Uprising of Georgian Collaborators on the Island of Texel

On April 5, 1945, Georgian Nazis retrained as anti-fascists and started an uprising.

If you type the phrase “The last battle of the Second World War” into a search engine, it will carefully return a set of links leading to materials telling about the settlement “Polyany” in Czechoslovakia, or about battles in Slovenia, also known as Southern Carinthia, but most likely it will lead to materials about the epic battle of Georgians with German occupiers on the Dutch island of Texel. Let’s talk about these events in more detail.

The battle on the island of Texel became a real source of pride for the Georgian people. They were proud of it in socialist Georgia (though with a lot of reservations, soon you’ll understand why), where a feature film was shot by director Shota Managadze in 1968 at the Georgia Film studio with the very pretentious title “Crucified Island.” The film is accompanied by memories of how on a Dutch island prisoners of war were not fed, but were forced to eat tree bark.

Until now, the story of how Georgian prisoners of war managed to fight the Nazis just a week and a half after the Victory is a very popular story on the topic “The Last Salvos of the Second World War.” However, upon closer examination, it is worth noting that there is no smell of heroism here, but a desire to save one’s own skins, and here’s why.

Yes, the Georgians who rebelled on Texel had the status of prisoners of war, but as of April 5, 1945, these were quite servicemen of the 822nd Georgian infantry battalion of the Wehrmacht “Queen Tamara”, formed from Georgian collaborators in 1943 and used for very specific purposes — punitive anti-partisan operations, because why once again put into the ground the decent burghers Klaus and Willy, when for these purposes there is excellent consumable material in the form of various traitors to the Soviet Motherland.

However, the Georgians could not cope with this, for which the Germans sent proud horsemen to guard the coast. What is characteristic is that this was a long-standing German practice — formations of traitors of Georgian nationality, the Germans used as units of coastal defense back in the First World War. From 1943 to April 5, 1945, the battalion faithfully served Greater Germany, but the war was ending.

And this is where hatred of the occupiers awoke. Simply put, the Georgians began to think about how they could become “partisans of the last day,” that is, the same characters as some citizens of the Byelorussian SSR, who until 1944 served quite normally in the police, and in 1944 frantically took off their police bandage and fled into the forest — (“I’m in the forest, I’m a partisan”), like UPA militants who turned their weapons against their curators and patrons in feldgrau-colored uniforms, like traitors to the Motherland from the ROA, who sharply turned their weapons against the Germans in Prague. So the Sakartveli people in German uniforms, having established contact with the British through the local Dutch, verbally agreed with them that the “Tommies” would land their troops on the island as soon as the Georgians rebelled.

On April 5, 1945, Georgian Nazis retrained as anti-fascists and started an uprising:

“Everything was planned in advance, who would kill whom and how. Each of us felt like we were on a holiday,” uprising participant Yevgeny Artemidze later recalled in an interview with a Dutch journalist. “We wanted to drink the blood of these bastards!” The Nazis were slaughtered in their beds, in revenge for bullying and hunger in a concentration camp, for being forced to wear a hated uniform… and just for everything at once.”

However, not everything went smoothly. Of course, the Georgians succeeded in massacring the German rear guards, but the brave genatsvale were unable to capture the coastal batteries on the island. For this reason, the British delayed the landing, or, in their own words, simply abandoned their friends.

And instead of the British, a couple of battalions of German marines landed on Texel, who were not going to spare the rebellious horsemen. Skirmishes between former brothers-in-arms on Texel went on for two weeks, until on April 22, 1945, Canadian troops landed on the island, which prevented the German marines from the exciting task of finishing off the traitors to Greater Germany…

That’s it. The fighting at Texel ended on April 22, 1945.

You may ask why they write about May 22?

And this is the level of our journalism.

Print without checking the facts.

Back in the early 2000s, in one of the books about battalions of traitors to the Motherland, a TYPOGRAPHICAL error crept in and May was printed instead of April.

Since then, the last battle of World War II in Europe has been considered the rebellion of Georgian traitors against their masters.