Birthday News

When I was in Anroechte last sunday (see the Local Fossils Post last week) there was a provincial trade market all along Main Street. Local handymen - builders, roofers, painters etc - each had a stall. Bigger stalls displayed tractors and agricultural instruments, mostly attachments for tractors using standardised interfaces such as rotating shafts, towing hooks, hydraulic lines etc. Even a bank offering finance if you needed to buy a tractor etc. All very provincial.

But one of the stalls was run by the local newspaper - The Patriot (established 1848) - pushing their advertising column-inches. However, they have also scanned in 170 years of front pages from their analogue archives. As a free offer, if you told them your date of birth, they would see if they had that day's front page digitised and print out a free copy for you in size A3.

So I told them mine, 8th June 1944, just 2 days after D-day, because I wanted to see what the provincial German press was reporting back then. Censored battle-front reports, propaganda, who Hitler had met the day before, and even fake news to pacify the worried population. See below.

The first thing I had to get used to was the Fraktur typeface, still popular during the Nazi era, which made it a little more difficult to read.

Translation, to show you the way the German news was slanted at the time :- "Geneva, June 7: The bloody sacrifice that the Anglo-Americans have made with the invasion is the price that Roosevelt and Churchill pay to Moscow..." The propaganda blames Stalin - at the Teheran conference - for forcing the Anglo-Americans to invade , presumably to ease the pressure on the East Front.

The map of the English Channel does not show where the invasion was happening (Omaha beach etc), nor does it give numerical estimates of the forces involved. I assume this information was classified or they did not want to upset the local German population. The lower articles claim the invaders had been mostly pushed back into the sea and had suffered heavy losses. However the article does admit to a 40km wide bridgehead still on land. No mention of the German losses nor of the absence of the Luftwaffe. The tone of the article is very much heavily edited news and propaganda.

To make things appear diplomatically normal - what, me worry - there were excerpts from Hitler's timetable for June 7th. He received the Hungarian President, the new Kroatian consul, and some other diplomat who had been swapped out. Three or four column-inches were devoted to the Allied invasions of Italy, the Balkans and Tallin (Estonia). A short list of the foreign towns bombed but no mention of any bombing of the Fatherland. A count of the Allied planes shot down, but no report of any Luftwaffe losses.

I found it interesting to see this WW2 propaganda and (partial) reporting. Better than the History channel, because uncompressed and REAL history.

I also gave the newspaper people SWMBO's birthdate, but there was no front page archived for that day :-( By that date in 1945 the Allies would have rolled over the Anroechte area on their way to Berlin . . . hence no German newspaper.

Comments (2)
My mailserver was down yesterday so Cop Car wrote in her own blog as a reply to a comment of mine there " Undoubtedly, among my friends, your birthday was on the most exciting of their birth days. How great that you obtained the front page of Der Patriot; but, if you’ve not already done so, you might seek one from a newspaper that was nearer your place of birth. Most news of the war was slanted - not only for purposes of maintaining morale but for security. Just two days before your birth, a Tulsa newspaper had the headlines shown at: https://goo.gl/images/siyuuY. I lived in Tulsa, at that time." It was by pure chance that I got it for that date. Effortless.
Maria (D) says "I have problems reading that font nowadays." Because you are young. Like I have problems reading stuff written in Sutterlin.

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