Eric Lee - Night of the Bayonets: The Texel Uprising and Hitlers Revenge, April-May 1945

About the Author

Eric Lee is a historian and journalist who has lived and worked in the United States, Israel and Britain. He was the founder editor of The New International Review and published his first book, Saigon to Jerusalem: Conversations with Israels Vietnam Veterans, in 1991. More recent books include Operation Basalt: The British Raid on Sark and Hitlers Commando Order and The Experiment: Georgias Forgotten Revolution, 1918-1921.

Acknowledgements

Many people helped me research and write this book. Without the support of people in Georgia and the Netherlands in particular this would not have been possible. Id like to thank the following:

In Georgia, Ambassador Zurab Abashidze, Gulia Artemidze, Lascha Bakradse, Ambassador Jos Douma, Irakli Khvadagiani, Beka Kobakhidze, Rezo Sulava and Davit Turashvili.

In the Netherlands, Arnold van Bruggen (of Prospektor, producers of the documentary film The Russian War), Gelein Jansen, Jan Nieuwenhuis (Aeronautical & War Museum, Texel - LOMT), Gerard Timmerman (Hoofdredacteur Texelse Courant) and Jasper Wessels (Texel municipal archive).

And elsewhere in the world, Charlotte Alston, Cindy Berman, Derek Blackadder, Kirill Buketov, Roger Darlington, Helen Fry, Donald Graves, Stephen Harris, Janet Johnson, Doerte Letzmann, Georges Mamoulia, Ambassador Stephen Nash, Peter Nasmyth, Roy Nitzberg, Jason Osborn, Clive C. Prothero-Brooks (Royal Canadian Artillery Museum), Donald Rayfield, Sarah Slye, and Bernard Stern.

My publishers in the UK and Georgia - Michael Leventhal and Natalia Alhazishvili - have been much more than publishers, helping to guide the research and writing, and providing encouragement all along the way.

Appendix

Counting the Losses

No one knows how many people died in the final battle of the Second World War in Europe, which was fought on the island of Texel.

We know with some precision that eighty-nine Dutch civilians died, nearly all of them killed by the Germans.

We also have a good idea of the number of Georgians who were killed. There were about 800 Georgians serving on the island at the outbreak of the rebellion. Of these, 228 survived the conflict, meaning that around 572 died on Texel.

The number of Germans who were killed on the island is much harder to calculate. This is in part due to the fact that many of the German dead and wounded were evacuated from Texel during the fighting. According to Huug Snoek, a member of the Dutch resistance on Texel, hundreds of badly wounded Germans were taken to the mainland on board the ferry De Voorwaarts. Men who worked on the ferry told him that the decks were full of German bodies. Overall German losses, including wounded, were estimated by the Canadians at 2,347.

In an interview seventy years later, the last surviving Georgian participant in the Texel uprising, Grisha Baindurashvili, told a journalist that 500 Germans were killed on the first night of the fighting. This is unlikely to be the case as there were only about 400 Germans serving in the 822nd Battalion at that time. But there may have been other Germans killed who were not in the battalion.

On the gravestone of Evgeni Artemidze in Manglisi cemetery - a stone which he designed before his death, and which he proudly showed off to Dutch documentary film-makers - he claimed that the Georgian rebels were responsible for the deaths of 2,500 Hitlerians on Texel. This total, too, seems to be an exaggeration and probably includes all the wounded.

Many years after the war ended, bodies continue to turn up from time to time on Texel. It had been assumed that all the German war dead were moved off the island and buried in the Ijsselstein military cemetery near Venray, south-east of Amsterdam. But not all of them made that journey.

One German visiting the island long after the war told of seventeen of his comrades who were buried near the Ongeren bunker complex, just outside Den Burg. Elsewhere, a Texel farmer admitted on his deathbed that he had been forced to bury thirty-three German soldiers in Gerritsland.

Overall, more than 3,000 people died or were wounded in the battle, and probably over three-quarters of those were Germans.

Bibliography

Archives

Aeronautical & War Museum, Texel, The Netherlands

Artemidze Home, Manglisi, Georgia

Historische vereniging Texel, Texel, The Netherlands

Imperial War Museum, London, UK

National Archives, Kew, UK

The Royal Canadian Artillery Museum, Shilo, Manitoba, Canada

Interviews

Ambassador Zurab Abashidze (Special Representative of the Prime Minister of Georgia for Relations with the Russian Federation)

Gulia Artemidze

Lasha Bakradze (Literature Museum, Tbilisi)

Ambassador Jos Douma (Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Georgia and Armenia)

Gelein Jansen (Historische vereniging Texel)

Irakli Khvadagiani (SOVLAB, Tbilisi)

Dr Rezo Sulava (Texel-Georgia Kontact, Tbilisi)

Films

Crucified Island (Jvartsmuli kundzuli), directed by Shota Managadze and written by Rezo Tabukashvili, 1968

The Russian War (De Russenoorlog), produced by Prospektor, directed by Arnold van Bruggen. 2009

Books

Anon, The Truth About Oberlnder: Brown Book on the criminal fascist past of Adenauers minister (Berlin: Committee for German Unity, 1960)

Abramian, Eduard, and Antonio J. Muoz, Forgotten Legion: Sonderverbnde Bergmann in World War II, 1941-1945 (Bayside, NY: Europa Books, 2007).

Andreyev, Catherine, Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Movement: Soviet Reality and Emigr Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)

Brandon, David, East Anglian Coast (Stroud: Amberley Publishing, 2012)

Carr, Gilly, and Keir Reeves (eds), Heritage and Memory of War: Responses from Small Islands (New York: Routledge, 2015)

Copp, Terry, Cinderella Army: The Canadians in Northwest Europe, 1944-1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006)

Dallin, Alexander, German Rule in Russia, 1941-1945: A Study of Occupation Policies (London: Macmillan, 1957)

Fischer, George, Soviet Opposition to Stalin: A Case Study in World War II (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952)

Fry, Helen, The London Cage: The Secret History of Britains World War II Interrogation Centre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017)

Hirschfeld, Gerhard (trans. Louise Wilmot), Nazi Rule and Dutch Collaboration: The Netherlands under German Occupation, 1940-1945 (Oxford: Berg, 1988)

Lang, David Marshall, A Modern History of Georgia (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962)

Lee, Eric, The Experiment: Georgias Forgotten Revolution, 1918-1921 (London: Zed Books, 2017)

Mamoulia, Georges, Gruzinskiy legion Vermakhta (Moscow: Veche, 2011)

Rayfield, Donald, Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia (London: Reaktion Books, 2012)

van Reeuwijk, Dick (trans. Judith Hin), Sondermeldung Texel: The Georgian Rebellion on Texel (Texel: Het Open Boek, 2002)

Simon, Fred A., A Berliners Luck: Surviving the Third Reich and World War II (Bloomington, Indiana: Xlibris, 2004)

Tolstoy, Nikolai, Victims of Yalta (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1977)

Tweedsmuir, Lord, Always a Countryman (London: Robert Hale, 1953)

van der Zee, Henri Antony,