Many places throughout Canada produced fake newspapers demonstrating what a Nazi occupation of Canada would be like. In my work, I have found that local newspapers often carried "gag" dailies in which the cover story would be a Nazi general meeting with a mayor or other Canadian authority. These were particularly common in areas where German POWs were interned. The local newspaper of New Toronto/Mimico, for example, which is now part of Toronto, carried many of these stories from July 1940 to April 1944.

A particularly large story enumerated martial law to be imposed on the town, complete with curfews and punishments, etc. These stories look convincing, but The Advertiser, the local newspaper at the time, wrote at the very bottom in fine print: "you think it couldn't happen here, eh?"

In hindsight, these stories seem funny or outlandish. But it's important to remember that by June 1940, there was a very real sense in the UK (and the rest of the English-speaking world) that Nazi Germany had won the war and would eventually invade the UK. For this reason, Canada agreed to accept so many German civilian internees and POWs (captured mainly by the French). The British had requested Prime Minister Mackenzie King to accept about 3,000 in July 1940 because, in the event of a German invasion, the British believed that the POWs would be released and the civilian internees would aid the takeover. Understandably, then, Canadian newspapers ran stories like this to highlight the gravity of what had just been accomplished by the Germans in the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. It reinforced the need to think seriously about the war effort in Europe and how the war in 1939 was much different than Canada's previous one.