289. The Georgian Texel Uprising - The War Beyond Surrender
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Hello and welcome to the Battleground podcast with me, Roger Morehouse. You may have thought that with the anniversary of VE Day some time ago already, that the fighting in Europe that we're tracking so assiduously on this podcast from 80 years ago essentially ended. But the subject we're talking about today will prove that to be a false assumption. We're talking about the Georgian revolt on Texel Island,

Welcome, Eric.

Good to be here. Now, these Georgians, now we should stress these are Georgians of the Caucasus rather than of the eastern seaboard of the USA. These Georgians, they had been in German uniform fighting alongside the Wehrmacht, and they found themselves on...

Tesla, largest island of the Frisian chain, is that right, in occupied Holland? Just tell us, how did they find themselves there and how did they find themselves in German uniform? Roger, one of the fun things about doing history is everything you just said is contested.

Like the idea that were they wearing German uniforms? Were they actually in the German army? Did they fight side by side with the Germans? Yes, all that is true. And yet all that is contested, right? How they found themselves to be, there's a very long story, but the short version is they fell victim, as did hundreds of thousands, millions of Soviet soldiers. They were captured in the early days of the war. And they were given a choice, a clear choice by the Germans because they were Georgians and not Russians. They were given a clear choice.

You can either stay here in a prisoner of war camp and you'll die with certainty, especially in the first winter of the war, or you can put on a German uniform, get three meals a day, and we'll send you somewhere nice. So there's actually a famous story that one of them told us that a German officer stood in front of several hundred of these Georgians when they were POWs and said, every man who was an enemy of the Reich stepped forward. And everyone knew that stepping forward meant they'd get a bullet in their head.

So no one stepped forward and they said, congratulations, you've completed your induction to the German army. So it was pretty clear. And that's the story that they told of why they became soldiers in the Wehrmacht.

So a couple of square meals and avoiding certain death. I mean, it seems a no contest really, doesn't it? It's a no-brainer. Yeah. Did they actually see combat in German auspices, this group, the Georgian Legion? It depends how you define combat. They were involved in anti-partisan activities in several funds because they were involved initially in the Caucasus region, later in Poland, later in France, later in the Netherlands. By the end of the world, they were not seeing any combat at all. But earlier on, they did anti-partisan activities. So yes, they saw that kind of combat.

Right. And how did they end up, or this group of them at least, I think the figures, is it about 800 were on Tessel? Yes, there were 800 of them. What proportion of that is that of the total Georgian contingent? I don't know offhand. It's a significant part of the Georgian contingent. It's a significant part. So how did they end up on Tessel and what are they doing there? It's interesting because originally it was thought that they would fight in their own region. The Wehrmacht would use them against Soviet troops.

And the problem was so many of them would desert to the other side that it was unsafe to keep them near the Soviet borders. So for that reason, they were moved ever more westward, first Poland, later France, and finally there. So they wouldn't be the option to them of simply crossing over the border back into the Soviet Union and declaring themselves the most loyal fans Stalin ever had.

So that's where they wound up in the end. And of course, their mission, the reason why they were there, why any German soldiers were there, was they were part of the Atlantic Wall to build fortifications and defend them against an Allied invasion, which never actually hit the Netherlands from the sea. Yeah.

But by the time the revolt actually erupts, then the Allies have effectively bypassed Holland already, haven't they? So they know that they're at a dead end in that sense. But did the Germans always view them with suspicion? Were they always considered unreliable? It depends, again, it depends which Germans, right? Hitler personally considered them unreliable. And he was a long period during the war, I'm sure you know this, where he had people recording everything. He said all his pearls of wisdom were

And he has a whole little paragraph I found. We talked about the Georgians. Explains they're not Turkic peoples. You can trust Turkic peoples because they're Muslims. They're all right. But you can't trust the Georgians because no one trusts them. They have no loyalty to anyone. The classic image of Georgians is kind of criminals and outliers and all that. So Hitler warned, I don't trust the Germans. And I wonder how that was maybe influenced by the person of Stalin, of course, being a Georgian. It was. And he mentions that the Georgians, of course, would have a natural loyalty to Stalin, anyone

Anyone who knows Georgian history knows that the opposite was the case. So Hitler didn't trust them, but there were German officers who did. And of course, the people working with Rosenberg, who was in charge of the Eastern ministry, right? They had a whole other view and they believed that all these small Soviet nationalities could be used. Again, they were all anti-Russian. They were all going to be anti-Soviet. They could be used. And Hitler didn't agree with that. So it was a kind of division among the Germans themselves whether to trust the Georgians. Yeah.

Interesting. So there's quite a lot of this sort of, as you said, sort of half-hearted, maybe halting, sometimes contradictory efforts to mobilize these, as the Germans put them, Ostfölker, the Eastern peoples, whether that's Armenians or Azeris, or in this case Georgians, all of those non-Russian nationalities or non-Slavic nationalities, crucially.

As you say, I mean, they're sort of different groupings are viewed in different ways and they're in varying ways successful, right? But these groupings then sort of subsequently crop up in various places across occupied Europe. So in this case, you've got the Georgians ending up in, or these Georgians ending up in Tersel, which is interesting.

So given that the Allies have already effectively passed them by, why do they choose to revolt effectively in April of 1945? What's in it for them? Well, let's step back a second. They made the decision to revolt actually a year earlier. I learned that when they were based on the Dutch mainland –

and they were in contact with the Dutch Communist Party, the underground Communist Party. They discussed with them the possibility of staging a march on Amsterdam that these Georgians would lead the Dutch and others in a march to kick the Germans out. And they were dissuaded from doing this. They were told that probably won't work. So like this is a year before the actual uprising on Tassel.

Then they agreed with the Dutch communists, I think. I mean, that does sound suicidal, Eric. It was insane. And they said lots of silly things about how they were going to lead the march of Berlin, kind of, which they were never going to do. But they took a decision that what would trigger the revolt...

Because they were perfectly loyal. They were not in any sense sabotaging the Germans at any point in the war. I mean, they were reasonably loyal, other than stealing arms and giving them to the Dutch resistance. But they never killed Germans or did anything particularly bad. But they decided that if the Germans ordered them to take up fighting against the British and Canadian forces in the Netherlands, if that order came, that would be the signal.

And that's exactly what happened in early April 1945.

and effectively their turncoat. So are they doing this to redeem themselves? Yes. I mean, that's part of it. Someone wrote cleverly that they were double traitors. They betrayed the Soviet Union twice. First, they surrendered. Stalin had given an infamous Stalin order, which I'm sure you're familiar with, that you save your last bullet for yourself, nobody surrenders. There are no Soviet POWs in German hands. There were only traitors in German hands. That was the first betrayal. The second betrayal was putting on a German uniform.

So this was complicated. And the Allies didn't make, as I understand it, the final decision to repatriate any Soviet citizens they captured until the Yalta Conference. But long before the Yalta Conference, the Germans themselves were telling the Georgians and presumably the other Soviets they held, you know this town's going to have you all killed. If we lose the war, you're dead. Okay.

Of course, by April 1945, it was pretty clear that the Germans had lost the war. You have to be really crazy to think they had any chance at that point. And it was at that point that the Germans decided to put these Georgians into combat. So...

They decide, as you said, they have this sort of longstanding decision to revolt at the point at which they're going to be mobilized for combat. That comes in what, early April, is it? I think it's the 5th of April, I think. And it's the German commanders, the Georgian battalions, of course, all had German commanders. Yes, of course. Right. And the German commander, Major Breitner, came to them and said, we need half of you.

to be ready to leave at dawn from boats will take you to the mainland and you'll go to arnhem arnhem famously the the bridge too far on them when it wasn't taken six months earlier when it was supposed to be taken was still in german hands and they were fighting ferocious battles with the canadians and british at that point and the georgians are being ordered to go there that was the moment when they thought okay this would be a good time to so they make that decision eric and then so what happens next

What happens next is the first major partner told the Georgians, this is what you're going to do. They saluted and said, yes, sir, whatever the expression will be in German. And then they met at a prearranged place in a little bit of woodland. Tessel doesn't really have woodland. It's hard to picture this, but there was a small wood they met in, the German officers, the Georgians, and decided at one o'clock tonight, I mean, there's not a lot of advance warning, we're going to fire off some flares. So they can be seen pretty much anywhere on the island.

And they divided up the island among, I think, six different local Georgian commanders. Each one took 100 men, and each one had a task. One o'clock, they were supposed to begin their task of, as they saw it, killing all the Germans and liberating Tessel from the German yoke. That was the plan. So it was also liberation of Tessel itself. That's part of the plan, was to liberate it essentially in the name of the Dutch people that were there. Yes, and the Allies. I mean, they became, in a blink of an eye, part of the great Allied army liberating Europe.

while still wearing their German uniforms, right? Yeah, yeah. The moral complexities here are staggering when you think about that. And with your subtitle, actually your title of your book, Night of the Bayonets, that makes it fairly clear how they went about their task that night. Yes, one of the first things I read was that their weapon of choice in the first hours of fighting was revolting.

And we think of razors like these little Gillette fusion things that are protected by a laser plasma. Shaving razors were very sharp blades. So a cutthroat razor. Cutthroat razors. And I actually saw one of these in a museum in Moscow, what Red Army razors look like. You do not want somebody coming at you with one of these things. They decided, first of all, all the Germans are sleeping in their barracks. I think they probably have shared barracks or they certainly have access to the German barracks. And they decide...

We're going to go in and kill as many Germans silently as we can using our shaving razors, bayonets, and knives. And the reason you use them is not just because they're incredibly brutal, but they're silent. So we won't raise the alarm.

So that was the plan. And they knew where all the Germans were. They were part of the German army. These were their comrades-in-arms for four years, in some cases, right? Almost four years. Many of these Georgians were captured in 41. So they lived with the Germans. They knew them. And yet they took the decision, the way we're going to do this is we're going to do that. And they killed, by all estimates, in the first hour or two of the fighting, 400 Germans, many of them in their beds. 400. Not only is that the method astonishingly brutal, but

Also, again, sort of the morality of that is, God, you've got to question. I appreciate it's the Germans. I'll hold no candle for the Germans. But, you know, as you say, these are people that they'd fought with. They slept alongside them.

And then they turn on them and slit their throats. I said, that's terrible. And of course, the brutality took place on both sides. But this initial thing was incredibly brutal. It did not work out as planned. In other words, they weren't silent. Many of them started throwing hand grenades and shooting and woke up all the remaining German soldiers. But probably the 400 Germans they killed, I'm sure, were more than the number of Germans killed by the Dutch resistance during the war. I mean, this was the single largest act of armed resistance on Dutch soil.

It took place over the course of an hour. And that's an astonishing stat in itself. Yeah, I mean, I think the Dutch resistance, unlike, let's say, in Poland, which you've written about, unlike there, they weren't into like armed battles with the Germans. It's more sort of clandestine operations and assistance and so on. I appreciate that. But still, I mean, that's quite a remarkable stat, isn't it? Yes, it is. And of course, the one person they needed to kill, really needed to kill for this to work, was the Major Breitner, who was in charge of the Georgian forces.

And they did not kill him. So that brings us on to what went wrong. So how does he avoid the straight razor? Again, depends who you ask. Major Breitner survived the war and wrote about it and gave interviews. And Breitner said that I had a kidney problem. I need to be in medical attention. I couldn't be in my barracks. I need to be somewhere else.

But the people on the island, the rumor mill in Tessel says, no, no, he had a girlfriend. He had a mistress. And they take you, the islands take you to the house. This is the house where Brighton was sleeping with his girlfriend that night. Thank God for the girlfriend, right? So when he heard all the shooting and explosions, he walked out of his girlfriend's house apparently or his medical facility. And he realized something was terribly wrong. His initial thought –

It's extraordinary to read this. He gave several explanations of what he thought was happening. His first, though, was the Georgians are shooting off weapons to celebrate the fact they're being allowed to participate in combat on the mainland. Oh, my God. Right. So that was his...

That was his assumption. Imagine the naivete of this guy. He's known these Georgians for years. He thinks, wow, they're just so happy to be able to join the fight against the British. Wow. First of all, that. Then he gave other explanations that just made no sense at all. It never crossed his mind the Georgians had started an uprising against the Germans. That really does show the depth of his delusion, doesn't it? Yes, I think it was a collective. As we know, the final month of the war revealed the depth of delusion at all levels of the German army and Nazi leadership, right? They were all delusional about what was going on.

Crazy. So he escapes the night then. Does he manage to raise the alarm? Yes, he manages, I believe, to kind of crawl his way to one of the two naval batteries. There are huge naval batteries on each side of the north and southern tips of the island. How big is the island, by the way, Derek? Eric, what are we talking about?

I don't have the exact measurements. It's something you can't walk it easily in a day, but you can cycle it in a day. Okay. It's almost completely flat. From north to south is quite a distance. You would do that in a car. Right. Okay. It's that kind of distance. He gets somehow, he's in the middle of the island. Den Burg is the sort of capital village of the island. He's there. He gets somehow, I think the southern battery.

These are the parts of the island the Georgians had to take. It's one of the other screw-ups. They had to take these to liberate Tassel, because if they didn't, the naval guns could be turned inland and could be used to bombard the island itself. They had no access to them because these were guarded by German Marines, not by regular armies. So the Georgians didn't have the key. They couldn't do the infiltration that essentially they'd done that night. They couldn't infiltrate there. And the Germans, they realized something was wrong as the Georgians came to them, so the Germans wouldn't let them in.

And these naval guns remained in the hands of the Germans the entire time.

They were there to, I guess, sink Allied ships that were planning to land. They were never used for that purpose. So the one time they were sort of used was against the island itself. Breitner gets to one of these naval batteries, and from there he radios the German army, and the word is passed on to Berlin, a call for assistance, and it reaches Hitler. Hitler hears the news, and Hitler personally gives the order to exterminate all the Georgians. Wow. Because he's shocked at the betrayal. These are men in German uniforms.

And it's not only the brutal and slashing throats and this, they're doing the while wearing the uniform of the German army. Unacceptable from Hitler's perspective. So do they capture all of the island that night, except for those two batteries? They capture most of it. I mean, there are certain key targets. The two main ones were the airfield, because they thought at any point the RAF is going to land. We've got to have an airfield ready for them. And there's a kind of port area.

facing the Dutch coast. When you take the ferry over there, it's a little port. So they took the port and they took the airfield and took most of the little settlements. And they had, basically, they had the whole island except for the two naval batteries. And assisted to some extent by the local population as well. To a degree. Not that much the first night. They immediately called on the population in the morning. They announced...

Tassel is now free. You're part of the free world. The war is over. It's kind of like, I think of the American soldiers walking the French villages. I mean, you know, roses throwing at them and girls running up and kissing them. They did a bit like that. Everybody dragged out their Dutch flags and draped their homes in Dutch colors and

People always seem to have these flags ready whenever they're being laid by the flags, like in the basement or in some closet. Everything's covered that way. And they ordered the Dutch men of fighting age to report to the center of Den Borg and to be given arms. They give them German weapons and say, you know, we're going to hold the island now and announce the world we're free and the British will come at any moment and everything is fine. The Germans are gone. They thought the war was over. They celebrated it.

Do we know how many Germans actually killed that first night? Well, we know that about 400 were killed immediately. I don't know after how many, but there's a staggering number. It's an enormous part of the garrison now. Wow. Okay, we'll just take a short break there and come back in a moment to find out what happened next.

Welcome back. So initially, that's pretty successful, right? I mean, they've taken the island except for obviously those two naval bases, naval guns. But essentially, they've done their job. They've done the liberation. So what goes wrong after that? Everything. Everything goes wrong. Where do we begin? First of all, not having a plan to take the naval batteries is a

Not a minor problem. And these are massively powerful guns. They can be turned. Interesting, it's designed. You can turn them all the way around. And they begin, I think, by noon. So not like Singapore, famously. Yeah, Singapore, they're faced only one way. Yeah, exactly. No, this is the German, to me, they learned the lessons. These naval batteries, I don't know why you would have a naval gun that would do that, but they had them positioned in such a way they could. So I think it was around noon, the night after, the day after the night of the bayonets, the

when the Georgians convened all the men in the center of the book, everyone had the flags, everyone's celebrating, the naval batteries opened fire on the town itself. I mean, you're talking literally hours after it began. I guess they received the order and they, with complete disregard for the lives of the civilians who really weren't involved in the uprising at all.

So this was extraordinary and was, of course, a war crime in itself. There are many war crimes going on here, but this was one of them to open fire on civilian villages that had just been liberated, they thought, from German rule. That was the first mistake or problem. The other ones are even bigger. They had no connection with the Allies. The only radio that might have reached the British wasn't working, so they couldn't broadcast. So the plan they came up with

was they assumed the Allies would have no idea what was going on here, which was not true. The Allies actually were listening, monitoring German radio communications, and Bletchley Park was decoding them, and they knew exactly what had happened. But the big problem was reaching the Allies, and the solution they came up with was a bunch of Georgians will get together a bunch of Dutch people and take a boat, a lifeboat, over to England, and they'll inform them. That was their plan. Wow. I mean, it was a bad plan, right? I mean, that's astonishingly low-fi. It took them 24 hours. I mean, you can practically...

I'm exaggerating. We can practically see Tassel from the coast of Norfolk. And yet, it took them 24 hours to get there. They did eventually get the message that the Allies did not act on the intelligence in any event. But they couldn't radio for them. And they were acting on the assumption the whole time that

the Allies will land and, you know, they can give them kisses and wave flags at them. So that was always their assumption that the Allies were coming in the same way as I suppose it was with Warsaw and everywhere else, you know. Yes. It was always that the Allies will come and help us. Yes. There's no reason why they wouldn't. They knew the war was ending. They just liberated Dundee a little bit.

They thought they could sit back and relax now. They had no idea that the Germans were going to unleash the full fury of the Wehrmacht and the SS against them. So how long does it take for those reinforcements that have been called by the commander to actually arrive? A day or two. They started arriving. There are conflicting reports of what actually arrived. Some reports say they were SS. Some say they were not SS. Some say they had tanks.

Some say they didn't. Some people might have confused tanks with just, you know, armored vehicles. I mean, it's hard to tell exactly what's there, but the Germans brought a very large number of men. And this is still then middle of April then, right? Yeah, first week of April. And literally within two or three days, from a strictly military point of view, revolt had been defeated. The uprising had been defeated.

The Germans regained control of most of the island. The last remaining bit was the very northern tip of the island. There's a lighthouse. It's still standing. It's a kind of rebuilt version of it standing with the Georgians holed up in and the Germans set fire to it. Some special Hermann Goering combat engineering brigade came in to set fire and burn the Georgians alive there. And basically, the remaining whole period from, let's say, April 10th or 12th until

until May 20th, was a war of attrition. It was underground. It was partisan warfare. The remaining several hundred Georgians scattered around the island and picked off the Germans one by one. It was that kind of fight. I read that there was an operation by the Germans. I suppose it'd be the mop-up after they've actually done the sort of the military defeat, if you like.

the ends of that lighthouse. Subsequently, they sort of essentially linked arms and did like a human chain across the island, which reminded me straight away of the British action in Tasmania, if you've ever heard of that, against the Aboriginals way back, which is one of those sort of horrors of

British colonialism. I don't tend to dwell on the horrors of British colonialism, but that is absolutely one of them. But it reminded me straight away of that, you know, marching arm in arm and literally combing the whole island to look for these Georgians and, incidentally, the Dutch that had helped. Yes. By the way, that story, I haven't heard the Tasmania story, but that story recurs in other countries. I've been heard many years ago

but people would complain back when Israel occupied the Gaza Strip before 2005 that Gaza was pacified because Ariel Sharon had this idea that the Israeli troops would walk arm in arm and recaptured inch by inch and that's how you got rid of terrorism. This was like one of these legends that was told there. This is what the Germans did and

The Georgians were sharpshooters. There are stories that the Georgians also were much more skilled fighters than they let on. A Dutch person wrote in an account, he saw the Georgians kind of playing with German grenades before the revolt. And they were doing this as like a show to the Germans how clumsy and inept they were with these weapons.

And the Germans fell for it. When they actually were fighting against the Germans, they turned out to be excellent shooters. And they knew how to use all the weapons really well. And they were clowning around to trick the Germans into a sense of security all along. I suppose playing on the German sense of their own racial superiority anyway. There's an already assumption there that these boys from the Caucasus are inferior. So they're just playing along with it.

They weren't just afraid. They were seen as being subhuman, right? For example, it was widely believed that they were cannibals. Wow. Because they liked eating human flesh, right? Not because the Germans were starving them to death. They were seen as cannibals, as wild men from the mountains of the Caucasus and blah, blah, and that they were not going to be trained fighters, were not going to be such a danger, and yet they were. So the marksman thing was important. The Germans were afraid to get near them because they could be picked off one by one, and they were very good. So many, many, many Germans died

after the military victory being picked off by this kind of guerrilla warfare. Wow, that's interesting. So they have this human train, they essentially hunt down every last Georgian, and this carries on well into May, right? Yes, and there are some interesting aspects to it. They went after the military leader of the Georgian group, Shalvala Ladser. He had been a

in the Red Air Force. He was already an officer. The Germans made him a Leutnant. He was the second lieutenant. And they wanted him to actually put out posters of him, like, this is Schaufer-Lalazze. We'll reward you if you... And they didn't know who they were killing. They killed him several days before they put out these posters about him. Because the Georgians were not wearing insignia of any kind. They were wearing dirty old German uniforms. They were indistinguishable one from the other. They found Lalazze sleeping in a ditch and killed him and didn't know who he was.

But there were many Georgians survived and the fighting went on. VE day for them wasn't even May 8th, it was May 5th when the German armies in the Netherlands surrendered. So technically for May 5th, German soldiers were supposed to lay down their arms. And they would have been happy to do so as they did all over the rest of the Netherlands. I don't think there are any other cases like this one. The Germans laid down their arms and raised their hands and went back to Germany. Here, they were terrified of these Georgians.

If we lay down our weapons now, we could be slaughtered by them. So in a sense, I mean, not to provide them with an excuse for that brutal suppression, but in a sense, after May 5th, this is self-preservation that you've got to keep the hunt going because otherwise they'll kill you. It was entirely self-preservation. And they knew they couldn't surrender to the Georgians because neither side took prisoners. So you don't want to equate the brutality. I mean, the Georgians were slashing throats with their shaving razors and the Germans were doing something else. You don't want to get into a game of who was actually behaving worse. But

But the Germans are genuinely afraid of them, genuinely afraid of them. And when they finally took the Germans off the island, it was quite a complicated procedure to convince them they'd be safe by getting on the boats and going back. And the Georgians also were afraid to come out of their holes, their bolt holes, their hiding, because they were afraid the Germans would still kill them. And everyone knew the war was over. It wasn't a secret. The day it happened, the Dutch certainly knew. They had their radios. They were aware the fighting had stopped. But neither side could be convinced to trust the other.

Even though the Germans just wanted to get out of there and the Georgians just wanted to go home by that point, each side thought the Olympics was going to kill them, which was true. It's another one of those aspects, this sort of frayed end, if you like, the frayed end of World War II that we have this lazy assumption that VE Day, everything stops, everyone shakes hands and then you start with the reconstruction. But that's really not the way wars end, as you well know. I mean, then this is a great example that it actually spans across VE Day itself, the

The end of the war is messy, right? And it's particularly in Eastern Europe because of, you know, revolts against Soviet occupation that follows. But this is a good example in the West that, you know, it's a very messy end. What happens that the Germans were very particular about taking those that they captured out of uniform before they were killed, right? So they didn't want to execute them in German uniform. Is that right? That's exactly. They no longer had the right, the honor and privilege of wearing a German uniform. So they were stripped naked and then shot. None of them were taken prisoner.

If you surrendered, you raised your hands, fine, take off uniform, now we shoot you. And that was it. And the same thing with any Dutch that were considered to have helped them. Was it as brutal? If

If they knew they killed Minters, they certainly burned a lot of the Dutch farmhouses, sometimes with people in them. If they had intelligence on Dutch civilians who aided them, and there were Dutch civilians who aided them, they would hunt them down. But their focus was on the Georgians. The Georgians were the real threat to their lives, not the Dutch. So what about any survivors from this? There were a couple of survivors, because I remember reading in my sort of preparation for this, Eric, that there were a few people. I think the last one died not long ago in Georgia. So a few of them did get back to Georgia. Yeah.

More than a few. It's an extraordinary story of how they got that. It's almost unbelievable, especially the more you know about the Second World War, the less plausible this actually seems. But what happened was about 200 Georgians survived. So of the 800 or so, there's a beautiful cemetery in Tessel, which is worth a visit.

visit, which has always been called the Russian cemetery because nobody distinguishing Georgians and Russians in those days. Now it's understood as the Georgian military cemetery. That's 600, but the other 200 got out. And how on earth, given the circumstances we've just described, how on earth did that happen? They emerged, right? Once the Germans were put in their boats,

Georgians will converge, find each other, and they're met by these Canadians. There are two Canadians who land at first, and they discover what's going on, and they bring in people, and the Allies appoint a British officer, possibly a Canadian British, to take them out, to escort them back to the mainland, to be handed over to the Red Army, to be repatriated to the Soviet Union. The guy they pick is the son of John, I'm going to pronounce this one, John Buchan, the author of The 39 Steps. Right. His son is designated to be the guy in charge. So he arrives in Tessel,

And he's given this historic task, and the revolt has ended. He's supposed to take these Georgians back to the mainland. And he writes about it. What does he write about? So this is John Buchanan. He was the governor general of Canada, I think, wasn't he? So his son takes the surrender at Tissel. And yet, so what does he do? He writes about it. He publishes an article about it. What's the article about? About birdwatching.

He thinks the birds are amazing on Tesla. He never mentions what he was actually there to do. A bit of an odd character. Anyway. Sorry to wind back, but that's then the 20th of May. That's when the Canadians arrive. Yes, it's after the 20th of May. The Canadians arrive on the 20th. The Canadians write in their unit's diary, their war diary. The commander is a Kirk. I think Lieutenant Colonel Kirk. He writes this.

They're shooting each other. They're all terrified of each other. We have three jobs. One is to safely remove the Germans from the island. Second, safely remove the Georgians from the island. And he says it's like a musical comedy situation. That was his description of it. It was a comic love. It wasn't that funny. But people continued dying. I mean, one of the Georgians went into a home of a Dutch family and they were all hugging each other and loving and the war was finally over. And

his weapon discharged. And the last person to die was a Dutch civilian who accidentally was killed by Georgia. So the tragedies kept going on. The Georgians were put on a boat and in theory, they were disarmed. Get on the boat. They all have hand grenades and pistols. They shoot him exploding on the boat in the water. They arrive in the mainland. They're all disarmed again. Okay. Nobody has weapons. Fine. Then they do like a strip search and find nine automatic weapons on them. I mean,

I mean, this is the George. They were terrified. And one of the ones who survived, it was Shavala Lazi, their military commander, did not survive, tragically. But their political officer, Evgeny Artemidze, he survives. And he's a very interesting character. He's sort of the leader of the group now. He's, in a sense, almost the commissar. He's the guy who famously said in many interviews, I wore the uniform of Hitler, but my heart was with Stalin.

Wow. But I mean, given this Commissar Old River in the war, I mean, he should by rights have been shot long since, right? So how did he manage to avoid that at the beginning? Do we know? We know from studying the history of this period that there are competing narratives about what actually happened, right? So there was an official Soviet narrative became an interesting one. And within a year of the war's end, this became the Soviet historical line, which was these guys on Tessel were heroes.

They were Soviet POWs, never wore German uniforms. They were loyal their entire lives to Stalin. They loved Stalin. And they produced little bulletins with hammers and sickles and pictures of Stalin. Suddenly, the Dutch Communist Party plays a key role because they endorsed this narrative. They said, we knew these guys. They were absolutely communist, loyal to Stalin and the Soviet Union. They never betrayed anything.

Blah, blah, blah. This became the line. And it was used all the time. A Soviet ambassador to the Netherlands would go every year to honor the men who fell in Tessel to this graveyard. It became like a Soviet military graveyard. And they made – I'm jumping ahead a bit, but they made 20 years later this film, this feature film about the uprising on Tessel called Crucified Island.

And for my sins, I had to watch the whole thing to research the book. It's one of the worst films I've ever seen. It's an awful film. I have a younger son who made me watch the Pokemon movie. And this was a close rival to that. That's how awful it was. And the film shows them as being Soviet POWs, unarmed, who would somehow all get access to weapons one night and fight the Germans. And of course, there's a beautiful blonde Dutch woman who helps them. None of this is true.

This entire fiction, this was the official Soviet historical line for many years, as a question of why the Dutch Communist Party colluded in this mythology around Tessel. So if it's okay with you, I'll explain what that is. I think it's an interesting part of the story here.

The Dutch Communist Party, unlike the French or German Communist Party, was a very weak party. In the last elections before the war, they won 3% of the vote. The Dutch Nazis were stronger than the Dutch communists on the eve of the war. They were that weak. And they did, as you well know from the work you've done on the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact, like every communist party in Europe, they took their line directly from Moscow. And the line was, Second World War is an imperialist war.

We don't support either British imperialism or German imperialism. We're neutral on that, blah, blah. They completely collaborated. Once the Germans had invaded, they remained the legal party working above ground. It's a notorious part of their history, which they tried to suppress, as did every communist party in Occupy Europe. I studied the Norwegians. They all went through the same experience of effectively collaborating with the German occupiers. This was a disgrace, and they knew this. So by 1944, 1945, they were looking for ways –

to clean up their own reputation, just as the Georgians themselves, you mentioned, were looking for a way to somehow show they were loyal and they contributed somehow to the war effort. Once it became the great patriotic war, it was no longer an imperialist war. The Dutch wanted, and the one thing the Dutch had actually done in the fight against the Nazis, at arm's length against the Nazis, was encourage and support the Georgian uprising.

There's a woman on Tesla who was a Dutch communist who was very involved. She called her the mother of the Georgians. She helped them. They latched onto this. This was the heroic Georgian uprising to protect their own interests because they did collaborate with the Nazis and they didn't want this to go out there. So there's that aspect of it as well. There was a lot of reasons why, but these 200 Georgians made it back to Georgia. Some went to camps for not very long. I was told actually by the Dutch ambassador to Georgia, told me a story that some of them were exiled to Azerbaijan.

from where they could walk back to Georgia. And they did. So they were treated incredibly with kid gloves. I mean, nobody was punished, including Artemidze, who was, by the way, he looked a bit like Stalin. They called him the little Stalin, his big bushy mustache. And he created a little museum in his house in some village in Georgia, which I've been to. I went with his daughter and went to the house with all his press clippings and

He was a hero. They were all treated as heroes. That is astonishing, given everything we've said about how the Soviet Union viewed its POWs in German hands. And even, you know, forced laborers that were, you know, liberated by the Red Army were treated abominably by the regime that sort of reclaimed them.

And especially those that had been in German uniform, you know, think of the Cossacks and that, you know, the whole case, is it the Aldington case, Tolstoy case down in Austria with the Cossacks that, you know, had fought in German uniform alongside the Germans.

And again, would rather commit suicide than go back to the Soviet Union. They were that adamant. But in this case, the Soviets seem to, as you say, treat them with kid gloves. They even celebrate their narrative, albeit a twisted version of their narrative. Why? The question there, Eric, is why? Is it Stalin? Is it the Georgian connection? What is it? It's a lot of things. But let's start with how unusual this was. At the same time as this was going on, more or less, in April 1945, as the Georgians in German uniform were rebelling on Tessel,

The Vlasovs, Russian Liberation Army, switched sides and tried to help liberate Prague, fighting against the Germans quite heroically. When they get captured, Vlasov and his generals and all his men get captured, they get taken to Moscow, they're put on trial, and a year later they're hanged, all of them as traitors. So incredible, a black and white difference how the Georgians were treated. Part of the reason was, first of all, the Allies...

sort of adopted the Georgians. The commander of the Canadian forces, General Fulks, wrote a very powerful letter to the Soviets, almost an open letter, saying these Georgians were great, they contributed to the warfare, they liberated Tessel, whatever else they've done, you should treat them as part of the Allied cause. They knew what they were doing. This general understood if they didn't say this, these Georgians were dead meat. Then Eisenhower wrote his own version of the same letter to the Soviet commanders,

So the Allies have adopted and embraced them. Vlasov was not treated, and nobody embraced him and his men. But these guys, for whatever reason, the Allies understood they're dead unless we say so. That's part of it. The Dutch Communist Party, it was important. The Soviets had to listen to them a little bit. They were going to rebuild. This party was hoping to grow by a lot, and the Soviets were desperate to get influence in Western Europe. They wanted all these Western European Communist Parties to be revived as part of the heroic efforts they'd done in the war. It's possible, in fact, that the Georgians helped them.

We have other cases, the generals, whose name eludes me at the moment, who was the commander of the Georgian Legion, survived the war, was in West Germany, was captured by a KGB team, extracted from West Germany, brought him back to Georgia, where he assumed he would die, be hanged, and gave him a house and let him go to school and resume his life.

It's very weird. So I think it's a very embarrassing narrative to them that Soviet soldiers, Red Army soldiers would lay down their arms, surrender to the Germans, take up German weapons and fight against them. It's embarrassing. That didn't stop them from killing all those Cossacks and Vlasov's men and the others. Who knows?

So then they go to those lengths of creating a narrative of them being, you know, poor POWs unarmed and then remarkably rising up against German occupation and et cetera, et cetera. And even to the length, as you said, of making a fairly awful, evidently fairly awful film about it to dement the narrative, right? I should say my Georgian friends say it's not an awful film. It's actually rather good, but they probably haven't seen that many films. It's a terrible film and it's a completely, it's

It's a complete fiction. And this is the 19th... And what's interesting about all of this is you can say, all right, that's what the Soviets are like, right? They rewrite history. They make fake history all the time. They make movies that have no connection to reality. The Second World War is a complete mythology in the Soviet Union. And yet, Georgia becomes an independent country in 1991, right? Under the leadership of Mikhail Saakashvili, who's currently a political prisoner in Georgia, but was the president of the country, and the most anti-Russian, anti-Soviet president Georgia really ever had, to this point where...

arguably he triggered a war with the Russians in 2008. Yeah. Zakashvili is married to a Dutch woman and they go together as part of an official delegation for one of these ceremonies on Tessel. And he gives a speech. And he gives the Soviet speech about how these heroes who fought against fascism their whole lives risked everything to defeat the Germans. You think he...

Surely he knows that's not true. I mean, these people, they must have learned in years of resistance to the Soviet rule that everything the Soviets told them wasn't true. Anything they read in a Soviet history book, forget all that, whatever it is, it's the opposite of that. So though they all saw the Soviet propaganda about Tessel and these heroes...

Nevertheless, they embraced the same mythology. Yeah. And is that still the sort of dominant narrative in independent Georgia today? Yes. And I had the experience of, I've written three books on Georgian history. I didn't write them in order, but I've written three. And my first one was about the Georgian Republic of 1918-21.

And I'm full of praise for what I love what the Georgians did. It's a whole other story. It's a fascinating country, a fascinating area as well in history. So I absolutely applaud you getting involved in that, Eric. That's brilliant. Thank you. And my Georgian friends told me everyone in Georgia loved your first book. It was a bestseller. People literally come up to me on the street and thank me for it because it makes Georgia look wonderful. They said, your second book, not so much.

So I think there is a sense of many Georgians still feel kind of pride in these men and what they did. When I visited with Artemidze's daughter, went to the home, I was taken by a well-known Georgian writer. He knew them. He took me to his grave and he had his gravestone. This is common in Georgia. It was done up long before he died with an engraved picture of him in his uniform and saying how many Germans he had killed. He was a hero of this. And he could personally kill 28 Germans on the first night. That was his claim.

And it's a huge carve. It's like for any hero. General Zhukov may not have a grave like that. He has an amazing grave, a hero of the Battle of Tessel, right? So for many Georgians, that's true. She was certainly proud of her father and his achievements. They showed me one of the interesting artifacts. All this stuff should go into a real museum. They had a map that Shalvala Ladze had on him, the commander when he was killed, folded up map of the island of Tessel with bloodstains on the map.

I said, "Guys, this should be in a museum somewhere. This is an important artifact. I offered to buy it. They didn't want to sell it." It's an amazing story. It's a morally complicated story. It's also, we should say a word about the Dutch because they have their own narrative, which is very different from the Georgian narrative. Their narrative is, "The wars could end in five minutes. You all know this. Everyone on all sides is aware of this. Just sit tight and wait till the allies come and liberate us." Everybody, Georgians and Germans, and they're furious at the Georgians who they

who they blame for the bloodshed, not without reason, right? The Georgians could have decided to just take it because the fact that they were being ordered to fight in Arnhem against the British was a factor. So they can't sit tight if they're being sent to Arnhem. Yeah, true. And their theory was that the ones who went to Arnhem would probably defect immediately to the British armies and the ones on Tessel would be then punished for that treason. There's a whole analysis of why they couldn't do that. But the Dutch were saying, look, way too many Dutch civilians were killed, including children, unarmed.

unnecessarily. They were killed by Germans. They weren't killed by the Georgians themselves. They were killed in the Kors fire by German arms. These German naval guns pulverized some of these villages, set fires everywhere. They shouldn't be blaming the Germans, but they blame the Georgians more than they blame the Germans. And you see this, there was a video documentary made by some

people on Tessel, it's quite brutal how they describe the Georgians, who they really didn't like and what they did. So they have their own narrative. So the Georgian military cemetery, which is beautiful, is nowhere near the main cemetery on Tessel, which has war graves and everything else. Allied pilots who were down there are buried in a lovely military section of it. Not the Georgians. They're in a separate location completely. So it's a different narrative depends who you talk to. And of course, the German narrative is

a major Breitner after the war who survived. He survived thanks to his girlfriend, lived many years after the war. Breitner's line is, you know, we have no idea what happened because we were so nice to the Georgians. He says, I took my address with me on holiday in Germany. How could the guy turn on me? I was like so nice to them. Couldn't, never understood what hit them. Why anybody want to kill their Germans? Everybody likes Germans.

Yeah. I mean, it really is a fascinating story, Eric. And you tell it brilliantly. And very cinematic as well, I would thought. And it does deserve, I mean, we mentioned that Soviet effort. It feels like it deserves some sort of cinematic treatment. It feels like a cinematic story to me. So if any filmmakers are listening to that, I think that'd be a good thing to do.

to do but it really is fascinating story and it illustrates as I said that sort of ragged end of World War II which is something much more familiar to us with Eastern Europe as I said but this is a good example of it in the West so the whole thing finishes 20th of May so that really should be I suggest the anniversary of VE Day but you know history had it otherwise and

It's a wonderful book, Eric. Eric Lee, Night of the Bayonets, the Tessel Uprising and Hitler's Revenge. Thank you very much for telling us the story. And we'll see you next time. Thanks very much. It's been my pleasure. Thank you, Roger. That's all for Battleground 45. Do join us again on Friday for Battleground Ukraine.