TZ-UK Forums TZ-UK Forums thieuster
German troops needed more soldiers and a lot of them were ‘recruted’ among the ranks of former Soviet POW. Stalin considered every Russian in German POW camps as a traitor. The chance of survival was 0.0. And men from Russian minorities had even less chance, so to speak. Easy ‘targets’ for the Germans.
They recruited 600 Georgians and those men were designated guards of the Dutch part of the Atlantic Wall; in this case: the Dutch coastline. Russian officers under German higher ranks controlled the troops. In April 1945, the Allied forces swung west: from Germany into the Netherlands. Canadian troops liberated villages in the east and slowly moved forward to the north and the west. The Germans in the western part of the Netherlands (e.g. Amsterdam) were trapped!
German HQ didn’t want to surrender and started building defense lines. The Georgians were designated troops to fight off the Allied troops. But the Germans were afraid of being attacked ‘in the back’ when they were facing ‘east’: it would not have been the first time, that Allied commandos landed on the beaches for raids! The Georgian troops were transported to the northern island of Texel. Strategically important: a small ‘strait’ of water was between the Island and the main German Navy harbour. There were canons on both side of the strait.
The Georgians didn’t want to go, but were forced. Once on the Island, they came up with a mutiny plan and they executed it very thoroughly. Every single Georgian had a ‘designated German’ who had to be killed. On the night of April 6, the Georgians killed ± 200 German soldiers without a single shot… They didn’t want the German officers to be alerted. And that failed: one German gun battery was heavily defended by the small group of Germans and the officers were able to ask for help before the Georgians captured the battery.
The German response was swift: despite the fact that the war was coming to an end, German HQ sent troops to finish the mutiny. What followed was a month(!) of street fights, hand-to-hand combats, executions of civilians and Georgians. 600 out of 800 Georgians were killed. But the number of Germans that were killed varies: from 1000 to 2000. Remember: mainly street fights. Most of the Georgians are buried on the island.
The Georgian leading officers were killed in late April. But the remaining Georgians organized a guerrilla war and kept on fighting. On May 5th 1945, the Allied troops and the German HQ in NW Europe signed the surrender of the Germans. On May 8, Hitler’s successor Dönitz ordered a full surrender. But the fighting on the island of Texel wasn’t ended! Germans and Georgians kept on fighting until May 20th.
On that day, the first Canadian troops landed on the island. The island is small, a rather inhospitable for troops to defend themselves: grassland, no hills, no forest to hide. Still, 200 Georgians appeared from hiding when the Canadians took over.
That part of the war lasted until May 20th. It’s called "Europe’s Last Battlefield’.
