The end of the Texel uprising

On 20 May 1945, twelve days after the surrender of the Third Reich, Canadian soldiers finished disarming the German garrison on the Dutch island of Texel. This brought to an end one of the strangest and bloodiest episodes of the last weeks of the war in Europe – the mutiny of the 822nd Georgian Infantry Battalion, which the Germans had formed from Soviet prisoners of war. On the night of 5/6 April 1945 the Georgians murdered their German comrades-in-arms and seized most of the island. Within two weeks a German counter-offensive had driven them into hiding, after which came manhunts and executions, while sporadic clashes went on long after the German forces in the Netherlands had surrendered on 5 May. According to the most commonly cited figures, some 565 Georgians, some 800 Germans and some 120 islanders were killed.

The Dutch call these events the “Georgian uprising” (Opstand der Georgiërs), and on the island itself “the Russian war”. It is often said that the last fighting of the Second World War in the Netherlands ended on Texel on 20 May, and the island is described as “the last battlefield in Europe”. The first statement is broadly accurate, although organised Georgian resistance had already been broken in the second half of April and in May there were only isolated clashes. The second is an exaggeration: in Yugoslavia fighting against units that did not recognise the surrender continued after 20 May.

Prisoners in German uniform

The battalion that mutinied on Texel was one of several dozen units of the Eastern Legions – formations raised by the Wehrmacht from 1942 onwards from prisoners and volunteers belonging to the peoples of the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Volga region. Their soldiers were mainly Red Army prisoners who, in the German camps, faced a choice between death by starvation – by historians’ estimates some 3 million of the 5.7 million Soviet prisoners died in German captivity – and service with the Germans. Some joined the legions out of hostility to Soviet rule, others in order to survive. The Germans promised the Georgians that after the Reich’s victory their country would regain the independence it had lost in 1921. Anti-communist émigrés also joined the Georgian Legion.

The 822nd Georgian Infantry Battalion, named after the medieval Queen Tamar, was formed in June 1943 at Kruszyna in the Radom District of the General Government. At the end of August it was moved to the occupied Netherlands, to the seaside town of Zandvoort, where for a year and a half it did guard duty on the Atlantic Wall. On 6 February 1945 the battalion – some 800 Georgians and some 400 Germans, with a largely German officer corps, under Major Klaus Breitner – was sent to Texel, the largest of the West Frisian Islands, lying opposite the naval port of Den Helder. It was near this island that a British destroyer flotilla had run into a German minefield in 1940.

By the spring of 1945 it was clear to everyone that Germany was losing. The Georgians knew what awaited them on their return to the USSR: to the Soviet authorities every prisoner of war, and still more anyone who had put on a German uniform, was a traitor. At the Yalta Conference the Western Allies had undertaken to repatriate all Soviet citizens. An armed rising against the Germans offered a chance to present themselves to the Allies as allies rather than collaborators. The conspiracy was organised by Shalva Loladze, a former Soviet air force captain shot down in 1942 and a junior officer in the battalion; the Georgians made contact with the Dutch resistance on the island. The immediate trigger was an order of 5 April to transfer several of the battalion’s companies to the mainland the next day to fight the advancing Allies.

“Birthday”

At about 1 a.m. on the night of 5/6 April 1945 the Georgians launched an operation they called “Birthday”. Each of them knew which German he was to kill. Most of the battalion’s German soldiers died in their sleep, by knife and bayonet; others were killed at their posts and on the roads. The number killed that night and the following day is given variously as between about 200 and nearly 250. The Georgians seized almost the whole island, but failed to take the two coastal artillery batteries in the south and north of Texel. Major Breitner managed to reach one of them and alert the command on the mainland. The rebels were counting on an Allied landing that never came: the Allies had neither the forces nor any plans for this area.

Counter-offensive and manhunt

The response came on 6 April itself. A ferry brought the first few hundred German soldiers from the mainland with machine guns, mortars and field guns, and both coastal batteries began shelling places where the rebels were suspected to be, including the island’s main village, Den Burg. Over the following days the 163rd Naval Rifle Regiment was shipped to Texel – some 2,000 sailors of the Kriegsmarine organised as infantry, poorly trained for land fighting but determined. Years later Breitner recalled that before losing the war the Germans wanted “to take revenge on the Georgians”, and he called the mutiny itself “treason, nothing more”.

The Georgians defended themselves fiercely in former German fortifications; the heaviest fighting took place in the north of the island, in the Eierland polder and around the lighthouse. By about 20 April the Germans had regained control of the whole of Texel. Between 22 and 26 April they combed the island for rebels in hiding. Those captured were shot – according to accounts, they were first made to dig their own graves and take off their German uniforms. Islanders suspected of helping the mutineers were also shot. On 25 April the Germans found Loladze with a few soldiers at the Plassendaal farm; he was killed on the spot. Even so, several hundred Georgians survived, hiding in the mined dunes or on farms where islanders sheltered them at the risk of their own lives. Dozens of farms burned down in the fires and the shelling; the damage was later estimated at 10 million guilders.

After the surrender

On 4 May the surrender of the German forces in north-western Germany and the Netherlands was signed at Lüneburg Heath, and on 5 May at Wageningen General Johannes Blaskowitz accepted the terms of surrender from the Canadian General Charles Foulkes. On Texel, however, nothing was over. The German garrison refused to lay down its arms for fear of falling into the hands of the Georgians, while the Georgians in hiding, emerging ever more boldly, had no intention of surrendering to the Germans. Neither the surrender at Reims on 7 May nor VE Day on 8 May changed the situation on the island. There were exchanges of fire; people were still being killed as late as 18 May.

It was only in the second half of May that Canadians of I Canadian Corps arrived on Texel. Accounts differ as to the day of their landing – 17 or 18 May is given. Within two days they had disarmed some 1,500 Germans, and on 20 May, when the German garrison laid down its arms, the fighting on the island finally stopped. The surviving Georgians were quartered in a local hotel. On 22 May a mass grave of executed Georgians and islanders was discovered on the beach.

The toll

According to the figures accepted on Texel, 565 Georgians, some 120 islanders (117 according to other tallies) and some 800 Germans died in the fighting and the executions. Immediately after the war there was even talk of more than 2,000 German dead, but this figure is believed to have come from a Canadian report that added together the dead and the disarmed. In 1949 the German war graves commission exhumed 812 bodies on Texel and moved them to the war cemetery at Ysselsteyn in Limburg.

Return to the USSR

228 Georgians survived the mutiny. Officers of the Soviet counter-intelligence service SMERSH came to the island and took charge of them as Soviet citizens, in accordance with the Yalta agreements. On 17 June 1945, wearing Allied uniforms and carrying letters of recommendation from the Dutch resistance and the Canadian command, they left for the USSR. What happened to them there is told in different ways. According to some accounts, the letters spared most of them the harshest punishments and only a few were repressed. According to others, after arriving at a filtration camp some of them were deported together with their families and the rest were sent to the camps of the Gulag; those who survived were released and rehabilitated in the mid-1950s, after the death of Stalin. The only point of agreement is that their service in German uniform marked them for many years, even though they had turned it against the Germans.

The cemetery on the Hogeberg

The Georgian dead lie in a separate cemetery on the Hogeberg hill near Oudeschild, named after Loladze. In the USSR, which kept silent about the fate of prisoners in German service, the Texel mutiny in time became an object of official remembrance – in the late 1960s a feature film was made about it, presenting the rebels as prisoners who had seized weapons from the Germans, and until 1991 the Soviet ambassador laid wreaths on their graves every year on 4 May. The islanders who died are commemorated by a monument funded by the surviving Georgians in the cemetery at Den Burg. On 4 May 2005 the graves were visited by the president of independent Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili. One of the last participants in the mutiny, Grisha Baindurashvili, died in 2021 at the age of 102.

The last shots in the Netherlands

The Texel mutiny had no influence on the course of the war – it broke out when the fate of the Reich had already been sealed, on an island that had lost all significance since the Allied landings in Normandy. It does, however, bear witness to the tragic position of millions of Soviet prisoners of war caught between two totalitarian systems: to the Germans they were “subhumans” and cannon fodder, to the Soviet authorities traitors. The Georgians of Texel tried to break out of this trap with weapons in their hands, paid an enormous price for it, and drew in the islanders, who paid for helping them with their lives and property.

The end of the fighting on Texel on 20 May 1945 closed the Second World War on Dutch soil – almost two weeks after the Dam Square shooting in Amsterdam, in which German sailors killed dozens of people celebrating the liberation. Yet in Europe the war had still not completely died down: in Yugoslavia fighting went on against units that refused to surrender, and in the Pacific Japan fought on – it did not surrender until August and September 1945. For the 228 surviving Georgians, the end of the war meant the beginning of another uncertainty – a return to a country that regarded them as traitors.