders sought the council of Mehdi Frasheri, a government official, for help; Frasheri referred them to Xhafer Deva, who apparently on the one hand had a "good reputation for protecting Jews" yet on the other "had become known for the terror he exercised across the streets of Tirana along with his hordes".

[27] Xhafer Deva, then the interior minister of the Albanian quisling government, reportedly told two Jewish delegates that he had the list, and agreed that he would protest the matter with the Germans.

[28] He refused to hand the list over to the Germans and rejected their requests to gather Jews in one place, purportedly because of the Albanian besa custom of hospitality.

In 1947, Deva moved via Italy to Damascus in Syria, where he helped publish an exile newspaper entitled Bashkimi i Kombit (Albanian: Unity of the Nation).

In 1960, he moved to Calaveras County, California,[14] and worked as an assistant supervisor at the mailing department[31] of Stanford University in Palo Alto until his retirement in 1972.

The decision was condemned by Serbian Culture Minister Maja Gojković, Germany's ambassador to Kosovo, Joern Rohde, as well as Efraim Zuroff, the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.