The Day Manitoba Fell to Nazi Germany

Avery Monette

In the early morning hours of Thursday, February 19, 1942, residents of Winnipeg and the surrounding towns were shaken from their sleep by the sound of air raid sirens. German Luftwaffe bomber planes had begun their attack on the Prairies and by 9:30 am, Winnipeg had fallen into the clutches of the Nazis. Renamed Himmlerstadt (Himmler City) in honour of Nazi Minister of the Interior Heinrich Himmler, uniformed Nazi soldiers marched through the streets as swastika banners were raised on municipal buildings across the city. Radio programs were delivered in German. The front page of the Winnipeg Tribune newspaper – renamed Das Winnipeger Lügenblatt – was printed in traditional Fraktur script and written in German rather than English, save for a square in the centre of the page that outlined ten proclamations made by the new Nazi administrator of Himmlerstadt, Col. Erich von Nurenberg. Among a list of suspended civil rights, gatherings of more than eight people were banned, and citizens were to be executed without trial for the offence of organizing any form of resistance to the Nazi authorities. If Winnipeg could be wiped off the map in place of Himmlerstadt in the matter of a few hours, how soon would the rest of Canada fall to Nazi Germany?

“Nazi” soldiers attacking a Winnipeg Free Press newsie, February 19, 1942. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Of course, this did not really happen. The Nazi occupation of Winnipeg on February 19, 1942 was indeed a simulation of what it would be like if the Germans were to invade. Meticulously organized by the Winnipeg Board of Trade and announced ahead of time to the residents of the city, ‘If Day’ was a creative fundraiser for Canadian victory bonds and quite a successful one. By March 3, Manitobans had raised $65 million dollars in victory bonds with contributions from Winnipeg residents totaling nearly $37 million.[1]

Although after February 19^th, the radio broadcasts returned to their usual programming and the Winnipeg Tribune reverted to the standard English-language reporting, the simulated takeover had a demonstrable effect on Manitobans. In reflecting on the print media produced specifically for the simulation, the scale of preparation becomes more evident. The German-language reports printed by the Tribune-turned-Winnipeger Lügenblatt are truly fascinating, and especially so when considered in the greater landscape of what Canadians knew about the war in Europe and the extent of the Holocaust by 1942.

According to the 1941 Canadian census, the city of Winnipeg counted 290 540 residents total. Winnipeg’s Jewish community stood at just under 6%, or 17 389 people.[2] While much of Canadian Jewish life at the time could be found in eastern metropoles like Montreal and Toronto, Winnipeg still boasted a significant Jewish population for a city further west in the country. Also in 1941 came reports published in the Canadian Jewish Chronicle (CJC) of mass atrocities committed by the Germans, though they did not characterize the sharp decline in the population of Jews across Europe as being the result of genocide at the time, considering the word did not officially exist. Part of an article republished from the Jewish Press Service titled “Starvation by Cold, Hunger, Ill-treatment and Epidemics Faces European Jewry” in the December 5, 1941, edition of the Chronicle contained the following:

Behind the welter of repetitious news stories of mounting horror is one basic, still unrealized fact – that actual, literal, physical extinction is the fate of European Jewry – UNLESS the peoples who are free will have the courage to speak up. The Independent Jewish Press Service has just received a secret document from the heart of Europe… This European analyst points an ACCUSING FINGER…

There are also forebodings of new persecutions in France. After all the “legal” measures against the Jews in unoccupied France and the usual vexations, arrests and imprisonments in concentration camps of many thousands of Jews in occupied France, there seems to be something “bigger” in preparation.[3]

The devastation of European Jewish communities was only partially known by the end of 1941. In Canada specifically, information about the mass atrocities being committed against all the victim groups of what is now known as the Holocaust was censored through two agencies – the Wartime Information Board (WIB) and the National Film Board (NFB). When asked in 1944 why there was nearly no information circulating in the Canadian public sphere about the mass atrocities committed against the Jews in Europe, John Grierson, the head of both agencies during the war, remarked in a conversation with his Jewish American friend Arthur Gottlieb that “The Cabinet War Committee declared Canada’s information policy on this issue: remain silent. Ottawa ordered all atrocity stories held up until they could be verified… Government policy has spared Canadian civilian morale and some possible guilt feelings.”[4]

This makes the inclusion of a news story on the front page of Das Winnipeger Lügenblatt more curious. In the second column, just underneath a snippet about the banning of civil and social groups, is a small report titled “Jüdisches Pogrom berichtet” or “Jewish Pogrom Reported”. The report in translation reads as follows:

(Berlin) The outbreak of a pogrom against the Jews was reported from Manitoba, Canada. All Jews were arrested and sent to Winnipeg, where a section of the city was surrounded by a wall and a ghetto was established. It was forbidden for Jews to leave the ghetto and Christians were not allowed to enter it.

Reports circulated that this would be the first in a series of pogroms that would serve to eradicate the Jewish race.

All teaching was restricted, and no Jew was allowed to prepare for a scholarly profession.

All religious events, religious celebrations were forbidden and entertainment was prohibited.[5]

Though the report is only a few sentences and meant to replicate the kinds of reports and activities that had occurred across Nazi-occupied Europe, the timing of the report along with the language used make for an eerie read. A month prior to If Day, on January 20^th, Reinhard Heydrich convened the Wannsee conference in Berlin and it was at this conference that the “Final Solution” was presented. While the report bears no indication of having been based on a real dispatch from Berlin, the presence of an open declaration that more pogroms would follow to “eradicate” the Jews in a Canadian newspaper by this point in the war serves as cry from an unknown present and a not too-distant future of what was to come in Europe. Other warnings about the destruction of European Jews in the form of reports and documents commissioned and received by Allied powers in Europe, and research papers containing translated Nazi statements, had been obtained by the WIB in the dark years of 1942-43 but were never released to the public.[6] The small report in the If Day edition of the Winnipeg Tribune might have been one of the few times the Canadian public would have read about the plight of the Jews, save for the reports in Canada’s Jewish press. It could have been.

Front page of the Winnipeg Tribune from Thursday, February 19, 1942. Credit: NewspaperArchive.com

The front page of the Lügenblatt was translated to English in the back half of the February 20^th issue for the benefit of the majority-English speaking population of Winnipeg, except for “Jüdisches Pogrom berichtet”. In other words, only those who could read in German would have the benefit of understanding the report. Throughout the English-language sections of the Lügenblatt that contained testimonies of national suffering from statesmen and diplomats across Europe, the plight of the Jews and other persecuted minorities like the Roma and the disabled are practically non-existent. This could perhaps be explained by the broader approach taken by the government of Mackenzie King in separating the “Good War” against the Nazis on the western front, as Norman Erwin described it, from the unthinkable atrocities against Jews and other ‘racial enemies’ in the east.[7] While the first major report on the Holocaust was available in Canada and the United States in late 1943, it would not be until late August of 1944 that Canadian print media began publishing front-page articles about the death camps as the Soviet army moved in from the east.[8]

If Day captured the imaginations of the Canadian public and motivated them to continue supporting the war effort. What if the Nazis made their way to Canada, what would it look like for Canadians? In thinking about the uses of propaganda and the importance of print media to the war effort, it must be asked – what if we had known more about the atrocities along the eastern front? Would it have inspired some type of public outcry, to urge the government to intervene? We don’t know for certain. Today we live in a media environment that makes the details of any ongoing atrocity readily available for anyone with internet access. In this interconnected world, distance is no excuse for apathy to human suffering, and, if ‘never again’ is to be more than hollow words, it must mean never turning away those in-need, regardless how far they are from our shores.

Avery Monette is a PhD student in History at l’Université de Montréal. Her research focuses on German historians working at German universities and how they wrote about German-Jewish history in the lead up to the Second World War.

Notes

[1] Jody Perrun, The Patriotic Consensus: Unity, Morale, and the Second World War in Winnipeg. University of Manitoba Press (Winnipeg, 2014), 114.

[2] Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Eighth Census of Canada, 1941, Vol. 3. Ages of the population classified by sex, conjugal condition, racial origin, religious denomination, birthplace, etc. Catalogue number CS98-1941-3 in Statistics Canada [database online]. Ottawa, Ont., 1946. 174.

[3] Unknown author, “Starvation by Cold, Hunger, Ill-treatment and Epidemics Faces European Jewry,” Canadian Jewish Chronicle (Montreal, Quebec), December 5, 1941.

[4] Norman Erwin, “The Holocaust, Canadian Jews, and Canada’s “Good War” Against Nazism” in Canadian Jewish Studies/Études juives canadiennes. Association for Canadian Jewish Studies (Toronto, Ontario) 2016. 108.

[5] Unknown author, “Jüdisches Pogrom berichtet,” Winnipeg Tribune (Winnipeg, Manitoba), February 19, 1942.

[6] Erwin, 111.

[7] Erwin, 118-19.

[8] David Goutor, “The Canadian Media and the ‘Discovery’ of the Holocaust, 1944-1945” in Canadian Jewish Studies/Études juives canadiennes. Association for Canadian Jewish Studies (Toronto, Ontario) 1997. 92.