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Nazis in New Zealand
26 Plays4 years ago
Josh and M investigate claims that the Nazis had infiltrated Rotorua, Aotearoa New Zealand, during the Second World War...
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
You can learn more about M’s academic work at: http://mrxdentith.com
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Transcript
American Democracy at Risk
00:00:00
Speaker
Well, that's that, isn't it? The great American experiment with democracy is over. Long live the autocracy.
Alternate Reality: Andy Bishago as President
00:00:06
Speaker
Do you think people complained about us pretending to live in a world where Andy Bishago became president instead? Canonically, we never pretended that. Technically, those episodes were from another reality.
00:00:19
Speaker
Holy crap, I'm glad we got out of there. Yeah, I wasn't sure that was even going to work. What are you two doing here? Didn't your universe explode or something? No, that was the other... other...
00:00:31
Speaker
other Andi-Bashiago universe. Yes, there was this crisis event on the infinite Bishago Earths. Anyway, it's all fixed now, and the Andi-Bishago reality is back, baby. It's just that it's not back in a good way.
Mars Conflict and Chaos on Earth
00:00:45
Speaker
What happened? And the only way to accidentally start a war on Mars? Yeah, it turns out those policy platforms for dealing with our extraterrestrial neighbours don't overturn the fact Andi was part of an expeditionary force on the Red Planet. Some of the Martian hierarchy is still pissed at him for the land grabbing.
00:01:00
Speaker
So when he accidentally ate their ambassador, well, now three-legged war machines are striding the Earth, causing all sorts of bother. So we thought we'd pop over here for the duration. So, uh, what's been happening here? No war with Mars, I hope.
Trump's Acquittal: Abuse of Power?
00:01:16
Speaker
No, the Red Planet just sort of sits there, being Martian. Though in recent news, Donald Trump just got acquitted on abuse of power and obstruction of congress churches.
00:01:25
Speaker
What? Donald Trump is the world president here? No. Oh, thank the non-existent gods. That would be a disaster. No, he's just the president of the United States. And a very naughty boy who no one wants to upset. Donald Trump is the president of the US. Yes. Donald J. Trump is president of the US. Indeed, eh? Oh, don't know about you, but I think Martian war machines seem just about dandy. Total pep.
00:01:52
Speaker
Do you think we should go and join them?
Waitangi Day and New Zealand's Colonial History
00:02:15
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy on this, the 6th of February 2020, which makes it Waitangi Day! It does indeed, a day where we celebrate the wonderful fix of colonisation in Aotearoa, New Zealand. As you can tell by the excitement in my voice, I'm very excited about colonialism. Yeah, it's always a bit of contention around Waitangi Day, but we do get a day off, so that's nice.
00:02:43
Speaker
Yes, it's nice that we get a day off to celebrate land grabbing. Yes, no, I think possibly the colonial history of New Zealand is, I mean, there is a bit of conspiracising going on there, isn't there? I know there are letters from Britain to the New Zealand authorities basically saying, dude, what are you doing?
00:03:04
Speaker
oh yes yes Westminster wasn't particularly impressed by the government here at the time although that being said they did aid in a bit that government nonetheless because the British people must look after other people being British even with them being British abroad and let's not get into what the state of Britain at the moment but anyway no no that's a uh it's a Brexit story of its own tragic conclusion
00:03:32
Speaker
Anyway, but we're not going to talk about any of that today. We are going to stay here in the land of the long white cloud. But we're going to the past. We're going back. Back to the heady days of the 1940s. Where apparently there was a war on of some kind.
00:03:49
Speaker
People were very concerned about a particular group of people who, once upon a time, everyone agreed was the enemy. And now we seem to be having a debate as to whether they're really all that bad. Yes, we're talking about the Nazis, former villains now being rehabilitated. Yes, I don't know. But anyway.
00:04:10
Speaker
So we don't have anything to go at the top of the episode here. No, particularly. We have no excuse for not piling straight into the main episode. Talking about Nazis in New Zealand. Yes, let's talk about the Nazis. OK, Joshua, you're a big fan of the Nazis. I love them to pieces.
00:04:34
Speaker
That's not true in any way. Chuck the disclaimer on there in this day and age. I do not think Nazis are good. I think they are quite vague. In the video version there should be a big flashing, this is not true. This is not true. Sarcasm tags. So yes, we're not fans of Nazis or Nazism. It turned out I only discovered this recently. So I've got German ancestry. My
00:04:56
Speaker
great grandfather actually fled Germany at the beginning of the last century and had no contact with his family back home at all. So mum was the first member of the family to actually make contact with our German relatives and she discovered that her
00:05:15
Speaker
uncle, so what would have been my great grandfather's nephew, was interred in a prison camp during World War II for writing salacious articles about the Nazis that the Nazis did not like. Salacious or seditious?
00:05:29
Speaker
Or both. Because they were salacious, they were by definition, seditious. You can write seditious articles without being salacious. No, that's true. That's very true. Anyway, so what we want to talk about is an interesting illustration. I only found out about it a few weeks ago, I guess. But apparently, as we'll see, there were articles written about it a couple of years ago for some reason. I don't know what
00:05:58
Speaker
what what resurrected the interest there but then there was a tv show almost a decade ago now basically a decade ago based on a book written more than a decade ago so it is something people have talked about but i'm i would it's the sort of thing that i think everybody would know because it's just such an interesting story and yet you didn't know i didn't know i knew your story well done but i just kind of assumed that we had mentioned some brief at some point
00:06:22
Speaker
I'm not quite sure why it was never an episode topic before now, but I knew of the story.
Sidney Ross: Nazi Infiltration or Hoax?
00:06:27
Speaker
And now we're doing the story. This is the story of Sydney Gordon Ross, infiltrator of Nazis in this country and someone who lied about the infiltration of Nazis in this country. It's quite a tangled web that we are about to unwave. Indeed.
00:06:44
Speaker
So, Sidney Gordon Ross, he was a career criminal, had numerous convictions during the 1930s for things like theft burglary, receiving stolen property and false pretenses. Which I'm assuming means that he was pretending to be someone of a much higher stature than a common criminal of that particular time.
00:07:04
Speaker
but he was something of a con artist. And so in 1939, his latest conviction for breaking and entering in theft got him a three-year, nine-month stretch in Waikariya Prison, which is near Teawamutu. He was released on the 28th of March 1942. On the 29th of March 1942, he contacted the New Zealand government.
00:07:30
Speaker
Not the police. Not the secret service. He contacted the New Zealand government with a rather intriguing tale about things he had learnt whilst in Choke. While he was in prison, he apparently formed quite a strong friendship with a man called Charles Remers.
00:07:47
Speaker
who was also something of a con artist as well. This is not really relevant to the story but in reading up I see that he had been convicted and imprisoned for false pretenses and forgery after impersonating a clergyman in an ill-fated second-hand motor vehicle business in Wellington. Now there's a story behind that and I'd like to know it. But we have to assume that
00:08:08
Speaker
He was buying a second-hand vehicle from a business as opposed to playing a clergyman who was also running a second-hand business on the side. Maybe that was his pitch for a sitcom. I mean, it's a great sitcom. By day, he sells cars. By night, he blesses the Eucharist. He's the second-hand sole dealer. Anyway.
00:08:30
Speaker
Interesting, but not relevant. But apparently the relevant part is that as fellow con artists, Remus and Ross cooked up this hoax that they decided to take to the government. Remus, from the sounds of things, was more the ideas man. But he was a couple of decades older than Ross. He was getting on a bit and was quite unwell. He would be dead of leukemia in much more than a year. Oh, sorry. Ross is the one who gets tuberculosis. Ross gets TB eventually. That's we're jumping ahead.
00:08:59
Speaker
No, so the day after his release Ross contacts Robert Semple, who was the Minister of National Service, and tells him that while he was in prison he was contacted by a cell of Nazi spies hoping to recruit him. Supposedly he had some experience with explosives, I don't know if it was actually like cracking safes or whatever, but supposedly... It was a theft conviction, yes, it probably was safe cracking tech. So supposedly he knew his way around explosives and they were hoping that they could recruit him.
00:09:29
Speaker
Now Ross is quite clever in that when he approaches the minister, he doesn't approach the minister as a squeaky clean member of the public. He admits, I've been in prison recently, I did X and Y, that was why of course the Nazi spies actually got in contact with me because they thought, you know,
00:09:50
Speaker
you won't like the state and you won't be patriotic because of what they've done to you and you've got the requisite skills that we require for our A team of Nazis to infiltrate the country. So he mixes his lie with a whole bunch of truths about himself to make his lie seem plausible. How do you know about the Nazis? Because they're in the prison system. Why would they approach him? Well, because I'm a bit of a bad egg. So, yes, I mean, he spins the story that
00:10:19
Speaker
You know, yes, I'm a criminal, I have this past, but I may be a criminal, but I'm not going to betray my country and so on and so on. And of course, also, this lets them say, why didn't you go to the police? Well, the police know me. You know, I'm known to the police. They know I'm a career criminal. They're not going to believe a word I say. So that's why I came straight to you. That's also why you probably shouldn't go and ask the police because they'll just say, oh, that's Sidney Ross. Don't believe a word he says because he's a career criminal.
00:10:44
Speaker
So what did Semple do next? Well, Semple at least took him a little bit seriously, took him to meet the Prime Minister of New Zealand at the time, Mr Peter Fraser. And at that point, Sidney Ross experienced the greatest stroke of luck that I think any con man has ever experienced in the history of con men.
00:11:04
Speaker
Yes, because you see, on the day that Ross meets with Fraser, Fraser has just learned about infiltration of gangs by foreign powers over in Australia.
00:11:19
Speaker
which has not been made public knowledge. So Ross basically has his light the exact point in time where the PM is going, oh I've heard a similar story going on in Australia that hasn't made the papers. If Ross had approached the PM beforehand there is a possibility, although we won't even know, that Fraser would have gone, that's ridiculous, don't be stupid,
00:11:44
Speaker
And if he'd approached the Prime Minister a few days later, when this news became common knowledge, he'd go, well, you have described yourself as a con man, and now there's a newspaper article that could have been read in the paper. It seems like you're trying to take advantage of me.
00:12:00
Speaker
I'm not that stupid. But at this particular point in time, it's secret knowledge about the infiltration in Australia. Ross doesn't even know about it. And so it turns out this was the right time to tell your line. Exactly the right time. And we should say that the story in Australia was genuine. There was a proto-fascist group called Australia First, apparently no relation to the current Australia First party.
00:12:26
Speaker
Although with a name, they're close cousins if they're not direct descendants. So they had plans to blob infrastructure and distribute propaganda to smooth the way for a Japanese invasion. Now, in World War II, New Zealand, down the bottom of the South Pacific, New Zealand, as it happened, was never attacked. Australia was, wasn't it? Didn't they bomb Darwin or something?
00:12:50
Speaker
The very north of Australia. Wasn't that the plot of the film Australia? Quite possibly, I haven't seen it. No, nor have I. Frankly, his film... I stopped watching his films after Moulin Rouge. Yes, well, you should. But yes, so this is 1943, World War II as well underway. There was not unjustified fear in New Zealand that should Japan properly invade Australia, we would be next on the list. You have to remember.
00:13:19
Speaker
The War Office in Westminster, which was in control of our military forces at the time, had spent a lot of time and money fortifying the coastline of Australia and Aotearoa, New Zealand, with gun emplacements and the like. And there was an active minefield in the Waitemata Harbour at this particular point in time. We didn't get attacked, but there was a great fear that we were going to get attacked if the war went on.
00:13:47
Speaker
So these were real concerns at the time. So in the light of the news from Australia, in the light of these fears, Prime Minister Fraser says, OK, we better take this seriously. And he hands Ross off to possibly the other major figure in the story. Major, no pun intended, Major Kenneth Folks. Major Folks was a British intelligence officer who'd been sent over from England to New Zealand to take control of the newly formed Security Intelligence Bureau. Or SIBs. We would call it from here on out.
00:14:15
Speaker
Now, I believe up until that point, New Zealand hadn't had any sort of an intelligence agency, but it's wartime. It's the sort of, you know, now's the time to get one, basically. We need spies. We need spies. So this new bureau had been set up. Folks had come over from Britain to manage it. And initially, apparently, from the sounds of things, wasn't entirely impressed with the way we were running things. Sort of the equivalent agencies in Britain had a lot more power to do stuff.
00:14:42
Speaker
which they hadn't been granted down here. And so he seemed quite eager to broaden his powers. But so he also was quite keen to get into this. So at this point, Sidney Ross, basically his con works. He left prison with I think it was the clothes on his back and empty suitcase and a train ticket. All of a sudden, he gets given money, he gets given a car, he gets given a fake identity.
00:15:06
Speaker
Merchant Marine Captain Calder. And gets sent up to Rotorua, which is where he claimed this Nazi-spiring had its headquarters, to investigate and report back to them. Now that was the first thing that seemed a little bit odd. Why does he need a false identity?
00:15:26
Speaker
I mean, the Nazis have already made contact with him. He should, in theory, be a known figure. Unless, of course, he wears the classic Shakespearean eye patch, at which point he would not be recognizable to anyone, apart from when he blinks suggestively towards his audience. Yeah, so if the Nazis know him, there's no point in a false identity. If they don't know him, there's no point in a false identity. But everyone seemed fine with that. They just went along with it.
00:15:53
Speaker
And so for the next wee while, Ross would send back details of the Nazi agents whose identities he's been able to ferret out. And from the sounds of things, he would basically just, I hate to say this phrase, finger people at random, but
00:16:08
Speaker
That's kind of, from the sounds of things, he would see a local in Australia, in Rotorua, say, and then report back, oh, there's this guy, described the guy, you know, he's in on it, some SIB agents would come and say, oh yes, you know, that person does exist as the man described him, so okay, you know, he hasn't invented a human being out of his pure imagination, and so I'm going to write that up.
00:16:32
Speaker
And so, over his time in Rotorua, he reported that this plot was going on that was going to include demolition of various key targets, attempts to kidnap or assassinate Prime Minister Fraser, MP Semple and possibly other MPs.
00:16:50
Speaker
too much like the spy rings in Australia make soften New Zealand up for an invasion. He also ends up introducing his old prison mate, Mr. Remers, and claiming that he is the mastermind of this ring and says that he's living in Nongataha, a small town outside of Rotorua, and again, you know, working in the truth with the lies, saying that because of his leukemia, he's sort of living out there for his health, names the building, which is supposedly the headquarters of this ring, where he's staying, and so on and so forth.
00:17:20
Speaker
Now this is all quite clever. So by implicating the Prime Minister, the Minister of National Service and other cabinet MPs, Ross is basically making his con more effective. Because by saying, look, you are a target, it means that the target's going, oh, we better listen to you because our lives are at stake.
00:17:43
Speaker
basically cements himself into a kind of social network by saying I'm the most important person you know when you are considering your future. So the con at this stage is working quite well
00:17:58
Speaker
except for what would happen with SIB. Because as we noted earlier, when the SIB was set up here the people who were running the show, who were people like folks who came over from the UK,
00:18:13
Speaker
They were going, we have a lot more power back home, especially in wartime, we have a lot more power than this. And yet we're largely subservient to the government of the day. We have to ask for permission to do all the things that normally we'd be able to do with a warrant from the Crown.
00:18:30
Speaker
We need more power. And folks, folks wants a lot of power. He wants an awful lot of power and he wants it very quickly off the back of their one source, Mr. Us.
00:18:46
Speaker
Yes, so folks is lapping Ross's reports up. And he's using this investigation as basically his ammunition to request all the powers that he wants. He wants more troops to be assigned to the SIB. He wants the power to arrest people and hold them without trial. He basically wants to put New Zealand under martial law, essentially. It sounds like he would quite like it if he was kind of in charge of the country a little bit.
00:19:15
Speaker
or at least not in charge of the government, but being able to do what he says and being able to tell everyone else what to do in the name of keeping the country safe against these subversive Nazi elements. Now, this somewhat upsets Prime Minister Fraser, who quite rightly thinks that he's the person who runs the country and has the executive power, given the way that our Prime Ministers work.
00:19:36
Speaker
And so he finally goes, maybe we should talk to the police after all and see whether we can get confirmation of Ross's story. Now, the police were aware of Ross at this time. Ross, not the best undercover operative, had apparently been drawing attention to himself. You'd been driving his brand new car all around Rotorua and being picked up by the police for driving on the wrong side of the road, I think it was.
00:20:04
Speaker
Great undercover work, that one. Indeed. And so then the police were able to get a hold of mugshots, I guess, and say, hang on, this Captain Calder, that's actually Sidney Ross. Look, you look at the pictures, same person. You're not this person at all. And Ross, but fortunately for Ross, he's able to say, OK, you know, you're right. You're right. I am really Sidney Ross. That's a fake identity. I'm working with the SIB on an investigation, which is true.
00:20:31
Speaker
So that's how he's able to sort of put the police off his case. This is the plot of White Collar. Is it? I haven't seen White Collar. Well, it's vaguely the plot of White Collar. The criminal now working for the criminal justice system and having to explain, although he's a well-known art thief, but he works for us, it's fine. Good show, actually. Well worth watching.
00:20:55
Speaker
But yes, nevertheless, Fraser has said he'd like the police to have a look and things. Superintendent Jim Cummings has a look over all the evidence that the SIB has compiled. Apparently there are these notorious binders. All of Ross's reports have been compiled into a series of binders that give all the information on the supposed Nazi plot. Superintendent Cummings has a look through this and he's not super convinced.
00:21:19
Speaker
Not at all. Not super convinced and somewhat suspicious of folks for pushing so hard on the back of this dodgy evidence to get all these greater powers that he wants. The police start to investigate some of the things that Ross has been reporting, in particular they go out to Nanga to her to find this Nazi headquarters and discover the building's there, but it's not a Nazi-spiring headquarters, there's just a bunch of people living there
00:21:45
Speaker
And there's nothing odd about that. So at this point they start to get a little bit desperate. And so the plan is, and exactly whose plan it is we'll come to shortly, but the plan is for Ross to fake an attack on himself
00:22:19
Speaker
to make it
00:22:29
Speaker
and digging his own grave out in the bush somewhere. But it could have been both. Maybe these two accounts were just sort of pointing out one of the details. Or he had non-descript wounds on his back and he went, well it could have been self-legilation or he could have backed himself into a bug warfare. At any rate,
00:22:49
Speaker
In some state of injury, Ross comes stumbling out of the bush near Rotorua, flags down a passing motorist, tells him to get help and call, contact the SIB, he's taken off to hospital, and basically nobody buys it, unfortunately. Turns out he's basically got to the end of his car. So the jig is up,
00:23:11
Speaker
And eventually Ross gives a full confession of everything that he's done. Which is leaked to the press. So now things start getting particularly sticky for major folks. A couple of days after Ross gives his confession, big, big headline news in the local newspapers. Nobody knows who leaked it to the news, but the fact
00:23:34
Speaker
Yeah, the fact that the news stories strongly condemn the SIB while praising the work of the police make it seem like that the police were probably the ones who chose to leak it. Folks apparently offers to go on leave, but the PM misinterprets this either deliberately or accidentally as offering his resignation and says, yep, I accept you're out of here.
00:24:00
Speaker
See, this is about the story. So the modern reporting says the PM seems to misinterpret folks. I actually think back in those days, offering to go on leave really was a coded way of saying, how about I resign? Oh, I'll go on leave and you will be deciding whether I come back to work. I think it was the polite way of resigning at that time. I'm taking my leave and then the Prime Minister goes, thank you very much for your service.
00:24:30
Speaker
You idiot. Please leave the country. Close the door on the way out. So folks get sent back to Britain and disgrace. His career does not do well after that I understand. No I do try to find out information about him post this and basically all the stories basically terminate with went back to the UK and disgraced. So nothing more became of him I guess.
00:24:51
Speaker
So the SIB is basically disestablished and folded back underneath the police. Superintendent Cummings eventually becomes Police Commissioner and I believe his successor then became the head of the SIS when it was formed in the 50s. The Security Intelligence Service.
00:25:09
Speaker
is now our intelligence, local intelligence agency. Now it's interesting that neither Ross nor Remers were charged at all for their part in all of this. And it seems to be that the authorities at the time would kind of, I think had it been up to them, this would have been kept under wraps entirely, which is why whoever it was who leaked it to the press felt the need to leak it.
00:25:33
Speaker
Now this is actually quite similar to what happened to the case of Christopher Lewis, the man who tried to assassinate Queen Elizabeth in this country. Who we have talked about in a previous episode. And that was a situation where
00:25:47
Speaker
The potential prosecution was kept very, very hush-hush for the notion that this is actually quite embarrassing information to come out, whether you're trying to assassinate a monarch or you've spent a large amount of government fund investigating a fictitious spy ring.
00:26:04
Speaker
You don't really want the public knowing about this because it just looks very bad and also looks very bad internationally as well. Yes, so we said this all kicked off in March of 1942. It's now February 1943 and the whole thing has fallen apart.
00:26:24
Speaker
So everybody sort of goes, sort of just goes their own way. Remers dies of leukemia in September of 1943. Ross, while not being convicted of his part in this particular hoax, is a career criminal, commits more crimes, goes back to prison, eventually dies of TB in 1946. Doesn't find any more Nazis though. No, he doesn't. So...
00:26:45
Speaker
At the moment, we have claims of a conspiracy, the conspiracy of this Nazi cell operating in New Zealand, which is a conspiracy because it involves both Ross and Remner's. But the question is, was there a conspiracy within the SIB?
00:27:02
Speaker
Did major folks by Ross's story completely believe it wholeheartedly and simply talk it up to the Prime Minister to get what he wanted? Or did he know it was rubbish? Yes, did he use it to try to seize power or to at least amplify the power the SIB had at the time? So was Ross instrumental to making the SIB something more like what you'd expect in the UK?
00:27:28
Speaker
So a lot of the reporting on this has come from a book called The Plot to Subvert Wartime New Zealand by Hugh Price and later I believe his wife Beverly, he died before it was published and his wife Beverly sort of brought it to publishing.
00:27:44
Speaker
And the stories they tell, they seem fairly certain that folks knew it was nonsense and not only promoted it, but actually embellished it, adding on his own material, in which case it does become a genuine conspiracy on his part to try and seize power.
00:28:01
Speaker
he fleshes out the binders to make the story more convincing to the Prime Minister and the Minister in charge of national service on the notion that that then will convince them to give him more power. Now unfortunately all the evidence we have around this these days is from Ross's confession.
00:28:22
Speaker
So Ross, after the jig was up, he was picked up, he was interviewed by some SIB agents and then eventually gave a full confession to the police. In his confession to the police, he puts as much blame on the SIB as he possibly can. Which is what you'd expect of A, someone who's just being caught out running a con, that there are Nazis in the country.
00:28:44
Speaker
and be probably a career criminal go no it wasn't me mate it was someone else. So he basically you know cops completely to his initial hoax but says that the SIB then took it and ran with it and blew it out of proportion. He talks about having supposedly gone into the SIB to sort of deliver reports or something seeing these binders full of information and had a flip through them just out of curiosity
00:29:08
Speaker
and he claims he was very much surprised to see that a good two-thirds of the information in there wasn't stuff that he had told the SIB. Now I should point out, if the plot was real and there had been Nazi infiltration of the country, you would expect the binders to contain information not just from Ross, because you'd have agents who were doing work to generate more information, connections, etc, etc.
00:29:34
Speaker
But of course, we know the plot wasn't real. So if there was additional information in the binders, that means someone or some set of people at SIB had to be going in and doctoring information to make the threat seem larger. Or it means that Ross was simply trying to reduce his role in the plot.
00:30:00
Speaker
So he says that the SIB had been adding their own embellishments to his material. He says that the whole fake an attack on yourself thing, he says that was the SIB's idea. They sort of, you know, said, no, we have to keep this going. Here's what you need to do to throw the police off the trail so we can keep on at this.
00:30:16
Speaker
He claims that the SIB agents who interviewed him before he gave his confession basically spent the whole time saying, no, no, keep lying. Keep up with this. Don't don't confess to anything. You just keep to your line and then eventually we'll come back. We'll quote unquote arrest you and then we'll just take you up to Auckland, let you go and that'll be the last you hear of us.
00:30:41
Speaker
and then unfortunately when they never came back and that never happened that was what spurred him to make his confession.
00:30:48
Speaker
But again, so all quite damning towards the SIB. But again, this is the testimony of a career criminal and convicted fraudster. So it's hard to know exactly how much we should believe it. And unfortunately, the binders in question have been lost. Nobody knows where they are or if they still exist. Well, yes. I mean, there was no protection of information at that particular point in time. The SIB itself was disestablished. So if the information was kept, it was probably moved into archives.
00:31:15
Speaker
Our archives are not particularly well run. Actually, it's not true. There are systematic problems in the cataloging of the archives in the past. So things have just disappeared because they're in the wrong marked box. Now, conversely, we should consider the career of Major Kenneth Fox. He was a junior, very junior, MI5 officer back in the UK.
00:31:42
Speaker
who was then shipped out to this country and promoted to major upon taking the position at SIB and given a fairly major promotion. And it does seem that he was a very junior staffer at MI5 who knew nothing about security procedure in his operational role there.
00:32:06
Speaker
So we have one mark against him. He actually wasn't a particularly well qualified candidate to run a major governmental organization. And the other mark against him is that
00:32:19
Speaker
The British had a history of shipping over not their best, but their least brightest and least qualified public officials or civil servants to the colonies, because that was where you sent trouble to disappear. So it's quite possible that folks was not a well-respected member of the MI5 community, but simply
00:32:43
Speaker
He's probably got aspirations and pretensions of greatness. Send him to New Zealand. He'll be fine. We'll have to deal with him ever again.
00:32:53
Speaker
Yeah, so no matter what the reality of the situation, major faults does not come out of it looking good. I mean, best case scenario, he honestly believed with all his heart that there were Nazis in New Zealand. And maybe he did embellish stuff just because he felt so strongly that something had to be done about it.
New Zealand's Historical Awareness
00:33:12
Speaker
Well, I mean, we all hate Nazis.
00:33:14
Speaker
And so with the best of intentions, he sort of cooked up the story to make the case for what he felt really truly felt needed to be done even stronger. But even then, you know, he's still being suckered by a career criminal and a con man. So at best, he's just not very good at his job. And at worst, he was basically seeking to undermine a country to enact a martial law basically during wartime to further, you know, to further his own ambition.
00:33:45
Speaker
So yeah, I found that a very interesting story and one that I'm surprised we don't know more about. That's the one that hasn't been talked about more widely in New Zealand. We are really quite pissed poor at teaching our history in this country. Which is why this is an appropriate topic for Waitangi Day because we're also very bad at teaching our indigenous history and also our colonial history. We're just very bad at knowing things about our past.
00:34:11
Speaker
I was reading an article yesterday about the erasure of Maori woman from a lot of history, given that Maori pronouns are gender neutral. So when talk of chieftains was transcribed, it was always, they were always made a he when that may not have been the case. Yes, and actually there's some good evidence of this. So the Paki'a who did the most for recording oral histories was Governor Gray.
00:34:37
Speaker
And we have the Governor Gray Collection, which is his written down versions of oral histories, Whakapapa, which is lineages and the like. But we also do have, because Maori learnt literacy very quickly after contact with the British,
00:34:53
Speaker
we do have some of their own writing from the time. And it's quite clear that Governor Grey borderised a lot of the history and turned people into men in the stories, because the expectation was it should be a patriarchy. And obviously these maru get in their own history wrong, but they think a woman was in charge of this particular organisational group.
00:35:16
Speaker
Yes, so New Zealand history is quite interesting and has some fascinating nuggets and also is quite poorly taught. Yes. I mean, as sort of Generation X's ourselves, I think we, I received just bugger all history, education in the history. I think I got more of the stuff to AO Maori in primary school with teachers in year one, year two, prima one or prima two, as we call them back at my school.
00:35:45
Speaker
where we had Maori myths being read at story time and I think that was basically, that was it. Frankly I'm still horrifically ignorant to be honest because I've never had it, never had the information delivered to me and I've never bothered to go out and
00:36:02
Speaker
search it, hunt it down myself. So as and I think a fair few people in our age bracket are around the same. Indeed. Indeed. Many people in our age bracket are willfully ignorant. You're quite right. Yes. Yep.
Conspiracy Theories and Patron Content
00:36:16
Speaker
A hundred percent. So at any rate, that's the end of our episode. We will of course go on to record a bonus episode for our patrons, the greatest of all people in the world.
00:36:28
Speaker
It's true. I mean, you are great non patrons, but the patrons who pay a dollar a month or so, they're even greater. You can aspire to that greatness by becoming a patron either via Podbean or through Patreon. And the greatness
00:36:46
Speaker
is reflected in the content we have in this upcoming Patreon episode because we have an interesting conspiracy by the UN to hide a very bad event that occurred last year, an update on the coronavirus and maybe why you shouldn't blame bat soup for its origin, an interesting case of a pro-Trump website doing something
00:37:11
Speaker
quite bad, which also relates to the coronavirus, and probably will be a substantial discussion about what just happened in Iowa in the last few days, because there are conspiracy theories galore around that, I think, still only partial count of caucusing. At the time of recording, yes.
00:37:32
Speaker
Yes, at time of recording, as to who was going to get the delegates from that state going forward for the primaries for the Democratic challenger to Donald J. Trump. So if you'd like to hear about all of that, then why don't you become a patron? And if you are a patron, stick around, basically. So we'll leave you now, all of our listeners, go record something for the small subset of our listeners who
00:38:01
Speaker
Just a little bit better than the rest of you, but that's fine. And we'll be back next week with a regular episode, but until then, I think all that remains is to say is goodbye. And also next week is going to be a bit of a surprise. Yes. Surprise!
00:38:26
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron, via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
00:39:27
Speaker
And remember, they're coming to get you, Barbara.