For five years it was as idyllic as war could be. But for the last six weeks – extending beyond the official end of the Second World War – it was bloody carnage. Those who were once comrades in uniform suddenly took to butchering one another in a conflict that has come to be called ‘Europe’s last battle.’
Photographs of German soldiers, who in the Second World War were stationed on the pastoral island of Texel, the largest of the West Friesian Islands, show them beaming as they write home. Texel (pronounced ‘tessel’) was a plum posting, a gem of endless sandy beaches surrounding productive fields of grain, potatoes and pasture for contented sheep. By April 1945, in what everyone knew were the last days of an appalling conflict, the 1,200 Wehrmacht soldiers on Texel had good reason to hope they would see war’s end without firing an angry shot.
But early on the morning of April 6th, tranquility turned to terror as Wehrmacht soldier slaughtered Wehrmacht soldier, using everything from bayonets to artillery. Friend and foe were distinguished by one small difference in their uniforms: some 800 of the men wore a small patch identifying them as Georgians, while 400 officers and non-commissioned officers were German.
The Georgians had begun the war not in German uniforms but Soviet. In 1941, when the USSR mounted a desperate resistance to Hitler’s massive invading army, the Soviets pressed every citizen into service. Coming from Stalin’s birthplace, Georgian citizens were given Soviet colors and weapons and thrown into the defense of the motherland.
The Georgians, captured earlier on the Eastern Front, were given a dismal choice. They could accept prisoner of war status with a future promising hunger, abuse and possible death, or they could enlist in the Wehrmacht. The choice of some 30,000 Georgians to don a German uniform was understandable but it made them traitors.
As the end of the war loomed, the Texel Georgians’ future looked bleak – a return to retaliation and punishment in the USSR. Fearing that fate, the members of the 822nd Battalion, having already replaced Soviet uniforms with German ones, changed their allegiance again, back to the Allied side.
Inside their barracks just after midnight on April 5th-6th, 1945, the Georgians turned on their German comrades, killing many of them with bayonets and knives in coordinated attacks. But some, including the commander, Major Klaus Breitner, who had spent the night with his mistress in the village of Den Burg, survived. Breitner and a few other German survivors were able to escape to the mainland.
On April 6th Breitner launched a counter-attack, having mobilized a force of 2,000 marines and members of the feared German SS. What had appeared to be a complete Georgian victory was quickly reversed. A house-to-house hunt for Georgians swept through Texel.
Captured Georgians, including 57 who finally surrendered control of the lighthouse where they had barricaded themselves, were forced to strip – their mutiny having disgraced their uniforms – and dig their own graves. Over 130 of them were executed in this gruesome fashion.
Texel was turned into a scene of carnage that spared no one, including civilian Dutch inhabitants. Resistance forces and ordinary citizens who sheltered and helped the Georgians were executed and the villages of Den Burg and Eierland saw serious damage to homes and buildings as the Germans exacted their revenge. ‘Texel is under a reign of terror’, wrote one Texeler.
Even the surrender of German forces throughout the Netherlands on May 5th and the official end of the war on May 8th brought no end to the slaughter, as the German execution campaign continued for almost two more weeks. The death toll in the six-week battle was 812 Germans, 565 Georgians and 120 Dutch.
Throughout the nightmare, Texel received no Allied assistance. Only on May 20th was a small unit of the Canadian First Army sent to the island to negotiate an end to the conflict.
The Canadian commander on the scene was so impressed by the Georgian resistance that he refused to class the 228 survivors as enemy personnel. Lieutenant-General Charles Foulkes wrote to the Soviet High Command urging clemency for the Georgians. This would have been a significant bending of the rules agreed upon by the Big Three leaders at the Yalta Conference that all nationals would return to their homeland at the end of hostilities.
Stories circulated that the surviving 228 Georgians would not have to return to the USSR. But, if the promise was made, it was revoked over the course of the next few weeks and the surviving Georgians were dispatched to their home country.
Contrary to expectations of retribution, in 1946 the Soviet daily newspaper Pravda praised the Texel Georgians as ‘Soviet patriots’ and wrote of them as rebelling prisoners of war. Soviet officials also visited the island regularly after the Second World War to pay tribute to the Georgians’ anti-German resistance.
Today, few pause at the collective grave of 475 Georgians killed in combat or through summary execution, their resting place marked by 12 rows of red roses and a simple cairn. Europe’s last battlefield is silent, remembering the murderous nationalist antagonisms unleashed on it when the outcome of the Second World War was already decided.
Larry Hannant teaches History at Camosun College in Victoria, British Columbia.
World War II: Photos We Remember
In a picture that captures the violence and sheer destruction inherent in war perhaps more graphically than any other ever published in LIFE, Marines take cover on an Iwo Jima hillside amid the burned-out remains of banyan jungle, as a Japanese bunker is obliterated in March 1945.W. Eugene Smith—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesIn this and dozens of other, similar pictures made at New York's Penn Station in 1944, LIFE's Alfred Eisenstaedt captured a private moment repeated in public millions of times over the course of the war: a guy, a girl, a goodbye - and no assurance that he'll make it back. By war's end, more than 400,000 American troops had been killed.Alfred Eisenstaedt—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesDuring 1940's Battle of Britain, Luftwaffe bombers tried to destroy British air power ahead of a planned invasion of the UK. When that failed, Hitler resorted to terror attacks on civilians, including the full-scale bombing of London (pictured) and other English towns. The attacks killed tens of thousands of Britons, but "The Blitz" fizzled: the invasion never materialized.William Vandivert—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesThree American soldiers lie half-buried in the sand at Buna Beach on New Guinea. This photo was taken in February 1943, but not published until September, when it became the first image of dead American troops to appear in LIFE during World War II. George Strock's photo was finally OK'd by government censors, in part because FDR feared the public was growing complacent about the war's horrific toll.George Strock—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesThe Statue of Liberty, photographed during a blackout in 1942 - an eloquent expression of the nation's mood in the first full year of a global conflict with no real end in sight.Andreas Feininger—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesMembers of the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps, commonly known as WAACs, don their first gas masks at Fort Des Moines, Iowa, in June 1942. The female troops were famously praised by General Douglas MacArthur, who called them "my best soldiers."Marie Hansen—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesA photo taken by Hitler's personal photographer (and later acquired by LIFE) shows a 1939 rally in which Hitler salutes Luftwaffe troops who fought with Francisco Franco's ultra-right wing nationalist rebels in the Spanish Civil War.Hugo Jaeger—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesSoldiers goose-step past the Fhrer in honor of Hitler's 50th birthday, April 20, 1939. Less than five months later, on September 1, the Third Reich's forces invaded Poland.Hugo Jaeger—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesAustrians cheer Adolf Hitler during his 1938 campaign to unite Austria and Germany. In the rapt faces, straining bodies, and adulation of the crowds swept up in Hitler's mad vision, one senses the eagerness of millions to forge a "Thousand Year Reich" at, literally, any cost.Hugo Jaeger—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImageIn a photo that somehow comprises both tenderness and horror, an American Marine cradles a near-dead infant pulled from under a rock while troops cleared Japanese fighters and civilians from caves on Saipan in the summer of 1944. The child was the only person found alive among hundreds of corpses in one cave.W. Eugene Smith—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImageThe home front: At Sportsman's Park in St. Louis, a visiting New York Giant is caught in a rundown in the summer of 1943. At a time when seemingly everything in America - race relations, gender roles, the country's very idea of itself - was undergoing profound change, the national pastime offered an antidote to anxiety and dread. Namely, something familiar. Something unchanging.Wallace Kirkland—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesMembers of the U.S. Army Air Corps' legendary 99th Pursuit Squadron, the Tuskegee Airmen, receive instruction about wind currents from a lieutenant in 1942. The Tuskegee fliers - the nation's first African American air squadron - served with distinction in the segregated American military.Gabriel Benzur—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesA welder at a boat-and-sub-building yard adjusts her goggles before resuming work, October, 1943. By 1945, women comprised well over a third of the civilian labor force (in 1940, it was closer to a quarter) and millions of those jobs were filled in factories: building bombers, manufacturing munitions, welding, drilling and riveting for the war effort.Bernard Hoffman—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImageArmy medic George Lott, wounded in both arms in November, 1944, grimaces as doctors mold a cast to his body. When Lott embarked on a 4,500-mile, seven-hospital journey of recovery, photographer Ralph Morse - astonished by the high level of medical care wounded troops received both at the front and behind the lines - traveled with him, and chronicled Lott's odyssey in a revelatory cover story for LIFE.Ralph Morse—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesPhotographer W. Eugene Smith's picture of a Marine drinking from his canteen during 1944's Battle of Saipan is as iconic a war picture as any ever made. In fact, when the U.S. Postal Service released a "Masters of American Photography" series of commemorative stamps in 2002, Smith was included - and this image was chosen as representative of his body of work.W. Eugene Smith—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesUnpublished. An exemplar of a bitter, grueling land battle, Iwo Jima also saw prodigious air and sea power brought to bear as American and Japanese troops clashed over control of the tiny Pacific island. American forces finally captured Iwo Jima - and its two strategic airfields - in late March, 1945.W. Eugene Smith—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesUnpublished. A crew maneuvers an enormous piece of artillery during the Battle of Saipan, 1944. In the waning days of the struggle for the island, thousands of Japanese civilians and troops committed suicide, rather than surrender to American troops. Many leapt to their death from the top of sheer cliffs that fall 200 feet to rocks and surf below.Peter Stackpole—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesUnpublished. American troops chat near a dead Japanese soldier on Iwo Jima. The degree to which the Japanese were willing to fight to the death, rather than surrender, is summed up in one remarkable statistic: Close to 20,000 Japanese soldiers were killed during the battle; only around 200 were captured.W. Eugene Smith—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesGIs tramp in review across an English field, 1944, as the long-planned Operation Overlord - the D-Day invasion of France - draws near. With 160,000 Allied troops taking part, the cross-Channel attack was the single greatest air-land-and-sea invasion in military history.Frank Scherschel—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesUnpublished. An American Marine readies to land on Guadalcanal during the five-month struggle for the island between late 1942 and early 1943. Three thousand miles south of Tokyo, Guadalcanal was a major shipping point for military supplies. The Allied victory there in February, 1943, marked a major turning point in the war after a string of Japanese victories in the Pacific.Joe Scherschel—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesAmerican troops in the Philippines celebrate the long-awaited news that Japan has, finally, unconditionally, surrendered in August 1945.Carl Mydans—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesPeace at last: V-J Day, Times Square, August 14, 1945.Alfred Eisenstaedt—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image
