16. German Propaganda Claimed That Life Continued as Normal
Germans cut off citizens’ ability to communicate with England, so they never heard any news or instructions from their government. They were very literally all alone in figuring out what to do. The newspaper on the Channel Islands was taken over, and the printing press was used to publish a paper in German for the men living on the islands, and they instructed the editor to print their propaganda. Their instructions for what to say were written in their broken English, so the editor decided that he would not make any corrections, and printed their propaganda word-for-word. This way, the English citizens would be able to tell from the broken English that this was propaganda, and they could not trust anything that was written in the paper.
Of course, the Nazis did not believe in freedom of speech. A group of journalists attempted to publish an underground newspaper called the “Guernsey Underground News Service” or GUNS for short. They listened to their radios to pick up on the news from England, and they published the truth in their own paper, and passed it around the islands. Unfortunately, these men were caught, and sent to concentration camps. Two of these men never returned home.