On May 9, our country celebrated the 74th anniversary of the Great Victory. With colossal exertion of forces, multimillion casualties, the military talent of Soviet commanders and the immense courage of ordinary soldiers, the Soviet Union managed to win the war against the most dangerous and cruel enemy. Hitlerite Germany capitulated.
But, despite the fact that on May 8 at 22:43 CET, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, endowed with the appropriate powers from the successor to the Fuehrer, Admiral Karl Dönitz, signed the act of surrender, which entered into force on May 9 at 00:01 Moscow time, some units and formations of the Wehrmacht and the SS troops continued to provide armed resistance to the Soviet troops, not wanting to recognize the surrender and lay down their arms.
Battle on the island of Bornholm
In 1945, Germany used the Danish island of Bornholm, 169 km east of Copenhagen, to evacuate the retreating units of the Nazi army. Back on January 25, 1945, Adolf Hitler decided to strengthen the defense of Denmark, primarily the island of Bornholm as a transshipment base. The garrison of the island by this time consisted of more than 12 thousand soldiers and officers. The island housed a military airfield, about 10 direction-finding and radar stations, 3 hydroacoustic anti-submarine warfare stations, coastal and anti-aircraft artillery batteries. The military commandant of Bornholm from March 5, 1945 was Captain 1st Rank Gerhard von Kamptz.
On May 4, 1945, German troops stationed in northwestern Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark surrendered to the 21st Army Group of Canada and Great Britain. But the ships and aircraft of Germany did not stop fighting, and the evacuation of German troops across the Baltic Sea was only gaining momentum. German aircraft and ships continued to fire at Soviet ships and aircraft, since the commandant of Bornholm, Captain 1st Rank Gerhard von Kamptz, gave the order to surrender only to British troops and not surrender to the Red Army.
In this regard, on May 4, 1945, the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command of the USSR accepted the proposal of the People's Commissar of the Navy, Admiral of the Fleet Nikolai Gerasimovich Kuznetsov, who advocated disrupting the evacuation of Nazi troops from Courland. It was decided to attack the island of Bornholm. For this operation, units of the 18th Rifle Division of the 132nd Rifle Corps, commanded by Major General Fedor Fedorovich Korotkov, were allocated. The corps was part of the 19th Army of the 2nd Belorussian Front under the command of Marshal of the Soviet Union Konstantin Konstantinovich Rokossovsky.
The Soviet command hoped that the Nazis, entrenched in Bornholm, in the current situation would no longer offer serious resistance. Therefore, it was supposed to carry out the acceptance of surrender by the forces of one company of the Marine Corps, in extreme cases - a rifle regiment. On the island of Bornholm by this time there were the remnants of the retreating Nazi troops from East Prussia under the command of General of Artillery Rolf Wutmann, who commanded the 9th Army Corps of the Wehrmacht.
At 6:15 am on May 9, 1945, a detachment of 6 Soviet torpedo boats left the port of Kohlberg towards Bornholm Island, on which a rifle company of 108 people also followed. The detachment was commanded by the chief of staff of the Kolberg naval base, Captain 2nd Rank D. S. Shavtsov. After a short time, torpedo boats intercepted a German self-propelled barge and four motorboats, with Wehrmacht officers and soldiers on board. These ships were escorted to the port of Kolberg by one of the torpedo boats.
The other five boats arrived at the port of Rønne on the island of Bornholm at 15:30, without encountering German opposition, and landed a rifle company. However, a German officer came to the Soviet commander, who conveyed the order of General of Artillery Wutmann to immediately leave the island of Bornholm. Wutmann emphasized that German troops surrender only to the Allies.
Soviet servicemen could not stand such impudence. The commander of the detachment, Shavtsov, warned that in 2 hours Soviet aviation would strike at military facilities in Bornholm. The rifle company managed to seize the telegraph office, cut the communication cables. A few hours later, General Wutmann, his chief of staff and commandant of the base surrendered to the Soviet command and were taken to Kohlberg. The disarmament of the German units took place on May 10-11, all 11,138 German prisoners were taken to the USSR in prisoner of war camps.
But the last battle at Bornholm took place on May 9, 1945. Three Soviet torpedo boats attacked a German convoy from a transport vessel, a tug and 11 patrol boats. In response to the order to return to the island, German boats opened fire. Two Soviet sailors were wounded, one of them soon died of his wounds. The German convoy managed to escape to Denmark.
In addition, air battles continued on Bornholm on May 9, during which 16 German aircraft were shot down. 10 German ships were sunk. Soviet troops remained on Bornholm Island until April 5, 1946, when the island was handed over to representatives of the Danish government. During the operation on the island of Bornholm, about 30 Soviet soldiers were killed.
"Queen Tamara" against Hitler's punishers
The island of Texel in the northwestern part of the Netherlands was turned by the Germans into a serious defensive point during the war years. On February 6, 1945, the 822th Georgian Infantry Battalion of the Wehrmacht "Queen Tamara", which was part of the collaborationist formation "Georgian Legion", was transferred to Texel Island to carry out various auxiliary tasks.
The decision to transfer the battalion to the island was taken by the German command for a reason - the Nazis received information about the appearance of an underground organization in the battalion. And it really was. The Georgians serving in the battalion, mostly former Soviet prisoners of war who had joined the Georgian Legion for the sake of liberation from the camps, hoping for a quick surrender of Germany, were going to raise an uprising.
On the night of April 5-6, 1945, while already on Texel Island, the battalion's personnel rebelled. The uprising was led by the 29-year-old Shalva Loladze, a former captain of the Soviet Air Force, squadron commander who was captured and served in the Georgian Legion with the rank of lieutenant. The Georgians killed about 400 German non-commissioned officers and officers, almost all of them slitting their throats with knives. In the shortest possible time, almost the entire island was taken under the control of the insurgent soldiers of the "Queen Tamara" battalion.
To pacify the insurgents, the German command landed 2,000 soldiers of the 163rd Infantry Regiment on the island. For two weeks, fierce battles were fought on the island, but the Germans, who regained control over the main objects of the island, did not manage to completely neutralize the rebels. On April 25, the leader of the uprising, Shalva Loladze, was killed in one of the battles. Dividing into groups, the Georgian rebels continued to fight against the German infantry. In response, the Nazis burned down any buildings where the rebels could hide, and destroyed the vegetation of the island. However, the resistance continued.
On May 8, 1945, Germany surrendered, but the fighting on Texel lasted for almost two more weeks. On May 15, 1945, a week after Germany's surrender, Nazi troops held a military parade on Texel. It was, perhaps, the last military parade in the history of the Third Reich, which, moreover, took place after the formal end of the war. Only on May 20, 1945, Canadian troops landed on Texel Island, which accepted the surrender of the Nazis and stopped the bloodshed.
During the fighting on Texel Island, from 800 to 2000 soldiers of the Wehrmacht, more than 560 Georgian rebels from the "Queen Tamara" battalion and about 120 civilians were killed. The economic infrastructure of the island suffered enormous damage, as the Nazis burned down any buildings, trying to deprive the Georgians of the opportunity to wage a partisan war.
In Courland, the Germans fought to the last
In 1945, when most of the territory of the Soviet Union, and the countries of Eastern Europe, was liberated from the Nazi occupiers, Wehrmacht units and formations continued to hold control over Kurland - the western regions of Latvia.
In Courland, a "half-boiler" was formed - although the Germans were surrounded by Soviet troops, they controlled the access to the sea and had the opportunity to communicate with the main forces of the Wehrmacht. Fierce battles were fought in Courland right up to the surrender of Germany. Many settlements of Courland several times passed under the control of the Wehrmacht, then under the control of the Red Army. The Soviet troops here were opposed by powerful enemy forces - Army Group Kurland, the 3rd Tank Army, as well as the collaborationist formations of the Latvian Legion.
On May 9, 1945, units of the Wehrmacht, fighting against the Soviet troops of the 1st and 2nd Baltic fronts, learned about the surrender of Germany. Only on May 9, 1945, Soviet troops managed to occupy Liepaja. On May 10, 1945, a group of 70 thousand people under the command of Colonel-General Karl von Hilpert surrendered. But up to 20 thousand people managed to evacuate by sea to Sweden. Only on May 10, Soviet troops entered Ventspils, Piltene, Valdemarpils. Moreover, only on May 12, articles about the liberation of Courland appeared in the Soviet press.
Interestingly, not all German formations stopped resisting the Soviet troops. Some units tried to break through to the west, to the allies, so as not to surrender to the Russians, but to capitulate to the British or Americans. Two weeks have passed since the formal end of the war, when on May 22, 1945, 300 SS men in formation and with the banner of the 6th SS Army Corps tried to enter East Prussia. The detachment was commanded by the commander of the 6th SS Army Corps, SS Obergruppenführer Walter Kruger.
The SS men were overtaken by Soviet troops and destroyed. Obergruppenfuehrer Kruger himself shot himself, just not to fall into Soviet captivity. But separate detachments of the Nazis continued to fight against the Soviet troops in June 1945. The last German soldiers were evacuated to the island of Gotland on October 30, 1945.
Spitsbergen: the last surrender of the Third Reich
On Bear Island near the island of Spitsbergen, the Nazis once equipped a meteorological station. A small Wehrmacht unit was assigned to guard it. But at the end of 1944, when the Germans were no longer up to the Arctic, the unit lost contact with the command. German soldiers threw bottles with notes into the water, hoping that they would fall into the hands of representatives of Germany. The weather station guards did not starve to death only because they were fishing and hunting seals.
Only at the end of August 1945, a group of German soldiers on Bear Island was discovered by seal hunters. They reported the incident to representatives of the Allied military command. On September 4, 1945, the allies accepted the surrender of a small garrison, whose soldiers surrendered 1 machine gun, 1 pistol and 8 rifles. It is believed that the surrender of the guards of the meteorological station on Bear Island is the last surrender of the troops of the Third Reich in Europe.
Of course, battles both against the Soviet troops and against the allies took place in other places as well. Moreover, if we talk about the allies, then on the island of Crete, British troops even acted together with the Nazis against the communist partisans: war was war, and hatred of the USSR and the communists united even fierce opponents.
