Thread by @ajcdeane

This is the 6th instalment of #deanehistory. I confess that beer brought me to it.

The Dutch island of Texel produces some very fine beer. It was also the site of one of the last, & most unusual, battles of the Second World War in Europe.

(I’m hardly the first Englishman to be interested in the chain of Frisian Islands to which Texel belongs; it’s the setting of German invasion plans in Erskin Childers’ “The Riddle of the Sands”.)

The Wehrmacht had a “Georgian Legion.” Some were Georgians who’d fled westwards after the Soviet invasion of their (beautiful) country & hated the Soviets. Rather more were captured Georgian soldiers.

Those soldiers were given the choice- go to the camps as prisoners, or fight with us (with the rations and perks of soldiers) as a unit against the Russians.

Given the conditions in the camps, what would you have chosen?

The Queen Tamar battalion of the Georgian Legion had been sent to Texel as part of the Nazi “Atlantic Wall,” the enormous fortification of German-held Europe against Allied invasion. But- as the backstory implies- their hearts weren’t in it.

Told they’d be moved from Texel to face Allied advances on the continent, the Georgians had other ideas. Overnight, 5 to 6 April 1945, in the Georgian Uprising against their Nazi masters (with gallant help from Dutch resistance) they took over much of the island.

It took the Germans over a *month* to take the island back from them. Combat was fierce. When battle proper had ceased, irregular resistance continued, with Dutch families hiding Georgians when they could.

The Dutch sometimes get a hard time on the topic of wartime resistance, so this concealment of fighters far from home in their ditches, dykes and houses pleases all the more.

Amazingly, hundreds of Georgians survived in hiding amongst the Texels people until after the war – at which point the Allies turned them over to the Soviets, under the agreements made by the great powers at Yalta. Their fate was not a happy one.

But, never ones to miss a propaganda trick, the Soviets turned the Georgian Uprising into a tale of Soviet heroes, complete with annual ceremonial visits from their ambassador to Holland & a feature film that pretended they’d been POWs, not Wehrmacht fighters.

It is not a straightforward story. Some amongst the Georgians will have been willing fighters for Germany. Some amongst the Germans will have been unwilling conscripts, killed in their sleep by the Georgians they thought to be their allies.

But the Georgians were on the right side of history. & from those coerced to serve by the threat of the camps to those who served because their homeland had suffered under the Soviets, their lives had been dictated by forces beyond their control.

Thus was the fate of so many vassal states throughout history, & what prompted me to think of this after yesterday’s instalment. That & the fact that beer has a strong influence on the places I read up on.

What’s the lesson from today’s story? Perhaps it’s that if you forced somebody into something in the first place, you can hardly expect them to cleave to the terms & conditions throughout…

Lest this all sounds too gloomy, be assured it’s the *second* thought I have when ordering Texels beer in an Amsterdam bar - the first being quiet admiration for the fact that whilst the brewery has a truly enormous output, the tiny island only exports half of it.

Postscript. If you're keen to know more, @hillww1 kindly points out to me that @erictlee has a super website (and book!) about this - head over to nightofthebayonets.com

I should have realised that #deanehistory was going to end up costing me money :)