Georgian uprising on Texel

The Georgian Uprising on Texel (Dutch: Opstand der Georgiërs) (5 April 1945 – 20 May 1945) was an insurrection by the 882nd Infantry Battalion Königin Tamara (Queen Tamar or Tamara) of the Georgian Legion of the German Army (Wehrmacht Heer) stationed on the German occupied Dutch island of Texel (pronounced Tessel). The battalion was made up of 800 Georgians and 400 Germans, with mainly German officers. It was one of the last battles on the European theatre.

Overview

The heavily fortified island was part of the German Atlantic Wall system of defense. However, after the Allied landings in Normandy it was relegated to relative insignificance. The men of the rebellious battalion were Red Army soldiers from the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic captured on the Eastern front. They had been given a choice: the captured soldiers could choose either to remain in the prisoner of war camps, which would have meant abuse, starvation, and very possibly death, or to serve the Germans and be allowed a degree of freedom. The battalion was formed of men who chose the latter option.

Texel

Texel (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈtɛsəl]) is a municipality and an island with a population of 13,641 in the province of North Holland in the Netherlands. It is the largest and most populated island of the West Frisian Islands in the Wadden Sea. The island is situated north of Den Helder, northeast of Noorderhaaks, also known as "Razende Bol" and southwest of Vlieland.

Name

The name Texel is Frisian, but because of historical sound-changes in Dutch, where all -x- sounds have been replaced with -s- sounds (compare for instance English Fox, Frisian Fokse, German Fuchs with Dutch Vos), the name is typically pronounced Tessel in Dutch.

History

In the early Middle Ages and before, Texel and Wieringen may have been much bigger and met each other as opposite banks of the Marsdiep, which was then a river with banks of permanent land: see here.

In the 13th Century Ada, Countess of Holland was held prisoner on Texel by her uncle William.

Texel received city rights in 1415.

Texel was involved in the Battle of Scheveningen (1653) during the First Anglo-Dutch War and the Battle of Texel (1673) during the Third Anglo-Dutch War.

Texel (disambiguation)

Texel is an island and municipality of the Netherlands.

Texel may also refer to:

See also

Texel (graphics)

A texel, texture element, or texture pixel is the fundamental unit of texture space, used in computer graphics. Textures are represented by arrays of texels, just as pictures are represented by arrays of pixels.

Texels can also be described by image regions that are obtained through a simple procedure such as thresholding. Voronoi tesselation can be used to define their spatial relationships. This means that a division is made at the half-way point between the centroid of each texel and the centroids of every surrounding texel for the entire texture. The result is that each texel centroid will have a Voronoi polygon surrounding it. This polygon region consists of all points that are closer to its texel centroid than any other centroid.

Rendering texels

When texturing a 3D surface or surfaces (a process known as texture mapping), the renderer maps texels to appropriate pixels in the output picture. On modern computers, this operation is accomplished on the graphics processing unit.