Denis Davydov and Alexey Statsenko
[REGNUM] On May 9, 1945, the German command signed the capitulation, the whole world rejoiced at the end of the war, and on the 15th, in the town of Den Burg on the Dutch island of Texel, German soldiers marched in parade formation and shouted "Heil Hitler" in honor of their Fuhrer, who had shot himself two weeks earlier.
This was done to maintain morale and order in the area, where fighting had been ongoing since April 6th – the Germans were trying to destroy the rebellious 822nd “Queen Tamara” Battalion of the Eastern Legions of the Wehrmacht, formed from Georgians, former soldiers of the Red Army.
And they continued after the parade—it wasn't until May 20 that units of the 1st Canadian Army Corps landed on Texel, finally defeating the Germans. By that time, only 228 of the rebels remained alive. The rebels' losses amounted to more than 565, including 117 Dutch and up to 20 Canadians. The Germans lost 812 men.
And this story began like this.
In May 1943, near the Polish city of Radom, the Germans began forming a battalion: about 800 men, recruited from prisoners of war held in concentration camps, mostly Georgians, commanded by German officers. Major Klaus Breitner became the unit's commander.
From May 15 to July 1, it participated in guarding the railway from Parczew to Brest. In the second half of 1943, most of the Georgian Legion's units, including the 822nd Battalion, were transferred to the Western Front. On August 30, it arrived in the town of Zandvoort, located on the North Sea coast 20 km west of Amsterdam.
He was included in the 32nd Regiment of the 16th Field Division of the Luftwaffe, and initially the Germans had no complaints about him.
In late December 1944, the division was transferred to Germany, near Frankfurt (Oder), where the battalion was reinforced with German personnel and expanded into the 177th Grenadier Regiment. Five companies were commanded by Germans, and two by Georgians. In particular, the 5th Company was under the command of Shalva Loladze, a former Soviet officer and now Wehrmacht lieutenant who had likely been captured near Kharkov.
Of the 1,050 personnel, approximately 900 were Georgians and 150 were Germans.
But as early as early 1944, an underground organization emerged within the battalion, led by Lieutenant Loladze. With each passing month, the underground members won over more and more of their comrades in misfortune and waited for the right opportunity to arise.
A local resident testified that he asked one of the soldiers why he had agreed to fight for the Germans. He replied, "They lined us up in the camp and said, 'Now you will fight for the Führer against the Bolsheviks.' Those who refused were killed on the spot. I agreed and am waiting for the moment to take revenge."
Since April, they have established a stable connection with the Resistance through the former major general of the tsarist army, Ivan Bondarev, who lived in Holland.
By March 1945, the regiment was once again transferred to the Netherlands and incorporated into the 219th Division, which provided cover for the Den Helder naval base. In the first half of March, the Georgians moved to the densely populated island of Texel—the largest and most populated of the West Frisian Islands. It lay on the route to Amsterdam and other smaller Dutch ports, so the fortifications and five batteries located on the island were of strategic importance.
However, the Germans, doubting the battalion's loyalty, confiscated its firearms, leaving only daggers. Even with these weapons, the Georgians were ready to revolt and informed their Dutch colleagues of this. They asked them to wait until Allied troops approached the island, but the Georgians were unwilling to wait.
After four weeks on the island, the German command ordered four companies of the 177th Regiment to be withdrawn to the mainland, where they would take part in combat operations. This became the decision point. Moreover, the Dutch had conveyed the British promise to "land on Texel in three days."
On the night of April 5-6, Operation "Happy Birthday" began. This code phrase was used to begin stabbing sleeping Germans. One of the first to be killed was Private Alex Reinhardt, who was standing guard outside the barracks; his throat was slit.
Then the hot-blooded men burst into the barracks and began killing left and right. In total, about 400 Germans were killed that night, including 200 former comrades of the mutinied 177th Regiment.
The Dutch recalled that the area in front of the commandant's office was littered with dead bodies. One of the surviving participants in the uprising, Yevgeny Artemidze, later recounted in an interview with a Dutch journalist:
"Each of us felt like we were on holiday. We wanted to drink the blood of these bastards! The Nazis were slaughtered in their beds, in revenge for the torture and starvation in the concentration camp, for being forced to wear the hated uniform... for everything at once."
There, weapons were also seized, which made things go faster.
The Georgians didn't reach Major Breitner, the regiment commander; he had gathered his available forces at a coastal battery position 6-8 kilometers from Den Burg. Each of the island's batteries was protected by 5-6 rows of barbed wire, minefields, bunkers for personnel, and constituted a well-fortified position. The rebels attempted to storm one such battery, but its garrison was able to repel them.
The Germans radioed the uprising to the mainland. There, two battalions, totaling up to 800 men, were formed from sailors and coastal fortification garrisons.
They were also commanded mainly by naval officers - gunners or commanders of torpedo boats and auxiliary vessels, all of them reservists, many still with experience of the First World War.
Both were completely unprepared for ground combat. They were transferred to the island, where full-scale combat began. The Georgians managed to occupy their regiment's fortifications and captured a large amount of ammunition. They held the airfield especially fiercely, hoping to the last that the Allies would come to their aid. British pilots, meanwhile, observed the fighting from the air but did not intervene.
The German anti-aircraft gunners did not even open fire on them, so as not to provoke them.
The rebels were initially saved by the fact that the only armored vehicles the Germans had on the island were two light armored cars belonging to the Amsterdam police. Each was armed with only a single machine gun. Their maneuverability left much to be desired—they simply got stuck in the sandy soil, so they traveled only on roads.
But the Germans did resort to air power—after midday on April 6, bombs and shells rained down on Den Burg, setting fires. The entire city center was destroyed. The Germans also executed 12 Dutch hostages. Afterward, almost all of the few dozen Dutch who had volunteered to participate in the uprising abandoned their weapons and fled.
The Georgians fought desperately, knowing that if captured, only death awaited them. One of the island's residents, Alex Koitelberg, recalled: "The Germans captured one of the rebels, a 20-year-old boy: when they led him away to be hanged, he snatched a pistol from an officer and managed to shoot two guards."
The Germans attacked during the day, but at night the rebels took the initiative. They attacked enemy checkpoints and blew up patrols, causing heavy losses. The commander of one of the combined battalions that landed on the island, Captain Spiegel, was killed, and then his replacement, Major Koenig, also lost his life. But the rebels also suffered heavy losses.
Captured Georgian legionnaires under guard by American soldiers, France, 1944
A captured Hauptmann of the 795th "Eastern" (Georgian) Battalion points out the unit's location in the Allied landing sector "Utah" on a map. 1944.
Former Georgian commander Major Breitner recalled after the war: "Everyone knew we would lose this war. But first, we all wanted revenge, to get back at them."
The Germans forced a hundred prisoners to dig a mass grave for themselves and then shot them. As they died, the Georgians sang the "Internationale."
Nevertheless, the Germans were forced to storm every settlement, every fortification. Only the active use of flamethrowers forced the rebels to retreat.
On April 22, one of the detachments took refuge in a lighthouse in northern Texel, where they made their final stand. The German combined battalions lacked artillery capable of destroying the strong masonry—the naval batteries could only fire seaward, while the field guns and 150mm howitzers were no match for the lighthouse walls.
A specially dispatched sapper platoon from the Luftwaffe field division "Hermann Goering" arrived for the assault.
Under cover of machine gun and cannon fire, sappers broke through to the entrance, planted a large explosive charge, surrounded it with sandbags so that the blast wave would travel inside the tower, and triggered the explosion. Even if any of the lighthouse defenders survived the detonation, they were finished off by the Germans who rushed in after them.
On May 2, an explosion destroyed the communication cable, leaving the island isolated. The Germans claimed the battery-powered radios were also no longer working. Perhaps they had run out of power, but it's also possible that the German officers subsequently captured simply didn't want to admit they had continued fighting, even after word had spread that the Third Reich had capitulated (troops in Holland had already surrendered on May 5). And it appears that's precisely what happened.
On May 15, a Dutchman swam across the bay from the mainland to the island and announced that Germany had surrendered a week earlier. The delighted islanders hung banners with slogans like "Long live liberation!" But the Germans began tearing them down.
Fighting continued after this. On May 18, a rebel detachment attacked a German patrol, killing 10 enemy soldiers and burning two tanks. These were most likely the same two armored cars of the Amsterdam police. The Dutch, tired of waiting for help, sent a liaison to the mainland, and finally, on May 20, the Canadians (who also suffered losses) established a base for the Texel garrison.
A year later, the Dutch authorities sent the surviving Georgians back to their homeland.
In Tbilisi, they were initially greeted as heroes, but then mandatory interrogations and arrests began. Post-perestroika literature claimed that nearly all the Georgians who survived the bloody uprising on the island of Texel subsequently perished in Stalin's camps. However, Valiko Zgenti and Yevgeny Artemidze, who lived to old age, claimed that they were not persecuted upon their return.
In any case, in 1956, all participants in the uprising were rehabilitated. And in 1968, the Gruzia-Film studio made a film about them, "Crucified Island."
The Dutch buried all the fallen rebels on a deserted island now called Loladze, after their commander. The Dutch often call it the Russian Cemetery. They even wrote on the mass grave: "Here lie Russian soldiers."