The Danger Zone (DZ)

People have wandered the earth over many many centuries predicting the end of the world – the climate alarmists continue this ancient tradition. So far no one has gotten that right – not even close. But something remarkable, although not as remarkable as the end of the world, happened in 1948. In that year a country of 9.6 million square kilometres ceased to exist. What replaced it is something ve...

It’s 30 January 1933 and we’re in Berlin. Well I can’t believe what I’ve been seeing happen. It’s beginning to look a lot like Adolf Hitler is going to become the new Chancellor of Germany. Incredible! If Hitler isn’t made the Chancellor today, and soon, the rumour is that the Army’s going to stage a coup – and that’s for sure and certain. Then they’ll put von Schleicher back in charge. Everyone a...

Thank God it’s Sunday. The shabat, the sabbath, but of course it’s Sunday 29thJanuary 1933, so not the Jewish sabbath but the Christian one. And the less I say about anything Jewish in a nice way the better. Anti-Semitism is pretty much a thing today. The cold bite that has been freezing Germany for a few days now still isn’t really let up. Grey, overcast day. I don’t think it’s going to get any b...

It’s Friday 27 January 1933. The weekend is coming. Everyone knows that Chancellor Schleicher is going to be kicked out but who is going to take his place. No-one in the know, knows. André François-Poncet, the French ambassador, who always knows what is happening on the political scene in Berlin – doesn’t know. He’s heard rumours that Schleicher, the Chancellor, will soon be going. He’s sent that...

Hi, today’s Thursday 26 January 1933 and here’s the weather report. A powerful anti-cyclone has settled over Europe, driving cold air from the Baltic and northern Russia towards Germany. The nights will be clear and icy. In East Prussia and Pomerania the temperatures are going to plummet to -28 degrees. The Rhine River is freezing over and drifts of ice are making for difficult and dangerous condi...

It’s still Thursday 19 January 1933. Chancellor Schleicher has an entirely unexpected visitor. It’s Ernst Torgler, the head of the parliamentary Communist Party. An unlikely visitor to the conservative, army officer, Chancellor. The’s here because the Nazi brownshirts are going to march outside the Communist Party’s headquarters in Berlin – Karl Liebknecht House – on Sunday 22 January 1933. The Na...

Do you think football will ever turn professional? Today is Thursday 12th January 1933 and the news is that Italian football club AS Roma has just signed the Argentinian striker and World Cup veteran Alejandro Scopelli after paying a transfer fee of a whopping 80,000 marks to his former club, Estudiantes de La Plata. The Germans didn’t want to go down this route. In 1930 they‘d banned fourteen foo...

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...

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...

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...

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 th...

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 yea...

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...

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...

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...

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 unl...

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...

One of history’s most significant speeches was delivered to a joint meeting of both houses of Congress on 8 December 1941, by the United States President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In his speech he focussed on the surprise attack that had been launched on the United States naval base at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii by aircraft launched from 3 squadrons, 6 aircraft carriers, of the Empire of Japan foll...

The two most evil empires in Europe, by mid-1941, Stalin’s Russia and Nazi Germany, had divied up between themselves all the spoils. They had been able to share out Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, parts of Finland, and Russia had grabbed parts of Hungary. Germany, without any help from Russia, had grabbed Denmark, Norway, France, Holland, Belgium, Yugoslavia and Greece. And now all that was le...

In 1941 was Russia planning to engage in a war with Germany, to defeat Hitler’s Third Reich, and then take over his empire in Western Europe. This programme is going to explore that question and what the evidence shows. The most important evidence that has to be closely examined are the records in the Russian archives that were opened up some years after the fall of the Soviet Union. You will be s...

Hamilton Fish III was a congressman from western New York. His grandfather had been a secretary of state. On a nationally syndicated radio broadcast he thundered: “Opposed though I am to Nazism, I am certain that American mothers will not willingly sacrifice their sons to make the world safe for Communism. It is "preposterous to think of America being aligned with Joe Stalin as our pal and comrade...

From the distance of the years, from all that you see and hear about a man who has grown into something of a legend, the 32nd President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR was one of the great presidents. He was one of the Big Three leaders of World War II, along with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. It’s not easy to get a view out of the ordinary view that we always hear abou...