Foreign Troops in Zandvoort

Germany’s successful campaigns against other Western European nations brought the Reich a great deal of booty and self-confidence and also resulted in the capture of hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war. The more fortunate of these captives were put into POW-camps and treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. However, Soviet soldiers captured at the eastern front, received a very different treatment. The Germans saw the war against the Soviet Union as a crusade to destroy the ideology of bolshevism, not as a conventional power struggle between nations. Consequently, in the German view, the Geneva Conventions did not apply to a conflict of this sort. This perspective resulted in harsh and cruel treatment of Russian captives. Their POW-camps were exceedingly barren with inmates housed in huts, dug-outs or improvised tents. Food was insufficient in quantity and bad in quality, and disease was rampant. Hundreds of thousands died on account of these poor conditions.

While some Nazis considered it risky to admit the “red germ” into the Third Reich, others saw the prison camps as an unlimited reservoir of forced labor. The conditions of slave labor took the lives tens of thousands more. In the prison camps, the security police hunted down the bolshevist intelligentsia, activists, and bureaucrats. Persons so targeted were used in medical experiments or sent to concentration camps where they were executed upon arrival. Victims of this type of treatment numbered around 38,000.

During the latter years of the war, several Soviets units were stationed along the Dutch coast: Turkmens in Noordwijk and Zandvoort; Georgians in Zandvoort; Armenians, people from the Northern Caucasus and Wolga Tartars in other coastal towns. 

There was really only one way out of this hell: collaborating with the enemy. Many Russian POWs were put to work rebuilding German-occupied territories. Others enlisted in the German army. Such recruits were considered unsuitable for duty at the front, but they were deemed sufficiently reliable to man defense works along the western shores of Europe. While German units were being sent to the eastern front, Russians, under the command of German officers, were used to man positions on the Atlantic and North Sea coasts.

In Zandvoort the Georgians had been stationed in several locations. It is known that they were present in the Kostverlorenpark complex, near the golf course (W.N. 161/W.N. 162), in W.N. 65 H near the Kraansvlak, and west of the town of Bloemendaal. 
These bunker complexes were characterized by their many thin-walled six-man bunkers. The complexes themselves tended to be large and include canteens, wash rooms and storage spaces.

In Zandvoort, a number of Georgians came into contact with the Dutch resistance movement, which was well-represented in the Haarlem area, and whose members were sympathetic to the communist ideology. Plans were hatched in Zandvoort by a group of underground activists and Georgians to rise up against the Germans. These plans never came to fruition because it soon became clear that the Georgians were about to be moved. In January of 1945, the Zandvoort Georgians were relocated to the Dutch island of Texel.