Victims of rumour: British Channel Islanders under German occupation in the second world war

After the entry of the United States into the Second World War, American psychologists undertook the first studies of rumour, in which they analysed and defined its social functions in a country at war. But rumours are themselves a useful lens through which to look at the societies which produced them, and in the German-occupied Channel Islands there is an opportunity to gain a much deeper understanding of a wartime society, whose experience of the war was fundamentally different to that of the United Kingdom and the United States. As small as they are, these islands have produced a large body of contemporary diaries written during the years 1940–1945, which are a rich but under-used source for the study of their social history. By their nature very private documents, diaries recorded events as they happened, the rumours which accompanied them, and the spontaneous and genuine responses of islanders to both. This article will use those diaries to examine not only the origin and transmission of rumours, but their reception by the public, and what they can tell us about how Channel Islanders coped with the trauma of five years of German occupation.