They had been Red Army soldiers from the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, captured on the Eastern Front and herded into camps where starvation and disease were doing the work that bullets had not. The German offer came as it came to so many Soviet prisoners: serve in a Wehrmacht auxiliary unit, eat regularly, perhaps see Georgia free again when the swastika reached the Caucasus. The alternative was to die slowly behind barbed wire. The men who chose the uniform did not become Nazis; they became survivors making a survivor's calculation. By 1945 the calculation had curdled. Germany was finished, and the Yalta Conference had handed Stalin the right to demand every Soviet citizen back, collaborators first. The Georgians on Texel knew exactly what waited for them on the docks at Odesa: a tribunal, a sentence, and a gulag if they were lucky.

The plan was conceived with the Dutch resistance, who supplied intelligence and would shelter the rebels when the rising came. The timing depended on an Allied landing that any sensible map could have told them would never come; Texel had been bypassed months earlier, militarily irrelevant since Normandy. When Loladze gave the order on the night of 5 April, his men moved barracks by barracks, killing the Germans they had slept beside for two months. By morning the Georgians held most of the island, and the Dutch flag flew over Den Burg for the first time in five years. But Loladze had not taken the heavy coastal batteries. Their German crews, the only enemy soldiers still alive on Texel, began shelling the villages where the rebels were hiding.

Two thousand riflemen of the 163rd Marine-Schützenregiment landed from the mainland and began working the island from south to north. They burned dozens of farms; the damage would later be reckoned at ten million guilders. The Georgians fought from windbreaks and dunes, from the lighthouse at Eierland and the polders below it. Texelaars hid them in attics, in haystacks, in cellars beneath kitchen floors. About one hundred and twenty islanders died in the crossfire and the reprisals, ordinary farmers and fishermen whose only role in any of this was to live on a piece of land that strangers had decided to fight over. Major Klaus Breitner, the German battalion commander who had escaped the first night, ordered captured mutineers to strip off their uniforms, dig their own graves, and stand at the edge.

On 5 May 1945 the German forces in the Netherlands surrendered. On 8 May, Germany surrendered everywhere. On Texel the killing continued, because the German garrison refused to acknowledge the surrender while armed Georgians were still on the island, and the Georgians could not surrender to men who were executing them on capture. The Second World War in Europe had officially ended, and yet two armies kept fighting in the dunes for twelve more days. Canadian troops under Lieutenant Colonel Kirk finally landed unopposed on 17 May, disarmed 1,535 Germans over two days, and on 20 May the last shots stopped. The final count: 565 Georgians dead, around 812 Germans, and 120 Dutch civilians. Five Georgians out of every eight who had landed on Texel were now buried in its sand.

SMERSH, Stalin's military counterintelligence, arrived to collect the 228 Georgians still alive. Most went home to Soviet justice; many vanished into camps. Allied testimonies of their heroism reportedly spared 236 of them from the worst, though the records are uneven and the personal cost is unknowable. The dead Georgians rest at the Hogeberg near Oudeschild, in a cemetery the Texelaars built and still tend. The Germans were eventually moved to Ysselsteyn in Limburg. In May 2005 Mikheil Saakashvili, then president of an independent Georgia his grandfathers' grandfathers had imagined and never seen, came to the Hogeberg with his Dutch-born wife and stood at the graves. Eugeny Artemidze, one of the main organizers of the uprising, lived until 22 June 2010 and died on the anniversary of the day he had first gone to war, sixty-nine years earlier. Grisha Baindurashvili, the last survivor, died in his village near Tbilisi in 2021, aged 102.