Original subtitles

Narrator: Mysterious remains of rusting ships,

stranded in an arid desert.

It was ecological suicide.

A ghostly set of concrete teeth high in the Italian peaks.

A very stark and strange sight to have in the marginally

beautifully mountain landscape.

An eerie collection of buildings hidden in a remote forest.

It's like a village of the damned.

You can tell that something happened here.

And a technological marvel

now rotting away in a forgotten cove.

It's so destroyed.

It's hard to believe there's any other reason

for that level of destruction

other than some major cataclysmic event.

Once they were some of the most advanced structures

and facilities on the planet,

at the cutting edge of design and construction.

Today, they stand abandoned, contaminated,

and sometimes deadly,

but who built them and how and why were they abandoned?

(Theme music)

In the southwest of the former Soviet union

is the country of Uzbekistan.

And not far from the small town of moynaq is an astonishing sight.

For mile after mile,

all you can see is a dry and dusty desert landscape.

There, in the middle of this Sandy expanse,

there are ships of every size, from small to large.

But where is the water?

It's a very odd thing, seeing a boat in the desert.

You think of water instantly, a boat is indicative sign of water.

But then you look around and there's none available.

It's like an armada of rusting hulks in the middle

of the desert without a shoreline anywhere in sight.

It is an intensely post-apocalyptic image.

You don't have to be an expert to tell that something has gone

extremely wrong here.

The town of moynaq is virtually deserted.

But what has gone on here?

The only clue is the symbol of a fish,

which adorns the town's sign.

There are signs that fishing was absolutely

once very important here,

but what makes it so extraordinary is that there's no water to be seen.

In fact, it's miles from the nearest sea.

So, what happened?

Where has the sea gone and why was moynaq abandoned?

The answer to this puzzle lies more than 4,000km away

in the heart of Russia's capital, Moscow.

In the 1950s,

Uzbekistan was part of the Soviet union,

an empire 2.5 times the size of the usa,

which stretched from the baltic sea to the pacific ocean.

The country was still recovering from the most destructive war

in human history.

The Soviet union's notorious war leader Joseph Stalin

died in march 1953,

and he left behind a country in very poor condition.

This was the grim situation facing nikita khrushchev,

the new first secretary of the communist party

of the Soviet union.

The regime responded in the only way it knew how,

by seizing complete control.

The Soviet union ran on a command economy,

all the decisions were made at the top.

And they would decide, "comrade, you will grow the wheat.

"And you will grow the cotton.

"And you will make the iron and steel."

The individual districts and certainly individual workers

had very little say in the matter.

And the technocrats in charge thought they had all the information

they needed to make all the decisions.

Each Soviet state had to provide goods

and raw materials to the central government

who would in turn provide food and other products.

Everything was controlled by Moscow.

There was no room for experimentation.

There was no room for anybody

to deviate from the central authority.

So, once the order came down from on high,

everybody got in line and conformed.

The gaze of the Soviet leadership fell on a new target

for exploitation, moynaq.

It's almost impossible to imagine now

when you look at the desert that surrounds it.

But 60 years ago,

moynaq lay at the edge of the fourth largest inland

stretch of water in the world, the aral sea.

Forty thousand of its citizens were either fishermen or worked

at its fish processing plant, the largest in the Soviet union.

Almas tovashiv was one of them.

More than 200 vessels

were engaged in the fishing industry,

more than 100 vessels were transporting fish

to the fish canning factory,

where 1,200 people worked and annually produced

up to 12 million cans of fish.

The fishing industry was able to thrive in the aral sea

because it was fairly shallow all round.

So, it was actually quite easy to fish.

And by its nature,

it didn't actually freeze in the winter.

So, you could do fishing almost all year round.

Overall, one-sixth of Russia's annual fishing quota

came from the aral sea...

And a substantial industry thrived on its shores.

At that time,

80% to 90% of the fish production in Uzbekistan

was provided by the aral sea.

There were 34 species of fish,

20 of which were of commercial importance.

Then there was one moynaq fishing-canning factory,

12 fishing collective farms, and 6 fishing flotillas.

The whole population was engaged in fishing.

But by 1990, all fishing had ended.

The sea had become a desert.

So, what was the main reason

for this extraordinary transformation?

It was all because of something called white gold.

We know it better as cotton.

Cotton's been grown in the aral basin for centuries.

But this really ramped up under the leadership of Stalin

when he announced to the world that the Soviet union

would be the leading producer of this crop.

It only rains about 4 inches a year

in that part of Uzbekistan.

That's about the same as the mojave desert in the us

or even the same as some parts of the Sahara.

So, they needed to irrigate.

They needed to get water from somewhere else.

Where did they get it?

From the two rivers that fed the aral sea.

They dammed them up.

They made reservoirs.

They made this huge complex of irrigation canals,

thousands of miles of irrigation canals.

It was a typical vast, ambitious Soviet project.

But the crops needed more than water to flourish.

Chemical fertilisers were used in vast quantities,

20 times the usual amounts.

Cotton, especially the way the Soviets grew it,

took a lot of fertiliser, a lot of pesticides.

They sprayed this stuff on with abandon.

It flowed out.

It polluted the ground water so what little water that did flow

into the aral sea was heavily polluted with toxins.

However, the Soviet plan to concentrate on cotton production

at the expense of the aral sea worked.

Uzbekistan became the dominant supplier of cotton,

the dominant grower of cotton in the Soviet union,

and remains a major grower of cotton.

But there was a huge environmental price to pay.

If you've got four-fifths of your water source coming

from elsewhere and being brought in to maintain

and sustain the sea, if you shut that life blood off,

things are gonna change very dramatically.

It was ecological suicide because once they took

all the water out of those rivers,

there wasn't enough water to feed the aral sea.

In its hot environment, it's sunny most of the time,

there's a lot of evaporation.

Without water continuing to flow into it,

the aral sea began to evaporate.

People understood that there was less water.

It was not enough

even for watering gardens and use on the farms.

Moynaq's fishermen depended on the lake for their livelihoods.

So, they followed its shrinking shores.

But they soon realised there was an even bigger problem.

The fish were dying.

Not only is the shoreline moving away

because you're deceasing the volume of the water,

but you're increasing the salinity.

And it went from about 10g per litre to over 100g per litre,

a massive jump, 10 times more salt in the water.

And the fish can't handle that.

The fish essentially get poisoned.

It was turning from a thriving rich freshwater

ecosystem into a dead sea.

By the late 1980s,

the last native aral fish had vanished,

lost to the shrinking toxic sea.

In just 34 years,

the sea level dropped by 16m

and the shoreline receded by almost 160km.

The speed at which this actually happened

is quite remarkable.

And it's really quite shocking to see this Jewel,

one of the fourth largest inland seas in the world,

suddenly just diminishing to a few sort of isolated lakes

and really just a big dry desert.

A third of the seabed was exposed,

spreading 100 million tonnes of dust and salt.

Add to that, the residue from the pesticides at the bottom

of the sea,

and you've got a highly toxic combination.

Ultimately, it all collapsed.

And you can only imagine how heart-breaking

life was for the people in that region.

This had been their culture and their way of life for centuries.

And have it all be obliterated literally in just a few decades

must have just been devastating.

Today, the trawlers lay rusting at the edge of moynaq's harbour...

A ghost fleet in a town where the sea is a distant memory.

The few remaining people still living here

are plagued by health problems.

The aral sea has now become the aral desert.

It's a real cautionary tale in environmental destruction.

An economy, it's not just a nice lifestyle or a pleasant vista

but crucial parts of economies depend on healthy an ecosystem.

When you see such a dramatic change,

it shows us that how delicate the environment can be

and how much we need to be aware

that we don't flip the switch the wrong way

and send those environments catastrophically

into the wrong direction.

Hidden away in a forest,

50km southwest of Berlin

lies a vast complex of abandoned buildings.

It's like a village of the damned,

you can tell that something happened here.

Due to its decrepit and dilapidating nature,

it's a very unique and creepy environment.

In one building,

there's a bathtub sitting by itself in the middle of a room.

It's really mysterious.

What's going on here?

You can tell the amount of care that was taken

when it was built,

with its pillars and terraces and elaborate entrances.

It's almost palatial.

There are around 60 separate buildings on the site...

And the whole complex sprawls across 1.5km.

But what dark secrets does this facility hold?

And exactly how did

one of the world's most evil men end up here?

The answer lies in this spectacular industrial revolution

in Germany during the final years of the 19th century.

The extraordinary pace of progress and technology, machinery,

and transport saw a once deeply divided country

surpass even Great Britain to become,

by the end of the 19th century,

the world's leading industrial powerhouse.

While technical schools turned out great thinkers and inventors,

Germany's years of investment in education and training

eventually paid rich dividends in the shape of a highly skilled

and motivated workforce.

The German population doubled between 1871 and 1910,

and its capital, Berlin, grew by 300% in just 30 years.

Germany had its industrial revolution

a bit later than some other European countries.

But it more than made up for any delay.

By the 1890s, it was thriving, fast moving, almost chaotic.

Factories were booming,

labour was pouring in

from impoverished rural areas into the big cities,

people were crammed into crowded tenements,

unhealthy living situations.

And along with all those people came a lot of diseases.

Over 120 years ago,

one disease in particular swept through Germany.

It was responsible for one in seven of all human deaths.

It was tuberculosis.

It's a disease that's passed by coughing or sneezing,

germs get in the air, and in crowded conditions,

it passes from person to person very easily.

Hygiene back then wasn't like today of course.

If there was a toothbrush at all in a working class household,

it was used by then whole family.

So many people infected their children with tuberculosis

without even knowing it.

For more than a century,

tuberculosis was the most common cause of death not only in Europe

but also in the United States.

At the time, there was no cure.

And 80% of those infected eventually died.

Tb was not really treatable in the sense

that there was a cure for it.

What people tried to do was create a healthier environment

for people with tuberculosis.

"And the idea was, "it's a lung disease,

"it has something to do with air.

"Let's get them out of the city, "out to where there's fresh air,

dry air."

It was very common for rich people to be able

to get sent off to one of these hospitals

in some lovely mountainous setting.

But many of the victims of tuberculosis weren't affluent.

They couldn't afford that.

So, a new kind of facility was needed,

beelitz-heilstatten was seen as the answer.

Its aim was to provide cutting edge care

in a healthy setting,

not for the very rich but for the very poor.

An insurance company

was behind the building of this sanatorium.

They wanted to create this model clinic for workers

in Berlin who had limited access to treatment otherwise.

But would it work?

Would a patient coming from the squalor of Berlin

actually have been helped in a sanatorium like this?

For people who lived in very crowded conditions,

they were many of them factory workers,

they didn't have a lot of money,

they might not have had a lot of people at home

who could take care of them in their sick condition.

So, to be able to go to this lovely retreat,

even as their prognosis

for getting better wasn't that great,

it must have seemed like a kind of blessing.

Building began in 1898,

and the initial construction phase took four years.

The intricate ornamental facades and the light spacious rooms

were in stark contrast to the conditions the workers

were used to back in the cities.

The beelitz sanatorium isn't really like any other hospital

where you might just have an operating theatre,

you might have a corridor full of wards,

and, you know, normal walls and ventilation systems, etcetera.

What we're trying to do here is to create an atmosphere

of wellbeing to bring light in, to bring air in.

What's really kind of lovely is that they designed it

to feel like a resort, like a beautiful country town.

I think the respect they showed to these sick people,

who were not affluent, who weren't paying their own way,

was really something admirable.

But with war on the horizon,

there were actually darker reasons for this apparent benevolence.

The kaiser was simply afraid of the inability

of some of his people to serve in the military.

Also, the economy would have lost its cheap labourers.

That was the real reason behind the construction of this sanatorium.

Eventually, there would be beds for 1,200 patients,

which made beelitz

one of the largest sanatoriums in the world.

It was also briefly home to the most notorious figure

of the 20th century.

When the first world war began in 1914,

the hospital found itself in the front line.

Beelitz heilstatten was requisitioned

as a field hospital for the red cross.

The number of beds increased to more than 1,500.

One of its patients was a young corporal

by the name of Adolf Hitler.

Hitler was a patient there for two months towards the end

of 1916,

when he was hit by a grenade in his left leg

and was sent to beelitz for treatment.

After the war,

there was a resurgence of tuberculosis.

And in 1920,

beelitz heilstatten reverted to a sanatorium.

For more than 20 years, it continued to treat the disease.

But a new treatment for tuberculosis was just around the corner.

Tuberculosis remained a serious problem

in the developed world

until shortly after world war ii when the antibiotic,

streptomycin was discovered and turned out to be

pretty effective in treating the disease.

By the mid-1950s,

tuberculosis had become a curable disease

and the need for the hospital slowly declined.

But that wasn't quite the end of beelitz.

After world war ii,

the Russians took over the eastern sector of Berlin

and beelitz served as a Soviet military hospital

for the next 50 years.

The Soviets operated beelitz sanatorium

as the largest military hospital outside of the country's borders.

In 1991,

the Soviet troops slowly started their withdrawal.

And in 1994, the grounds were empty again.

Today, this once vital hospital is a ghostly shell.

The disease it was built to beat, now a footnote in history.

Or is it?

With the emergence in the 1980s of drug resistant strains

of tuberculosis,

beelitz heilstatten serves to remind us

that the battle against

this potentially fatal disease continues still.

The size of the epidemic of tuberculosis

in the early 20th century was large.

Its impact was felt wide through Europe.

Sites like beelitz help us remember that.

And with the onset and increase of modern tuberculosis,

perhaps it's a really good reminder of the seriousness of the disease.

More than 2,000m up in the Italian alps

is the most extraordinary sight.

Punching through tons of snow

are rows of menacing conical structures.

There are these strange pyramid-like structures

that almost look like a modern art installation.

Seeing hundreds of these concrete teeth jutting up

out of the ground in the alpine landscape

is almost hard to grasp what that is.

The bizarre set of teeth are made of concrete and iron

and range in size up to 1m tall.

They stretch out over the remote mountaintops

in a series of long clusters.

But why were they built at such a remote location?

And what could their strange purpose be?

What's really odd is where these things are,

right near the top of a mountain.

They just don't belong there.

It looks very medieval.

It's almost exactly out of "game of thrones",

a very stark and strange site

to have in a largely beautiful mountain landscape.

A clue as to what these rows of conical spikes are can be found

in the valley below.

A labyrinth of secret tunnels that stretch deep

into the mountain itself lurk behind a secret entrance disguised

as a rock,

which is built into the side of the valley.

When you look at it,

it seems incredibly solid and it blends

almost seamlessly into the background.

Someone went to an incredible effort

to build that here.

Who built this bizarre alpine structure

and what was its purpose?

The answer lies in the uneasy peace that existed across

Western Europe in the 1930s.

Germany still simmered with resentment at the harsh

respirations imposed on it by the treaty of versailles,

and its people turned to Hitler, a national socialism,

for salvation.

Meanwhile, Italy fell under the spell of the fascist dictator

Benito Mussolini.

Incredibly, less than 20 years after the end of a conflict

that killed millions,

the dark clouds of war gathered once more over the continent.

That was why the major European powers

looked to their borders

and began to fortify them with a series of elaborate defences.

All of this stuff in France where the country's

seemingly impenetrable maginot line.

And at the same time, the Germans were building their own version,

the siegfried line across their western front.

All through Europe, you see these border defence lines.

And this is a reasonable precaution by most European countries

that had genuine threats.

In 1931,

Mussolini's engineers began to build what was seen

as the answer to the threat of attack.

It was a line of defences that aimed to protect Italy

over a 1,600km front through the Italian alps.

From ventimiglia on the west coast to fiume in the east.

It was known as the vallo alpino or the alpine wall.

Rows of concrete and iron teeth crowned the ridges.

And the valleys below aligned with gun placements

and bunkers for troops.

However, this section of the alpine wall

faced not a hostile enemy

but Mussolini's supposed closest ally,

Adolf Hitler's newly annexed Austria.

Mussolini was rather distrustful of Hitler.

He knew that Hitler had expansionist ideas in Germany

and certainly had ideas on Austria.

Now, this meant problems for the Italians

because they had annexed this one region

of south tyrol of Austria after 1918.

Mussolini understanding Hitler,

knew that Hitler would likely want to demand

this territory and could attack Italy and take the tyrol.

Since world war I,

fast-moving tanks had become the most dominant weapon

on the battlefield and Germany

was the master of this new type of warfare.

How would the Italian alpine defences be able

to stop Hitler's new mechanised army in its tracks?

So, the dragons teeth or the dente di drago

were wooden Poles that were pounded into the ground

and then cast cement around them,

capped off with an iron pyramid or cone.

This creates a barrier

for which armoured vehicles and troops

cannot pass through and effectively funnelling

a large armoured force into effectively kill zones.

The Italians designed an elaborate network

of interconnected bunkers

and guns to encounter any German advance.

The fortifications were named defence in depth.

But would they work?

The idea of having multiple layers of defence

is that you'll slow down the momentum of an attack,

making it much easier to repel.

It's a series of strong points.

It will stop and delay any enemy advance.

This gives the defender time

to move up reserves for a counterattack.

Hidden in the side of the mountain

is the heavily camouflaged secret entrance

to the Italian alpine fortress.

This is the fortified door to bunker number 20.

The door opens to reveal a network of passages

that link secret rooms and machine guns posts.

Local guide Ludwig schopf knows exactly how dangerous it was.

So, we see here the machine gun room

of the bunker number 20

and here inside we have three soldiers.

The room is outside of the rock.

Here is beginning, the rock, and here, outside of the rock.

And the soldiers knows

that they were the first people to die.

The bunker's heavy camouflage was designed to give the Italians

the best possible chance of destroying the enemy

before they could make an attack.

They would cover the face of the bunker

with rock slurry material.

You could not tell that this is not part

of a cliff face until you're actually there

and then the guns open up on you.

But how secure were the bunkers themselves?

The bunkers were built using a vast amount of concrete,

up to 13 feet deep in places.

What they did was they actually built concrete

in and amongst the rock units

to try and utilise the fact that you've got these strong rocks

either side of the pass and act as a natural defence

and then build round that natural defence

with some manmade fortifications.

What made Mussolini think that Hitler would attack here?

On the Austrian side of the border, there is a simple mule track,

which wouldn't have supported the weight of a tank.

But the Italians were worried that Germans would construct

a road into that region, allowing armoured vehicles, tanks,

and a large number of troops to pass into the area.

Yes, it's quite possible the Germans could send troops

up here because that is in fact

how they broke through mountain defence lines.

But were the fortifications ever used?

If we're to follow Mussolini and the advance of the Germans,

the vallo alpino defence structures were never actually used.

The Italians just surrendered, and effectively,

the Germans walked into northern Italy.

The vallo alpino was actually,

for the most part, very lightly guarded.

And this would have been essentially border troops.

These are not your frontline troops.

So, it provided no real defence at all.

The defending soldiers just gave up.

And even though there was these very elaborate

defence structures that were constructed, in essence,

they were never used and were useless.

Ironically, the Germans themselves

later incorporated the vallo alpino

into their own defences against the allies,

when they were sweeping through Italy.

But in the end,

the vallo alpino defences were never used.

Today the rusting spikes

of the dragon's teeth still dominate the landscape.

They show just how far Mussolini

was prepared to go to defend his country.

So, when you see these expansive structures now,

it's an interesting historical throwback to a different time.

For now, they're too expensive to remove.

So, we just sort of accept them as historical reminders

as well as just strange structures

stuck in the middle of the alps.

At the far eastern tip of Canada, just visible above the waterline,

lies a rusting hulk of corroding metal.

It's almost like this monster of the deep.

But why is this leviathan

being gradually reclaimed by the sea?

It lies in a forgotten cove off the coast of newfoundland.

This partially submerged structure

has such mystery around it.

And that is compounded by where it sits

in this completely idyllic setting.

This weird sort of a sandwich of junk of rusty steel,

one chunk of it,

you can recognise as some kind of modern trawler

or something parked alongside.

But what it's next to is like an exploded factory.

It just doesn't belong there.

Only part of the structure is still visible.

The rest is completely submerged.

It's so devastated, it's so destroyed,

it's hard to believe there's any other reason

for that level of destruction

other than some major cataclysmic event.

These are the remains of hms 'calypso'.

Once, it was one of the most technologically advanced ships

in the British fleet.

Now, it's abandoned and rotting in the water.

The reasons for 'calypso's destruction

can be found in the job she was designed to do.

In the 1870s, britain was a dominant global force,

the British empire,

which at one point covered a quarter of the globe

and included 450 million people was at its height.

Britain's ports were busy bustling places,

where goods from all over the empire were processed to fuel

and feed the industrial revolution, which was in full swing.

Britain was a wealthy nation,

a small country but with extraordinary influence

all over the world.

All of this was thanks, in part, to its powerful Navy.

Britain is absolutely the world superpower

in the 1870s.

Nobody has got a Navy like britain.

Nobody has global reach like britain.

The royal Navy exists to ensure that whatever difficulties

there are in the world,

nobody stops trade between britain and her colonies.

Designed to fight competing European powers

and pirates in the far corners of the globe,

'calypso's design was a quirky combination

of sail and steam.

She has a steam engine.

But 'calypso' can also go under sail power.

That means that 'calypso' can go on a long patrol

and just use the wind to get where she needs to go.

This helped the vessel ply the waters that were in vast,

distant colonies where they may not have access

to any resources.

What we see here is design features that actually make the vessel

more reliable and allow it to carry out its duties.

Endurance and toughness were the main strengths

of the 'calypso'

and at her heart was her strange and revolutionary hull construction.

Her hull is actually composite.

In fact, it's a steel hull, steel plates over an iron frame,

all very modern.

But then you've got this weird addition of wood.

You can see the timbers still sticking out

of the water today.

Now, why would you bother putting wood over steel?

Steel, on its own,

won't protect the ship from what's called biofouling,

which is the build-up of barnacles and algae,

which can damage the hull and the propulsion system.

So, the solution was to coat the hull with copper.

But you can't put copper plates on a steel hull

because you get galvanic erosion.

You'll actually corrode the hull itself

because of the reaction between these two metals.

The only thing to do is to have your steel hull,

put wood over the top of that,

and then copper sheets in the same old

way over the top again.

In June 1883,

'calypso' was launched with a great fanfare

from the chatham dockyard in england,

built to police britain's vast maritime empire.

She's one of the last steam and sail ships ever built.

This wasn't an old-fashioned and weakly armed warship.

For her size, for her speed, she could pack quite a punch.

So, how did such a powerful ship meet its end?

Did pirates or enemy ships somehow overwhelm her impressive defences?

'Calypso's' design was actually her undoing.

As soon as the royal Navy builds a ship,

the French Navy or the German Navy builds a comparable ship

and makes that royal Navy vessel obsolete.

In the 1870s,

the kind of ship that we see in the 'calypso'

is briefly very powerful,

briefly useful against enemy vessels,

and within ten years, is obsolete.

In 1902,

'calypso' was sent across the Atlantic

to become a training ship

for the newfoundland royal Navy reserve.

Sixty years later, the decision was made to scrap her.

In 1968,

it was finally decided

that the vessel should be abandoned.

It was towed to a small cove outside of embree, newfoundland.

And it was burned to the waterline.

Today, hms 'calypso' lies abandoned

off the coast of Canada.

When I see a ship like the 'calypso',

I see a monument to so many people

working so hard together to make something great.

Now, they lie abandoned.

But once, they were at the cutting edge of engineering.

There are echoes from history in these decaying structures.

They remind us of terror and war but also of great innovation

and human endeavour.

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