Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (37 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

Understanding the Story

I
T WAS THE KIND OF FUNNY STORY THAT MADE THE ROUNDS PRACTICALLY EVERY WEEK
during the heart of the Occupation. In this case, we will allow Reverend Ord to do the honors:

A German propaganda film was being shown in Jersey, featuring British and American soldiers dying by the hundreds in battle. Not so much as a single casualty was sustained by the Germans! It was a stirring narrative. It was finally rounded off by a special “shot” of a German Military funeral, for—one supposes—not even Germans live forever. A hero's honours were accorded. The coffin was borne slowly past amid, at least, the respectful silence of the audience, when a sepulchral voice from the pit broke the spell of amazement: “That man died of indigestion”! Immediately the house rocked with great gusts of laughter. Swiftly the Germans reacted. They stopped the performance, locked the doors and made valiant efforts to identify the culprit, but in vain.
¹

In this one little tale we can find many of the narrative elements that helped Islanders understand their own experience of Occupation and construct the second element of rhetorical resistance.

Ord's story begins with the German propaganda that surrounded the civilian population, permeating their newspapers and serving as the required prelude to airings of popular films. Islanders were subjected both to German propaganda and British counterpropaganda to such an extent that it almost seemed as if the successful outcome of the entire war hinged on the hearts and minds of this small population. The story swiftly moves to recount the execution of a resistant joke, one successfully pulled off because of the cleverness of the perpetrator and the determination of his neighbors not to give him away. The act itself, as well as the humor behind the comment, would have been appreciated by this truly “captive” audience, both in the theater and in life.

Finally, the incident continued to exist as a story, one to be heard and then relished in the retelling as it passed from neighbor to neighbor. It was a tale laced with humor, and one that had much to say about life in the Island community. Such stories—along with jokes, metaphors, puns, and other discursive artifacts—still survive as remnants of the hidden transcript of the Occupation. Too often ignored by historians in favor of the official documents and proclamations of the public transcript, the stories and other shared “chat” of daily life provided a “web of interaction” for the common Islander, and an informal means of constructing a shared worldview.
²
They also constitute an underestimated narrative form of resistance to power.

This chapter will examine the discursive life of the occupied population of Guernsey, and the view of reality that was constructed by this shared narrative. Common narratives serve
as a vital sense-making process and are key to resisting the mental control exerted by the dominant. I will begin with competing German and British propaganda, in relation to which the civilian populace served more as an audience than as active participants. Not only did the Islanders become adept decipherers of German propaganda, they constructed counter-readings by comparing the narratives found in the local press, and in films of the Channel Islands constructed for German consumption, with the daily reality they could view for themselves. The hunger for trustworthy information on the conduct of the war would make them a ready audience for the counterpropaganda of British leaflets and newssheets occasionally dropped over the Island by the RAF.

It should not be assumed that Guernseymen and women were naive readers of the British presentation of the war, as they were in a position that occasionally made them critical recipients of the hopeful messages from the mainland. Still, this ability to compare the patently deceptive war news and anti-Semitic nonsense of the German official press to the British worldview put forth in leaflets and through the BBC only strengthened the Islanders' psychological ties to the Allied cause. Second, this chapter will consider some of the many stories, jokes, metaphors, and other narrative elements that the Islanders utilized as one of their few available means of resistance, and one they learned to mold to their own purposes. The final portion of this chapter will examine the diarists' understanding of performed compliance and of their own Controlling Committee, and the small triumphs, grave miscalculations, and other difficulties inherent in powerless leadership. As their leaders in the highest levels of Island governance constructed their own resistance based on a mask of outward compliance, their audience consisted not simply of the German command but also the common Islander. It was a mimetic performance that created its own narrative, one that could be read—and misread—during the Occupation and by subsequent generations. All of these largely discursive elements provide a window into narrative resistance, one that would be vital in the construction of the hidden transcript of the Occupation.

A CRESCENDO OF HARD LYING

Our understanding of propaganda and the general response to its use has shifted considerably since the term's origination in 1622 in Pope Gregory's establishment of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. “Propaganda” was simply derived from the Latin (meaning “to sow”) and intended “to propagate” an understanding of Church teachings, thus clarifying Catholic doctrine for the people and resisting the persuasive goals of the Reformation. Now, the meaning is clearly pejorative, summoning to mind a dark art of lies and distortion bordering on brainwashing.
³

“Black propaganda” is, quite naturally, the form we think of when dealing with fabrications, lies, and “all types of creative deceit.”
⁴
In this case, the propaganda is covert, concealing often the source of the propaganda and the intentions behind its use. And the gold standard for the widespread and intensive application of this form of propaganda was the Nazi Party, from 1933 under the minister for propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels pioneered a highly coordinated and media-centric style of propaganda that was, at its best (or worst), finely crafted and devastatingly effective in its psychological impact. One element that has remained as a historic artifact of his work is the concept of the “Big Lie,”
what Ted J. Smith calls “the paradigm instance of the craft” of deception.
⁵
Hitler and Goebbels both propagated a concept of the Big Lie (
Große Lüge
), a falsehood so large—perhaps so fantastic—that few would believe anyone to be impudent enough to create it out of whole cloth.
⁶

The Nazi propaganda machine would be the force to control information in the Channel Islands during the Occupation, and Goebbels's reputation had preceded him. Islanders anticipated that a change in the ready flow of information would come just when news of the outside world was so vitally important to them. Initially, the change was delayed. It was November of 1940 when Ord decided that Goebbels (whom Ord liked to call “the little Doctor”) had “at last discovered that we have newspapers in Guernsey” and ordered that subsequent issues would be “special ‘cooked’ versions of the news.” Unwilling to just accept Goebbels's propaganda as news, Ord noted in his diary that he would now call the papers “the Front Page,” for they would be little more than “German communiques.”
⁷
Local Guernsey news remained in the papers, but only encompassed silver and golden anniversaries, mundane police blotter and court cases, and the usual accounts of accidents and obituaries. Ambrose Robin believed that by early 1941, not even one in ten people continued to read the outside news.
⁸

Even this narrow window of information closed further in the spring of 1942, when the
Evening Press
and
Star
began to publish on an alternate-day schedule,
⁹
and even more so in early 1944 when the newspapers were reduced in size. By then, not that many missed having the full salvo of “contradictory news and Haw Haw's effusions,” according to Robin.
¹⁰
Even granting their loss of control over war news, the editors often lost the battle for the remaining small portions of the papers. In October 1943, Gartell, the editor of the
Press
, was suspended because of his desire to publish a Red Cross message from the King and Queen congratulating a couple on their golden anniversary. It seems that it was more the “tone” of his protest over this relatively inconsequential issue that led to his fall, a reflection most likely of intense frustration on a daily basis. It is noteworthy that Gartell lost control of his mask of cooperation under the heady combination of emotion for an elderly couple and a sentimental patriotism.
¹¹

Although there was irritation with what Rev. Ord called “the crescendo of hard lying on the ‘Front Page,’” there was a degree of amusement in reading the more obscure or imaginative German propaganda offerings.
¹²
It was, for example, “with deepest sympathy” that the Islanders were informed that “President Roosevelt is either ill or insane,” in one press offering,
¹³
and that a Churchill speech was reported under the banner headline “churchill outlines programme of terror.” This last offering gave details of Churchill's receiving the Freedom of the City of London from the Lord Mayor of the City, described as “presenting a magnificent figure in his resplendent robes.” The account of the ceremony was improved upon by the description of Churchill's pledge of obedience to the Lord Mayor and the German commentator's assertion, “I had now wonder at the deeper meaning of the words, for the Lord Mayor is a Jew!”
¹⁴

If such blatant twisting of information was amusing to Ord, he also grew heartily tired of the “wild propaganda statements” trumpeted by
Press
and
Star
headlines: “Britain Ready to Forget her War Heroes,” “Jews Have a Firm Grip on Britain” (according to Ord, this was “a regular stand-by”).
¹⁵
Ord seemed particularly to relish the crazier stories given major news treatment in the
Evening Press
and
Star
, perhaps because the ludicrous propaganda twist relieved some of the despair inherent in bad news. He related a tidbit from Dr. Goebbels,
whether directly or by implication, describing “the King's visit to the smoking ruins of Coventry.” According to the “Front Page,” at the close of the visit, the King turned to the local dignitaries and said, “I am glad that everything went off so well.” Ord could only respond, “Oh, Doctor!”
¹⁶

More fascinating in its own way was Islander awareness of their starring roles in an entire series of propaganda offerings designed for the German home front. This particular campaign would probably be best described as a specialized type of black propaganda called “disinformation,” even though the word was not coined until 1955. Still, the term well suits the highly targeted efforts to frame the taking of the Channel Islands as a triumph of German will, and the relationship of occupied to occupier as a cozy meeting of minds. Disinformation is less broad-based than general propaganda, and a more subtle tweaking of the details of a larger news story, designed to show adversaries in a negative light and thus to weaken them.
¹⁷
Civilians reading these accounts had lived through the actual taking of Guernsey by the Germans, an event that was a combination of the mass murder of civilians in the bombing and strafing of the harbor, and an anticlimactic final takeover of a demilitarized population incapable of offering armed resistance. The introduction to a publicity film being shown in Germany made the rounds to the amusement of Islanders in its description of the Germans' “daring and sudden attack” that allowed the seizing of Guernsey, or as the film described it, “Tomato Island.” The film was obviously structured to appeal to Germans under wartime rationing in its description of the greenhouses of Guernsey supplying “tomatoes, bunches of grapes and melons,” now to be diverted to Germany.
¹⁸

By a year later, various versions of the occupying of the Channel Islands were filtering through to Guernsey, revealing just how the Germans had embroidered the account for home consumption. Rev. Ord came across a German periodical that published stills from a film account of the capture of Guernsey, a fictional pitched battle complete with British dead strewn about the streets and “no German dead noticeable.”
¹⁹
Winifred Harvey inserted into her diary a translated account from
Der Durchbreche
, July 3, 1941, that was a pastiche of comical (and irritating) distortions. According to this version of the advent of Occupation, when abandoned by the British the Guernsey civilians left the streets and closed their businesses as they “awaited the cruelty of the barbarians.” The shops then reopened the next day, and the shopkeepers were very willing to serve the German soldiers. To the astonishment of the populace, the Germans paid for everything, and they found that “the lies told about the Germans were not to be believed!”
²⁰

This propaganda happy-talk, an account that left out such uncomfortable details as the murderous initial air raid and slave labor camps in Alderney, closed with assurances that there was now universal “praise of the Germans' conduct.” Highlighted was the relief of the Islanders in knowing “that the German power cares more for them than their fellow countrymen were willing to do.”
²¹
To Guernseymen and women, the news of their gratitude for the tender ministrations of the occupiers was laughable. However, they became accustomed to having their feelings, whether about RAF raids or German orders, mischaracterized in the German press and took it no more seriously than the other factual misstatements and overt lies that composed Nazi propaganda. Little could they know that their attitudes, as falsely filtered through German disinformation, would sit like a little narrative time bomb, only to emerge in the revisionist 1990s as part of the “newly uncovered” story of the Occupation. Although accompanied in the German public transcript by easily debunked historic “facts,” German characterizations of Islander beliefs and attitudes have sometimes been accepted in surprisingly uncritical fashion.