A stark dilemma The roots of the Texel rebellion lie not in Texel itself, but hundreds of miles away on the eastern front. For it was here, one day in April 1942, as the great battle raged between the forces of Bolshevism and Nazism, that about a thousand starving Soviet prisoners of war were paraded before their German captors and presented with the starkest of dilemmas. As one soldier later remembers it: “The German officers ordered all enemies of the Reich to step forward. Nobody stepped forward since this would have meant a bullet in the neck. It was then announced that the ceremony of induction into the German army was concluded.”