The Danger Zone (DZ)

The Danger Zone (DZ)

By Paul FordyceHistory
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The Danger Zone (DZ) episodes

  • DZ Season 002 Part 03. How Hitler Almost Missed the Bus. 22 December 1932. Not possible. Hitler Chancellor in just over 30 days!

    It’s 22 December 1932 and Adolf Hitler is still as far as he has ever been from becoming the leader of Germany – hopefully he never will. That’s what most people think – but not everyone.

    Bella Fromm was a woman with a coquettish mouth and dark eyebrows. She was forty one years old and a journalist. She worked for the Vossische Zeitung newspaper. This paper was a must read if you wanted to try to keep up with the politics in Berlin – and nowadays that was no easy thing to do.

    Bella had come from a wealthy Jewish family. By now she’d been married twice. She’d had a daughter from the first marriage, but right now, once again she was single – alone again naturally. The inflation disaster that hit Germany in 1923 had wiped out a lot of her inherited wealth and she had needed to get a job – hence she was now a journalist writing a column called “Berlin Diplomats”. She covered what was happening with the foreign emissaries, staff and foreign ministry and the politicians in Berlin. She kept her poison-tongued political analysis out of her newspaper column, saving it for her diary and her closest confidantes. If she wanted to have good relations with these people, insulting them or betraying their confidences was not the best way to go about it. Being a Jew today in Germany, 1932 that is, did mean that there were some people that didn’t want to talk to you anyway – like say the National Socialist Party.

    Although she’d lost a lot of her wealth, she had managed to hold onto a villa in Berlin, a sports car and two horses. Not bad in these financially distressed times.

    It was worth hearing her thoughts on what was happening in Germany and where the country was headed to – and she knew because she has access to having a chat to US Consul-General George Messersmith. He’d arrived in Berlin two years ago and was keeping a close eye on the Nazis in particular.

    Tag words: Bella Fromm; American Consul-General George Messersmith; Völkischer Beobachter; Nazi Party; Joseph Goebbels; Magda Goebbels; Professor Walter Stoeckel; Adolf Hitler; Franz von Papen; Kurt von Schleicher; President Hindenberg; Vossische Zeitung; Gregor Strasser; Karl von Wiegand; Henkell;

    19 min
  • DZ Season 002 Part 02. How Hitler Almost Missed the Bus. 8 December 1932 - Hitler’s Rise.
    Today is Thursday 8 December 1932. History tells us something that seemed impossible on that date was soon going to happen. That was that in just under two months, Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi Party, would be the Chancellor of Germany and in under 13 years after that, 60 million people who were alive then, or were born during those next 13 years, would be dead. Countless millions of other people would have their lives shattered beyond anything that was imaginable.
    In this programme I’m taking a close look at what happened in those few days that were destined to send the world to a new kind of hell. What was impossible on that Thursday, 8 December 193, on Monday 30 January 1933 would become the new reality as Hitler was handed the keys to the gates of hell.
    Hitler was the supreme gambler, it was the reason he came to power and it was the reason that he almost dragged the entire world to hell with him. In July he’d refused to accept the office of Vice-Chancellor that had been offered to him. He would only agree to being the Chancellor. That didn’t happen. One of Hitler’s most important lieutenants, Gregor Strasser, then resigned from the Nazi Party. Many of the top political people and political commentators in Germany saw this as the end of the Nazi Party. A sane betting man would have to have agreed with them.
    Tag words: Gregor Strasser; Adolf Hitler; Nazi Party; Goebbels; Kaiserhof Hotel; Reichschancellory; Himmler; Tägliche Rundschau; Kurt von Schleicher; Reichstag; Hindenberg; Otto Meissner; Frederic Sackett; Franz von Papen; Mein Kampf ; Woody Allen; Third Reich; Herman Göring; Emperor Nero; Kurt Freiherr von Schröder; SA; Nazi storm troopers; Keppler
    Circle;
    19 min
  • DZ Season 002 Part 01. How Hitler Almost Missed the Bus. Germany Undefeated in World War I.
    Germany after World War I found itself a Republic and a democracy. Neither of which its people wanted. This was all new and all came out of what happened at the end of the First World War and was forced on the Germans by the victorious allies. If you were a German back in those critical days, the first thing the returning German soldiers from the trenches did was to be paraded through the streets of Berlin, as if in a victory parade. The mayor made a public speech telling them that they were returning undefeated. Today we’re used to lies from our leaders and activist groups but perhaps they weren’t so used to them back in 1919. Some people will tell you that no harm can come from that sort of lie that helps, unjustifiably, to build up your self-esteem. Don’t believe them. Did Germany need a new leader with vision to take it to its true destiny?
    Tag words: German Workers Party; Nazi Party; Hitler; Weimar Republic; Paul von Hindenberg; Heinrich Brüning; Kurt von Schleicher; Franz von Papen; Villeroy & Boch; Joachim von Ribbentrop; Annelise Henkell; Gregor Strasser; Ernst Röhm;
    24 min
  • DZ Season 001 Part 12. World Safe for Communism Yalta American Hostages. Final Part
    During the war, especially in the first four years from 1939-1941, Germany took many prisoners of war. A continuing stream of prisoners of war were always falling from the skies over occupied Europe –British and American airmen. Australians and other nationalities too. The majority of the prisoners were housed in Germany’s eastern territories, mainly Poland or eastern Germany.
    In late 1944-1945 the war was rushing towards its climactic end. British historian Richard J. Evans believed that Hitler, since he could no longer win, wanted, a Wagnerian end for himself, one that was fit for the gods of the Vikings. In the last days leaving Berlin was unthinkable for him. The Nazi capital, Berlin, that had always rejected Hitler and the Nazis in all of the elections, would be finally immolated with Hitler in his glorious ending. How ironic.
    At this stage of the war, the allied prisoners of war had two things to fear. Being butchered by their defeated German guards, or falling into the hands of the approaching Russians and being sent to join the other millions of slaves, including many Russians, in the gulags.
    This programme is the story of the elite American fliers at Stalag Luft I and the incredible story of how they managed to escape from both perils.
    And to finish off, a final shocking story of betrayal by Roosevelt and Churchill to Stalin after the war had ended, one that they had agreed to at Yalta.
    Tag words: Stalag Luft I; Hubert “Hub” Zemke; Lt. Colonel Charles “Ross” Greening; Lowell Bennett; Oberst von Warnstadt; General Andrey Andrevich Vlasov; Stalin; Molotov; Anthony Eden; Churchill; Cossacks; General Helmuth von Pannwitz;
    17 min
  • DZ Season 001 Part 11. World Safe for Communism Yalta Far East
    From the time Hitler invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 until the defeat of Japan, World War II, or The Great Patriotic War, as the Russians like to call it, had been an absolute bonanza for Stalin. Sure tens of millions of Russians had died, been shockingly wounded, been psychologically damaged, but for Stalin that was all a cost of doing business – building an enormous empire in just 6 short years.
    Stalin’s view of the horrors of World War II is captured in the comment he made during the Korean War. Things had stabilised at the 38th Parallel. But it suited Stalin to keep the war going. But the Koreans and the Chinese were losing a lot of men in the ongoing fighting. They begged Stalin to end the war. Stalin replied that there was no reason why the North Koreans and Chinese should not continue fighting. He replied:
    “they lose nothing except for their men.”
    Many of the soldiers fighting heroically for their Russian motherland suffered the loss of all four limbs – both legs and both arms. Those men were, quite frankly, rather unsightly and quite bad for morale. Stalin had them sent to towns above the Arctic Circle so no-on would have to look at them. The Russians called them samovars – like the Russian teapots that stand on four tiny stumps of legs.
    The Americans and the British, well especially the Americans, had made sure that Russia awash with their military and civilian equipment. Whole factories were even shipped to Russia by the Americans and assembled there. No American secrets were kept from them, except for the atomic bomb, and they easily got that, what with so many spies and fellow travellers in the US, including at the White House.
    Russia started the war as just being Russia but when it was over it had all of Central Europe, a lot of territory that the Japanese had owned, and it oversaw Mao Zedong taking over mainland China.
    At Tehran Roosevelt and Churchill had given Stalin everything he wanted, or hadn’t been strong enough to oppose him and to say no.
    Now, at Yalta, Roosevelt again raised his desire to have the Russians help to beat the Japanese, the empire of the Rising Sun, and end the war. A request he had made previously at Tehran, but now he needed to get it firmed up. That is what this programme’s all about.
    Tag words: Stalin; Tehran Conference; Roosevelt; Churchill; Sakhalin Islands; Kurile Islands; Yalta Conference; Admiral Ellis Zacharias; General Marshall; Chiang Kai-shek; ALSIB; Guandong Army; Alger Hiss; Harry Hopkins; Oleg Smirnov; Marhsall Vasilevsky; President Truman; 38th parallel; Hamilton Fish III;
    21 min
  • DZ Season 001 Part 10. World Safe for Communism Yalta - the World is Raped
    It’s a fact of life that your bargaining power is at its weakest when you’re at your weakest. As I’ve discussed before this, paradoxically, didn’t apply to Stalin in World War II. Stalin could as easily have swapped sides, again. He had already been aligned to Hitler, during World War II. He could have joined with Hitler again if the right deal was offered. For the English, who should have done a deal with Hitler in May of 1940 after the fall of France, that was out of the question. To do that would have been morally wrong.
    For Stalin, even with tens of millions of his fellow citizens killed by the Germans and vast amounts of his cities, their factories and infrastructure destroyed, that wouldn’t have mattered. If Hitler ever had an offer that he was willing to put to Stalin, that was better than what the Americans and British had on offer, he would have changed sides at the drop of a hat. Mind you Hitler, although in 1942 he had toyed with making a deal then rejected it – preferring to fight to the death.
    So during World War II, when Russia was weak and on the backfoot, and that was the case pretty much from June 1941, when Hitler invaded, until at least mid-1943 to the end of 1943, the Americans and the British, in theory, should have had the better bargaining hand. But their relations with Stalin never worked out like that.
    By February 1945, when the Yalta meeting took place between America, Great Britain and Russia, Russia was then clearly the strongest military power in the world on the basis of raw coal face power.
    At the time of the Yalta Conferencein February 1945, America especially, but also England to some extent, had just been beaten up by the German attack known as the Battle of the Bulge. That attack most likely happened with them, and not Russia as the target, largely as a result of the Germans finding out about the Morgenthau Plan that Russian agents, at the highest level in the Roosevelt administration, had prompted the Americans and the British to adopt. If implemented it would have reduced Germany to a farm.
    That offensive had removed vast amounts of tanks and troops from the Eastern Front facing Russia – against the wishes of General Heinz Guderian. It had allowed the Russian offensives in late 1944 and the beginning of 1945 to gain real ground against minimal opposition.
    The Russians had launched their offensive on 12 January 1945 about the time that the Allies had finally halted Hitler’s Ardennes offensive, were starting to recover from the punishing blows they had suffered and were then pushing back to the lines they had held in mid-December.
    Our friend Rokossovsky, who had had a box seat for the Warsaw Uprising, which destroyed the Polish resistance, now smashed his way into central and northern Poland and East Prussia. His Second Belorrussian Army Group came to a halt on the Oder River just 65 kilometres from Berlin.
    On 17 January 1945 the Red Army had marched into the ruined capital of Warsaw. At the start of the war, Warsaw had had a population of 1.3million. By the time the Red Army entered the city in 1944 its population was reduced to just 130,000. If you want to get a good visual on what Warsaw looked like at this time watch the last scenes in the 2002 movie The Pianist.
    Romania had been overrun in late 1944, and so had Hungary.
    So what would Stalin want now that he was the strongest of the three Allies?
    Tag words: Churchill; Prince Michael Vorontsov; Roosevelt; Livadia Palace; Tsar; Stalin; Gromyko; Uncle Joe; Rokossovsky; Stanislaw Mikolajczyk; Zygmunt
    Berling; Lublin government; United Nations; Red Army; Ilya Ehrenberg; The Brothers Karamazov; Dostoevsky; Vasily Grossman; The Great Patriotic War; Red Star newspaper; Panzer General Heinz Guderian; Lavrenty Beria; Kathleen Harriman; Averill Harriman; Charles Bohlen;
    24 min
  • DZ Season 001 Part 09. World Safe for Communism Yalta
    On 3 September, 1939, England and France, and as a consequence, the dominions of the Empire, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, found themselves at war. The declaration of war followed the German invasion of Poland. The war was to preserve the independence of Poland as a free nation. Freed from the yoke of a tyrannous regime.
    60 million lives lost later, including in the Pacific, the last meeting of the wartime leaders, before the fall of Nazi Germany, and before Hitler took his own life, took place at Yalta in the Crimea between 4 and 11 February 1945.
    The world leaders present at that meeting, were Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of England, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, (a man so sick that he would be dead just 10 weeks later) and Stalin, the Vozd, the leader of the Soviet Union.
    On 6 February, 1945 the leaders discussed the future of Poland. With most of Poland overrun, and with 10 million Russian soldiers occupying most of eastern Europe, including parts of Germany, the Allies had no choice other than to let Stalin set up a puppet regime in Poland which became a slave state to the Soviet Union.
    It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the original reason for going to war had, by that agreement, completely failed.
    I’m going to look at what happened that winter on the Black Sea in Crimea. If nothing else, Stalin gave some of his best quips over those few days.
    Tag words: Big Three; President Roosevelt; Edward Stettinius; Churchill; Stalin; Lord Moran; Yalta; Riviera of Hades; Tolstoy Conference; Stanislaw Mikolajczyk; Wladyslaw Sikorski; Polish Home Army; AK; Polish Committee of National Liberation; Boleslaw Bierut; Warsaw Ghetto uprising ; General Rokossovsky; Heinrich Himmler; George Kennan; Tito;
    24 min
  • DZ Season 001 Part 08. World Safe for Communism Morgenthau Plan - How They Persuaded Churchill.
    Henry Morgenthau, Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury, steered by the Communist agent, Harry Dexter White, had done as much as anyone to bring about the war in the Pacific. Now he was manoeuvring to have Germany dismembered mainly for the benefit of his boss, Joseph Stalin. He also was hoping to bring about the deaths of 30 million Germans by starvation, and the mass shootings, without trial or any other legal process, of upwards of 100,000 German officers. Well, on the bright side they wouldn’t starve.
    Tag words: Henry Morgenthau; Harry Dexter White; Joseph Stalin; Harry Hopkins; Roosevelt; Cordell Hull; Churchill; USSR; Anthony Eden; Morgenthau Plan; Lieutenant Colonel Marshall Knappen; NKVD; Andrei Gromyko; Nathan Silvermaster;
    20 min
  • DZ Season 001 Part 07. World Safe for Communism Morgenthau Plan
    In Sean McMeekin’s book, “Stalin’s War”, with the benefit of extensive access to what had been the secret, and closed to Western eyes, records of the USSR, until after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, we are given a breathtaking view into how Communist spies in Washington, with the willing, if uninformed enthusiastic support of President Roosevelt, had successively led America to vast and unlimited supplies of American manufactured war and civilian materials, foodstuffs and fuels, oils and lubricants, without which Russia could not have survived the Nazi onslaught, and the provision of vast amounts of intellectual property that set up the Soviet Union for decades to come in what would turn into the Cold War.
    After the successful landings on D-Day, and then the breakout of the American, British and Canadian forces in August 1944, winning the war was now just a matter of time. So thoughts had to turn to what was going to happen when the war was over. Particularly, what was going go happen to Germany.
    The Treasury, under Henry Morgenthau, a Jew, I’m not being anti-semitic and shortly you’ll see why, and one of the most influential people in the Treasury, advising Morgenthau, was one of the top Communist assets in Washington, was Harry Dexter White, and they were going to play a big part on American thinking on what should happen to Germany after the war. Harry’s thoughts, surprise, surprise, fitted in with what would help Communist Russia.
    From a previous programme, if you were listening, and for those who weren’t Harry Dexter White was the man who almost single handedly caused the Americans to provoke the Japanese into attacking them.
    Now Sean McMeekin, described how the almost totally Soviet controlled Roosevelt government looked at the question of post-war Germany. He says this:
    “…. a long-running policy discussion in the Treasury on how to administer the German economy after the war morphed into an open-ended revenge fantasy.”
    Tag words: Henry Morgenthau; Harry Dexter White; Franklin Delano Roosevelt; FDR; Stalin; Tehran Conference; The Brothers Karamazov; Leo Tolstoy; The Vozhd; Handbook for Military Government in Germany; Anthony Eden; Frank Coe, Solomon Adler; David Irving; Philip Mosely; Francis Penrose; Henry Stimson;
    24 min
  • DZ Season 001 Part 06. World Safe for Communism Stalin Makes Japan Attack Pearl Harbour
    After the Second World War, between 1947 and 1957 there was a scare, in America and other countries that had only just recently been allies of Communist Russia against Nazi Germany. These included England, Australia, Canada. The scare was that their countries were infiltrated with Communist agents everywhere. As the old Garfield joke goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t meant they’re not out to get you.
    The scare had more substance that people ever knew. It's not the number of Communists working in your country to betray your country that mattered, it was what power they had, what positions they held and what access to vital, top secret information they had.
    The Democratic regime that was ushered in with the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, swept into office with it’s supporters, many significant people who were either Communist spies, or fellow travellers. People sympathetic to Communism. They were the people who Lenin called useful idiots. So the problem of having your top secrets, including vital intellectual property, handed over to the Communists didn’t begin in 1947, it began in 1933 when Franklin Roosevelt was sworn into office.
    The man who was destined to play a major role in dragging America into a war with Japan, to advance Joseph Stalin’s goals, was a man with the very traditional and American sounding name of Harry Dexter White. He was not then and never was a member of the United States Communist Party, but he was a spy working and reporting variously to members of the United States Communist Party and later Stalin’s secret service agents, in the GRU, located in the United States, mostly thanks to Roosevelt giving diplomatic recognition to Russia against his experts’ advice.
    What motivated Harry to betray his country isn’t known but he had more than almost anyone else to do with the air force of the Imperial Japanese Navy arriving over Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941 to attack his own country. In this programme I’m going to look at how America and Japan were tricked by Stalin into going to war with each other. This programme isn’t the end of what Harry got up to – but that’s for another programme in this series.
    Tag words: Henry Morgenthau; Harry Dexter White; GRU; Stalin; Hitler; Iskhak Akhmerov; Bill Grienke; NKVD; Vitaly; Old Ebbitt Grill; Hideki
    Tojo; Saburo Kurusu; Roosevelt; Cordell Hull; Emperor Hirohito;
    20 min

About The Danger Zone (DZ)

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Paul conducts the guided tour at the Australian Armour and Artillery Museum, Cairns every Saturday at 10:30 am. Paul’s tour’s like what Carlsberg says about their beer, probably the best tour of an…