Original subtitles

(Dramatic music)

Tom ward (narrates): A vast complex at the ends of the earth...

No-one wanted to end up here and if you did,

it was likely you would never leave.

..A deserted outpost lost in a freezing landscape...

The amount of engineering efforts that needed to go

into sustaining the work force

went above and beyond what was necessary.

..The battered remains of a monumental project built

in a dangerous place...

You've got the constant

and unrelenting pressure from the ocean.

..And the ruins of a notorious regimes chilling prototype.

It's strange, it's weird.

Why would somebody put this much cement in the middle of the woods?

Some are engineering marvels, now abandoned.

Others are ruins shrouded in mystery.

Within these decaying structures are the echoes of history.

Some are associated with dark times.

But they also remind us of human ingenuity and endeavour.

Each haunted shell is ready to be unmasked

to tell its own unique story.

(Dramatic music)

In the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard,

which lies in the arctic ocean,

there's a strange looking town

with an almost supernatural atmosphere.

To find something on this scale, it's amazing.

Everything seems to be in pretty good condition,

it's all very well built

but what strikes you is the backdrop to this town

is this quite strange-looking, pyramid-shaped mountain

and it gives the whole place a kind of mystical feel.

(Breeze)

The breath-taking scenery has a savage beauty.

This is miles away

from any other kinds of civilisation,

it's subjected to such brutal environmental conditions.

This is quite a dangerous place to be,

cut off from the rest of the world,

freezing temperatures and long, dark winters.

The harsh conditions here would probably scare off most people.

But this was clearly no ordinary settlement.

There's something more to this town than just functionality,

there is a certain air of grandiosity or sherriness.

It's engineered, it's built, it's decorated,

the piano is waiting to be played.

All that is lacking is a population.

So, why build

such an elaborate-looking town miles from anywhere?

And why is it now abandoned?

For almost a century

the islands of Svalbard have been a part of Norway.

But almost everything on show here suggests a foreign country

was actually in control.

(Dramatic music)

Everywhere you look,

there's a flavour and a really strong hint of the Soviet union

down to the signs, the architecture...

And the bust of Lenin in the town's central square.

It's astonishing to see the head of Lenin

still looking boldly across the town

just as though the Berlin wall never fell.

Named after the strange-shaped mountain

that looms over the buildings,

this is the Soviet town of pyramiden.

At its peak, this was home to more than 1,000 people.

Today, just a handful of volunteers

like galina nosachenko tend the site.

But in fact, they're not alone.

(Eerie music)

Even though the people have left,

the town often sees some quite dangerous visitors.

So, what was it that made people come all the way out here to live?

In the beginning, at least, the answer lay underground...

Coal.

There are lots of countries that were interested in this place

because of the coal

but when you weighed up all the options,

many people thought it wasn't worth it.

But the Soviets felt it was.

It's such an incredibly inhospitable environment

to live in, let alone mine in.

How do you create a settlement there and turn a profit?

(Dramatic music)

The ussr first obtained mining rights here in 1927.

And by the middle of the century, during the cold war era,

it was pouring money into the town.

But the extravagance and opulence suggests

there were other reasons for the huge investment.

As an engineering project,

it wasn't just the basic necessities.

There was a level of luxury to this place that suggested

that there were other reasons for being here.

They don't only bring coal mining equipment and shed,

they build first rate accommodation for everybody.

They make it so that it's easier to live

at this mining station in Svalbard

than it is to live in the ussr itself.

Located over 700 miles from the ussr,

the excellent facilities here

were far superior to any other mining town

behind the iron curtain.

The coal then was not the only reason

the Soviets were here.

Some people believe that there was never enough coal

there to sustain a prosperous town and community.

And that, in fact, it's real purpose all along

was to gain a foothold in the west.

During the tense standoff and stalemate of the cold war,

the Soviets were looking for any opportunity

to gain access to the west.

Since the expansion of the communist territories

after the world war ii,

mistrust between Russia and the usa was at an all-time high.

It was an ideological war

where both sides raced for nuclear and technological superiority.

Throughout the world,

the two super powers began exerting their influence

over smaller countries,

like Svalbard

that might be used for espionage

or as a launch space for nuclear missiles.

Knowing that an all-out war would lead to nuclear oblivion,

the battle for political influence over these proxy countries

became a key battle ground in the cold war

as both sides sought to convince the world

that their very different political systems were superior.

But this place wasn't built for spying or for the military.

This was something different.

This was an opportunity for propaganda,

an opportunity to showcase to the west,

in the west, how communism actually worked.

Building a showpiece city in Svalbard

meant that on Norwegian territory,

in a place theoretically visible to the entire world,

everything that was the best about the Soviet union

could be put on display.

While the money and support lasted,

pyramiden was a beacon of communism.

But when the iron curtain finally lifted in 1991,

reality began to bite.

The original threat caught up with this place

to get to the lucrative coal,

you had to dig deeper and it just wasn't worth it in the end.

The mine was already in a slow decline then,

when a disastrous event involving many of the towns citizens

came to speed its end.

Tragically in 1996,

a plane flying from Moscow crashed on descent to the island.

News reader: Searchers say wreckage

is spread across the top of opera mountain

and there's speculation

they may have been trying to keep below the cloud cover.

In total, 141 people lost their lives.

The community never recovered from this disaster.

The last tonne of coal was finally extracted on march 31st, 1998.

And the last inhabitants left the town for good.

What pyramiden shows us is that you can pour a huge amount of money

into an engineering ambition.

If that engineering ambition doesn't support itself,

it will eventually disintegrate.

On the west coast of the usa

in the shadow of the golden gate bridge

is a rocky bay covered with bizarre remains.

You see this ruin here, you have no idea how old it is.

If you were in the mediterranean,

you might think it dates back to the time of the romans.

This place is intriguing.

At first glance, you just see these weather beaten concrete foundations.

The more you look, the more you see.

It's clearly something that's been built in and around

using the landscape as part of it, but why was that?

This eerie debris extends beyond the cliff tops.

Beneath the rocky shore line,

a series of basins emerge from the waves.

This thing is huge, this is not just one little pool,

this covers an area of about 2 acres.

I mean, it makes you wonder whether it's something to do with ships,

some sort of boatyard-y type thing.

Was it some kind of fish farm or an aquarium?

What was this all for?

And why would an area like this, right on the edge of the ocean,

be chosen for such a huge complex?

There was obviously a reason why they choose that location,

that the sea obviously played an important role in this building.

But building that close to the sea

is always gonna give you trouble.

This coastline construction would have to face the full force

of the mighty pacific

but that was just one of the dangers it faced.

A hundred years ago, this place was full of people

from nearby San Francisco.

In the 19th century, the city was booming

and its growing population had money to spend on leisure and enjoyment.

One business man spotted an opportunity...

Millionaire engineer, Adolph sutro,

bought the land known as niad cove in 1881.

Pacific coast near San Francisco is very rocky with high surf.

Sutra noticed that there were a lot of tide pools

and the waves would wash up on the rocks and flow down.

That gave him an idea.

What if he took some of these natural tide pools

and connected them to a larger man-made pool,

he could turn that into an aquarium.

The first step was to build a basin to collect sea water,

as local historian John Martini explains.

This is where it all began,

at the very tip of point lobos

furthest west point in San Francisco,

the workers blasted away the tip of the point

and they created this basin, they called the wave catch basin.

A hidden tunnel carried that water using just gravity to a tank inland

where spectators could observe the sea creatures within it.

But to construct something so sophisticated

on the edge of a cliff would be a huge challenge.

This was a very dangerous place to work.

You're literally at the edge of the ocean

that could only work at low tide.

And the elements weren't the only threat

to this ambitious plan.

One night, something washed up nearby

that would endanger the whole enterprise

and that could have put an end to sutro's dreams.

We're inside the walls of the original aquarium,

this collapsed section reflects the damage that occurred

when a sailing ship loaded with dynamite wrecked

on the point right out there.

And shortly after midnight,

it blew up with a monstrous explosion,

a huge piece of the ship was sent sailing

through the wall of the aquarium.

With the site not yet completed, it could have been a disaster.

But in fact, sutro used it

as an opportunity to expand his vision.

What sutro had learned from this

is that he'd come up with this system

where he could work with the tides

to fill up pools further inland and that sparked his imagination.

He decided he wanted something more,

he wanted a place where people could actually swim.

The plan sutro was forming

was something on a scale never seen before.

Sutro's plan was audacious.

His word for it was pretentious.

The idea was to build a set of swimming pools

fed by the ocean

but covered under glass, like a giant greenhouse.

These are the remains of the sutro baths.

Sutro envisaged a grand cathedral-like structure

on the shore,

enclosed in 100,000sqft of glass.

As well as sea water pools,

the complex would include over 500 changing rooms,

7 slides and a grand sweeping staircase.

But could sutro's epic plan be made into a reality?

You are building a structure

that has to sort of deal with large waves, small waves,

depending on what the ocean's doing.

So, it's a real interface between engineering and nature

that was being attempted here.

Who was going to win?

Building so close to the ocean meant nothing

could be taken for granted.

The derelict ruins would suggest that things didn't go to plan.

Sutro made several attempts to contain his pool

and at first, they kept getting washed away by the storms.

It was only with the construction of a monumental concrete wall,

9ft deep and 285ft long,

that workers were able to begin building the rest of the complex.

It wasn't just a single big pool, it was subdivided.

There were five smaller pools,

one, two, three, four, five

that were heated to different temperatures,

the warmest one was the one that was right behind me

but was closest to the power house.

5 boilers heated up to 2 million gallons of water

bought in from the ocean,

which was then released into the different pools.

Overall, the building was able to accommodate

up to 10,000 people.

Sutro had created the world's largest indoor swimming baths.

When the sutro baths opened in 1894,

people were just overwhelmed.

The scale of the place was just so huge.

You know, sutro said that union square in San Francisco,

the big downtown park could fit inside this building.

It wasn't just a pool, it was an amphitheatre.

He knew that not everyone would want to swim,

some people just came and watched the swimmers,

so he had rows and rows of seats.

The entire place was decorated like some kind of lovely fantasy land.

Sutro did nothing half way.

Not only was it beautiful, but it was also genius.

When the tide was high, the water would come into the bath,

and then obviously when the tide became low,

it would take the water with it.

And in that way, he had built a self regulating swimming pool

that would refresh with the tides twice every day.

The baths were a great success.

So, why is there so little left of them today?

This building did not have an easy life,

it's on the coast, so it was battered by storms.

And although they didn't know it yet,

it's one of the world's most dangerous areas

in terms of earthquakes.

News reader: The west coast city of San Francisco

was struck by a violent earthquake in 1906.

Although it lasted less than a minute,

75% of the city was destroyed, but not the sutro baths.

They survived an earthquake,

so what was it that bought about their end?

This beautiful building that had been able

to withstand an earthquake

but also decades of being that close to the sea

was finally destroyed in a bizarre twist of fate by fire.

In 1966, a fire broke out here.

Fanned by strong winds, it quickly turned in to a raging inferno.

And within hours, the once magnificent baths

were raised to the ground.

It's often the thing around the corner

that you're not expecting that leads to the demise

and end of what were really quite fantastical ideas

that someone put in to an engineering masterpiece.

Today, the site is maintained by the national park service.

And although they're long gone, the baths still fascinate people.

As one person said,

"you know, San Francisco is a very young city,

"we don't have a lot of ruins.

"But by god, these are our ruins."

And every day hundreds, if not, thousands of people

are crawling around,

basically trying to figure out what was this place.

At the southern tip of Australia, on the island of tasmania

is a collection of imposing buildings.

At first glance, this looks like a grand site,

a royal or aristocratic home

but there's more here than meets the eye.

In all of this lush vegetation

to see what looks like a created ruin

of a medieval Abbey

with all of its dormitories and workshops and church,

it's a little bit strange.

It's a bewildering mix of buildings,

different sizes and shapes.

It looks as if it might have had some factory or warehouse purpose,

there's even a feeling of something slightly sinister about it.

It doesn't quite, as a building and an ensemble, make sense.

It really feels like you're at the very edge of the world.

You get the sense that whoever designed this place

wanted to isolate its population from everyone else.

Why build such a diverse group of structures

in this far-flung location?

Behind their grand facades,

these buildings hide a darker purpose.

It's odd how only a few dilapidated buildings

can take a gorgeous scene of beautiful countryside

and turn it into something that feels

gas though there's deep human misery involved.

This became one of the most feared places in the region.

No-one wanted to end up here and if you did,

it was likely you would never leave.

Why did this remote place strike terror

into the hearts of all who knew it?

Although buildings are on the edge of the southern hemisphere,

their roots lay 10,000 miles away in britain.

In the 18th century,

new punishments for crimes were being introduced

and the British courts began sentencing convicts

to transportation to the country's new colonies.

Because people were starting to view capital punishment

as unfair and inhumane,

instead of hanging people

who were repeat offenders or serious criminals,

we'd just send them away.

Originally, the eastern seaboard of america

was the destination of choice for britain's prisoners.

They would send them to penile colonies there

such as that in what became the state of Georgia.

But that system was forced to change after 1783.

After the American war of independence,

britain had to completely rethink its penile policy,

as it could no longer send convicts there.

So, in that new world,

Australia became the epicentre of its deportation programme

and some of the worst offenders

from the British empire were sent to Australia.

In 1770,

British explorer captain cook had landed in botany bay,

christening it new south wales.

Transportation to Australia began just 18 years later.

And the authorities weren't exactly short of people to deport.

The urbanisation of britain,

especially during the industrial revolution,

saw crimes both petty and serious sharply increase.

Eventually this new location would hold over 165,000 people

from across the British empire,

becoming effectively the empire's largest prison.

Before long, penile colonies

had been established all across this vast southern continent.

And here in tasmania was the largest and the most infamous of them all...

Port Arthur.

It was designed to be escape proof,

there was only one passage to the mainland

and the water was full of sharks.

And that one passage to the mainland had fences,

armed guards and even half-starved dogs

to ensure security.

Located on a remote peninsula surrounded on 3 sides by water,

the port Arthur penal colony held 9,000

of the British empire's most dangerous prisoners.

Port Arthur became notorious for two sorts of offenders.

Repeat offenders,

those who willingly chose not to be reformed

and continue their life of crime,

and those who committed some of the most heinous offences.

This place is an idealistic settlement for prisoners

and the idea is that we'll allow the prisoners

through work to redeem themselves.

This was the site of a giant experiment

which tested out a cutting-edge approach to criminal justice.

One of the driving ideas of this new thinking

was productivity,

the idea that if people could be made to be useful,

then they would feel some purpose.

So, in addition to being a prison facility,

it also became,

in a very major sense, a production site.

Port Arthur was an industrial prison

where convicts were used for forced labour.

For the prisoners who cut timber, built ships and ground grain,

conditions were harsh.

One of the worst jobs was in the flour mill

as historical archaeologist Richard tuffin explains.

So, this wall that we're looking at is the treadwheel wall,

this is where there was a big wheel

and that had 56 men on it at any one time

and they would be turning the wheel and grinding the grain.

These guys were doing thousands of steps per day.

So, it was an incredibly harsh punishment.

You also have this economic element as they are just grinding the grain,

making the flour that is going in to the rations for the convicts.

But the port Arthur system didn't just involve physical punishment.

Central to the rehabilitation of the prisoners

was psychological treatment.

Behind this new thinking

were the ideas of one man in particular,

Jeremy Bentham,

who urged the world to think

that beatings and floggings

only entrenched criminal behaviour

and that the world had to find another way

to try and deal with, minimise and repurpose criminals.

This might have been seen as a softening of the system.

But the new rehabilitation methods were just as extreme.

At the edge of the colony

is the building known as the separate prison.

This facility is for the people

who are too rough

for the regular prisoners in tasmania.

In this facility, the prisoners are kept under constant observation,

in solitary confinement, in thick walled cells.

Prisoners wore hoods,

they weren't allowed to communicate with other prisoners.

It was a psychologically brutal system,

they were locked up for 23 hours a day in isolation

and total silence was imposed on them at all times.

This is the solitary punishment cell of the separate prison.

So, whilst convicts will be kept in the cells for 23 hours

in the separate prison,

those who continued to misbehave

would be bought into this cell

which was a punishment cell in solitary confinement.

They would be in here for up to 48 hours on bread and water,

there were 4 doors, very thick walls,

no-one could hear them scream out

if they were in this place,

and what they would do is shut the doors

and they would be left in the dark.

To encourage the convicts to reflect on their crimes,

silence and isolation were enforced everywhere.

The prisoners are sent to church for their improvement,

obvious thing to do,

but we don't want the prisoners to see each other.

So, their church pews are built as little stalls,

they can see the minister, they can listen to the sermon

but they can't look at or listen to the other prisoners.

It's hard to imagine a more dramatic stripping away

of identity of sense of self,

you must have felt that you were truly alone in the world.

So, what became of the convicts who were sent to port Arthur?

Some of these prisoners survived

and were trained as craftsmen

and became part of the permanent population of the colony.

For those who weren't so lucky,

there was a cemetery on the campus as well,

known as the isle of the dead.

And over 1,000 convicts had known to be buried there,

the vast majority in unmarked graves.

Transportation from britain was ended in the 1850s.

And in 1877, Australia's largest and most infamous prison

was closed down.

But port Arthur quickly got a new lease of life.

As soon as it closed, the public flocked in as tourists,

eager to see and experience

what the convicts had been put through.

The historic site was turned into a popular open-air museum

and port Arthur reverted to being a peaceful corner of tasmania.

But one last act of terrible savagery

would take place there.

(Siren wails)

In 1996, port Arthur became

the site of the deadliest mass shooting in Australian history.

Thirty five people were killed by a lone gunman.

The atrocity shook Australia to the core.

Within four months, the government put major gun reform in place...

And automatic and semi automatic weapons were banned.

Gun laws were imposed and over a million weapons

were handed in to the Australian government

and destroyed.

The massacre at port Arthur had changed Australia forever.

Today, it's one of Australia's most important historic sites.

But the grim memories of the suffering

that took place here remain.

In the steep hills of southern Germany,

outside the bavarian city of nuremberg

lie the overgrown remains

of a monumental construction project.

If you're going through an ancient sacred forest,

the last thing you expect is for the woods to end,

where someone has scraped away the forest

and left almost no trees behind.

The forest is littered with solid lumps of stone.

If I saw this in a town,

I'd think I was looking at the ruins of a building

that had been demolished.

What you're seeing makes you think

of ruins of ancient Roman or Greek cities

that you might find in Asia minor.

What was once the acropolis of a city.

But this site has a dark past

which is linked to an evil regime's epic plans.

The layout of these blocks suggests that

this was part of something that could be much larger.

Does the unique situation of these structures hint

at why they were built?

They are dispersed over an almost vertical slope.

When you stumble across them,

you kind of wonder

what the purpose of this stepped formation up a hill was for.

It's strange, it's weird.

Why would somebody put this much cement

in the middle of the woods?

The story begins 20 miles west

of these neglected ruins in nuremberg,

a city that was central to the Nazi vision of Adolph Hitler.

(Dramatic music)

The nazification of Germany began in 1934,

when after the death of president Paul Von hindenburg,

Hitler combined the offices

and powers of the chancellery and the presidency.

And a national referendum confirmed him as fuhrer.

In a country battered by the great depression,

Hitler ended the scourge of mass unemployment

through a programme of extensive public works

which famously included the construction of the autobahns

and by enormously increasing military spending.

When the Nazis start to have

their great big political pep rallies,

they have them in nuremberg.

The Nazi party develop the idea of nuremberg

as almost the capital of the Aryan race.

It made the regime increasingly popular,

a seemingly endless tide of pro Nazi propaganda

orchestrated by Joseph goebbels

rammed home the message to the public.

Slowly but surely,

the insidious evils of the Nazi creed

began to take hold of Germany.

It was helped by the fiery oratory of Hitler himself

and the mass rallies which were held at nuremberg

became powerful

and frightening symbols of Nazi might.

Hitler loved his German history and as a German nationalist.

By making nuremberg the centre for the Nazi party rallying days,

he is hearkening back very, very directly

to the first reich

which lasted 1,000 years and which created the German nation.

Nuremberg was the most important stage

to present the Nazi party

and it was the central cultic space for the Nazi movement.

They wanted to show the whole world and the Germans, too,

that they are a movement who can speak for the whole people.

There's one leader and the people stands behind him.

To show the world that the third reich

intended dominating Europe forever,

Hitler ordered the complex of grand edifices

that glorified the Nazi regime to be built.

The final building was to be a national stadium

of truly epic scale.

The ambition for this project

was to create massive auditorium space

that could house 405,000 people.

This was gonna be a stadium

as big as the four largest stadiums in the United States today.

No stadium in the world has ever been

as big as this new German stadium was going to be.

But first, it had to be built.

The vast scale of the deutsches stadion

or German stadium would be a challenge for Nazi architect

and close ally of Hitler, Albert spear.

To be able to create a structure like this

was a real statement of power and dominance and authority.

But what does this have to do with the concrete ruins on the hill

in the woods 20 miles from nuremberg?

Spear realised that to build the stadium,

he would first need a prototype.

Historian doctor Alexander schmidt has investigated the site.

What we have here is a concrete wall,

it's part of the foundation of the whole wooden construction

for the visitor benches.

You have to imagine that

there are long benches for the visitors

and the hill is without any trees,

so you have free sight to the bottom.

(Dramatic drum roll)

In 1937, work began on a life-size model

and this was the test site.

In the Nazi times,

you have here a realistic one-to-one-scale model

of the biggest stadium of the world.

It was important to test out the concept of building

such an enormous stadium,

look at things like sight lines and seating.

But if they'd had to build all of the structures

that would have to hold up the new German stadium,

it would have taken forever

and it would have used way too much material.

So, what the Germans did was they found a hill

that was just the right angle to simulate the angle

that they wanted the stadium to be at when they finished it.

Building a scale model

allows you to improve the design,

but building on an actual test site

allows you to really experience what it would be like.

For 18 months, hundreds of workers laboured to construct

this enormous prototype.

The end result was five levels of bleachers

capable of holding thousands of people.

But only one person could sign off on the final design.

Albert spear comes with Hitler

and he needs his permission to go on,

and Hitler was only here one day

on this 21 march, 1938,

Hitler said, "ok, we do it."

The sinister reason behind Hitler's determination to construct

such a vast stadium

lies in his plans for world domination.

When it was completed,

the German stadium in nuremberg

would provide the perfect location

to demonstrate the unrivalled strength of the reich.

Nazi ideology requires eternal war,

the Aryan race has got to keep on fighting

in order to perfect itself.

This is the concept from the beginning.

If you wanted a war against the whole world,

then you have to have soldiers.

Once they conquered all of the surrounding nations,

once they killed all of the Jews and gypsies

and Russians and everybody,

what would they do to continue to fight?

They would hold life-and-death war games

where they came together in this massive stadium

for the pleasure of the German people

and the continued improvement of the Aryan race.

This stadium was the place to celebrate this aim.

You only are a good German

if you can fight as a young man.

But these ruins are all that remain of this terrifying vision

of Aryan dominance.

When war broke out, the building of the stadium in nuremberg

was put on hold and then eventually abandoned.

Today, the concrete foundations are being reclaimed by nature.

Ironically, the wooden bleachers that once stood here

have since helped repair some of the damage

caused by the Nazi regime.

The wood here is after the war,

used for rebuilding a little village here nearby,

achtel was destroyed at the end of the war

and this is a very better use for this wood

than for a senseless one-to-one scale of the German stadium.

Now, they lie abandoned,

but once, they were the cutting edge of engineering.

There are echoes of history within these decaying structures.

They remind us of terror and war

but also of great innovation and human endeavour.

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