Would be interesting how they work technically. The linked pdf mentions an EMV chip, which I assume is some sort of TEE. Other than creating recipient-specific one-time vouchers online, I can't think of a way to do offline payments without a TEE.
They’ve also supported offline transactions that entire time. Indeed offline transactions was the norm for a long time because internet connections were expensive. So payment terminals did offline transactions, then literally phoned home at the end of the day to upload all of the day’s transactions.
The transactions themselves are just signed by the cards, and stored by the payment terminals. Interestingly using symmetric encryption, because asymmetric encryption was two expensive to put into debit/credit cards when the EMV spec was originally created.
Card transactions being online by default in the EU is pretty recent phenomenon that only really happens in the past 5-10 years, as internet connections and cheap mobile data plans have become ubiquitous.