The Danger Zone (DZ)

I’m guessing a lot of you have heard of the DuPont company. They make all sorts of paints, amongst other things. A lot of you people have probably had your house painted using DuPont paint. In the early 1940s, DuPont had this new paint that they were working on. They were using an additive made from a by-product of oil, waste called divinylacetylene. They mixed it with a pigment which made the pai...

I’ve done a programme before based on a book by Ben MacIntyre called “The Spy and the Traitor” – a true story about the most important spy who defected to the West from the Soviet Union. He leaked information to the West that probably averted an all-out nuclear war. Ben has also written a number of other true life books about spies and spying, in World War II and in the Cold War. So I was interest...

In November 1940 during the dark days of World War II, when it looked like Hitler had won the war, Australia, which didn’t even have a car industry, decided to design and build a tank. It turned out to be one of the best tanks in the world at that time. This incredible, success, story is told for the first time, in detail, in a book written by Cairns’ own, Jason Belgrave, assistant manager at the...

In November 1940 during the dark days of World War II when it looked like Hitler had won the war, Australia, which didn’t even have a car industry, decided to design and build a tank. It turned out to be one of the best tanks in the world at that time. This incredible, successful, story is told for the first time in detail in a book written by Cairns’ own, Jason Belgrave at the Australian Armour a...

In April 2016, the Australian government entered into a very weird contract with the French company, DCNS to convert DCNS’s nuclear powered submarine model into diesel powered submarines for the Royal Australian Navy. DCNS had to know that even if they were able to get a submarine that had been designed as a nuclear powered submarine into a working diesel powered submarine the results would most l...

There’s nothing worse than a bad neighbour. Your life can go completely down the toilet. Sometimes moving away is an option – and that’s an option often worth taking. But sometimes you don’t even have that choice. For example, if you’re Finland or the Ukraine, and your neighbour is Russia. Or you’re Tibet, or Vietnam, or India, and your neighbour is China.  Today’s programme is about a tiny countr...

Taika Waititi claimed to have made Oscar history as the first indigenous New Zealander, Maori, to win an Oscar. Well it turns out that he’s half indigenous. His mother is Jewish. Sometimes he uses her surname as a professional name – Cohen. Shopping for the best ethnicity has become an important part of our world today. Ironically this isn’t so different to the issues discussed in his Oscar winnin...

One of the ritziest hotels in New York before and during World War 2, was the Hotel Pierre. It was a real life Café Americain from Casablanca. Filled with doubtful and flashy characters with Nazi-Fascist-Vichy backgrounds and connections. The hotel had been bought by John Paul Getty after a waiter had been rude to him when he was a guest. Getty bought the hotel so he could sack him. When Getty bou...

This company designed the most produced fighter aircraft of World War II for the Nazis. The first operational jet fighter – faster and more heavily armed than any Allied fighter. Became part of the first modern European consortium to design jet passenger aircraft and many other types, is a serious challenge to Boeing’s monopoly. Made the first commercially viable digital fly-by-wire aircraft and t...

What have Krispy Kreme Donuts, Prêt-à-Manger, Kylie Jenner Cosmetics, Coty Cosmetics, Calvin Klein Cosmetics, Dr Pepper, Jacobs Dowe Egberts (Moccona Coffee for instance) and Durex Condoms got in common? The Nazi Party and the holocaust. Don’t believe me? Then you’d better stay tuned in. And by the way – there are lots of songs with the words “Krispy Kreme” in the lyrics. Tag words: Nazi Party; Ad...

Ferdinand Porsche – the man behind the amazing iconic German brand who brought new standards of excellence to racing and sports cars, invented and manufactured the world’s first hybrid car in 1898 as well as designing an all electric car. He designed the first Volkswagen beetle or Adolf Hitler. Designed the legendary World War II German Tiger tank, as well as the world’s heaviest tank ever, the 20...

In 1945 it looked like Nazi Germany had lost the war, but there was a huge BUT - the new Škoda flying saucer looked unbeatable and light years ahead of anything the Allies could put into the skies against it. It could fly at 2900 kph. The fastest Allied plane could only fly at less than half that speed. It could stop in mid-flight and hover. It could fly in any direction from wherever it was. It w...

Toward the end of his life Henry Ford was talking to a young kid by the name of John Dahlinger (more about him later in the programme). Henry was telling the kid how great his education had been when he was a boy, in a single-room schoolhouse. The kid listened to this stuff and then said “But sir, these are different times, this is the modern age and …” Henry cut him off before he could finish. “Y...

His eyes burnt into hers. “There's a very fine line between pleasure and pain. They are two sides of the same coin, one not existing without the other.” Said Christian Grey to Anastacia Steele in “Fifty Shades of Grey”. It was a sentiment that the owners of the publisher, Random House, came to understand during World War 2 when they were working with the Nazis. Tag words: Gütersloh; Westphalia...

The Adidas story is the story of an amazing man by the name of Adolf (Adi) Dassler – a man who revolutionised sports from World War I, through Nazi Germany and into the post-war world. He was the Michaelangelo of sports shoes. His equally amazing wife, Käthe, in an incredible story, saved the Adidas factory at the end of World War II from being flattened by the Allies, then Adi and Käthe transform...

This programme’s about a piano salesman who on the one hand helped the greatest armed forces on earth to a righteous victory and on the other hand helped the commission of one of the most vile crimes against humanity in history. So the lesson is, think twice before you invite a piano salesman into your house – you could be biting off more than you can chew. This piano salesman was born in 1874 whe...

The President of General Motors export arm, James Mooney , stood in his hotel room practising his Nazi salute in front of the mirror. Should his sieg heil show enthusiasm or maybe solemn obedience? Too late for any more practice, it was the afternoon of 1 May 1934. Time to meet Hitler - as his special guest at the giant May Day Parade. General Motors World, the General Motor Corporation’s company...

“America never contributed anything to the world but chewing gum and Coca-Cola” said Otto Dietrich, the Nazi Press Chief and head of propaganda in 1942. But then all of the Nazis fantasies came true with a new amazing drink developed by the Coca Cola company in Nazi Germany called Fanta – it didn’t win the war for them but it made losing a lot easier. Tag Words: General John Clifford Pemberton; Ul...

The last time I told you the story of 19 year old Sergeant Daniel Culler. His B-17 bomber, “Hell’s Kitchen”, had just forced landed in Switzerland. He planned to set the plane on fire by pumping out its fuel and then firing a flare into it to stop it falling into German hands. The rumour going around on the American air bases was that the Swiss were swapping American and British planes that fell i...

In the great 1949 movie, “The Third Man”, set in the immediate post war rubble of the then once great city of Vienna but now reduced to rubble from bombing and combat during World War II, Orson Welles, playing the lead character, Harry Lime, talking to the newspaper man and his friend from the past, Holly Martines, played by Joseph Cotton, gives the briefest and most brutal put down of a country t...

One benefit of being persecuted over a long period of time, since 1572, and not giving up the fight, is that it’s not as easy to be intimidated as people who have always lived a quiet life. The reason these people had been persecuted for so long was because of their religious beliefs. They were Protestant followers of John Calvin in Catholic France. Their beliefs set the framework within which the...

Miss Dior – such a popular and well loved perfume. The very essence of femininity – or is it? Perhaps it’s the very essence of the free spirit too, the free scent of France – maybe even of the world. And what did Dior have to do with melting clocks? But in 1940 France was humming to a different tune. The sounds of German footsteps on the pavements. Shopping in the stores for that legendary French...

In this Danger Zone programme I’m going to tell you about the Spanish fashion designer who met 6 enormous thugs sent to his Paris studios by Adolf Hitler. Hitler wanted Berlin to become the fashion capital of the world. He wanted this designer to relocate there from Paris. Balenciaga sent them packing saying to them “tell your boss you might just as well take all the bulls to Berlin and try and tr...

He was like Dick Whittington. In 1835 a young boy of 14 set off walking to Paris looking for a job and to learn a trade. Today his company, Louis Vuitton, is a $42 billion dollar a year brand in a conglomerate with Moët and Hennessey. But what of its past that it doesn’t want to talk about. A past during the dark days when France was occupied by the Nazis. Follow me back to the time when Adolf Hit...

Audrey Hepburn. Princess Diana. Kate Moss. What famous woman style icon isn’t known for her little black dress. For Hepburn, it was her Hubert de Givenchy in 1961, for Princess Diana it was Christina Stambolia in 1994, also known as “The Revenge Dress,” and Kate Moss is always wearing a show-stopping LBDs. So, where’s its power come from? The LBD possesses what so many women want to achieve with t...