Original subtitles

Tom ward (narrates): Italian ruins that bought war

to the big screen.

And the fear must have been

reeking out of everybody's pores.

They weren't in Hollywood anymore.

A striking relic hidden in a Scottish forest.

You come upon

this kind of mind blowing set of buildings

that don't look like anything you'd expect to see here.

And an isolated desert town in Chile

where progress turned to horror.

Over time that isolation was mobilised

for different and more sinister purposes.

And a compound in Germany

that saw an old technology come to the rescue.

It looks imposing from outside but if you get right down to it,

it's really a great illusion in many respects.

Decaying relics.

Ruins of lost worlds.

Sites haunted by the past,

their secrets waiting to be revealed.

Hidden deep within a Scottish forest

is an enchanting structure with uncertain origins.

As you approach through the forest

and across this old bridge you start to catch glimpses

of something massive and stark.

And then out of the foliage emerges something almost other worldly.

Its bold design and strange mix of spaces

seems to defy explanation.

With its stacks of concrete floors,

parts of it look a little bit like a high tech parking garage

but maybe one that's survived a neutron bomb.

These semi dome structures look like fingers pointing upwards,

almost as if they're hands

cradling the structure from each side.

At the end of this large open hall with the dappled light beaming in,

it really does feel like a, a magical spiritual space.

The architects wanted it to become a work of art

rather than just a utilitarian structure.

But was it cursed right from the start?

This was a place of great hope

but it barely lasted the blink of an eye

before it was abandoned.

Today, this place is known

to many as nothing more than a spell binding ruin.

Architectural historian Diane watters

has spent 25 years uncovering its lost story.

What it is now is so unrelated to what it originally was,

it's become a kind of mythical romantic ruin

of international status

and it's become a focus of artists and...

And writers and historians.

This is one of if not the most famous

modern buildings in Scotland,

yet few people even know what it was used for.

Amongst all the angular concrete and cavernous interiors

there is something here that feels out of place.

Right at the back of the main structure

are these foundations

of what looks to have been quite a grand building

but they seem strangely close together.

You know I first came here in 1994

while this building was still standing.

Soon after 1994

it was actually burnt down completely

and then once this building had gone the design rationale

for the whole extension had disappeared.

And the modern extension stands on its own.

But what linked these two very different structures?

There is one purpose,

one cultural function that has probably produced

more grand soaring structures

than any other single activity through history.

This is where the story of st Peters cad Ross began in 1948

when it was the first home of the training of the priests

for the catholic church.

After the second world war

the number of young men signing up to a life in the church

was on the rise.

It was decided that they needed a new bigger school

for all the people they expected to be training for the priesthood.

And there was an immense sense of...

Of optimism amongst church officers

and this structure was meant to be the physical embodiment

of that future.

Construction began in 1961

but behind this futuristic design lies an ancient concept.

The layout is actually based on the historic building

so the idea was to create a cloister,

a kind of medieval like cloister around the historic building.

It's function seems almost ancient and monastic

and it's architectural forms are stunningly modern

so there's this kind of contrast between the style

and the function of the building.

The main building is a key element that forms a courtyard

with the wings angling off of it.

And all the different parts of the college

were supposed to interact with this original building.

The first trainee priests arrived here in 1966,

much of their time was spent in contemplation and prayer.

These are what are commonly called the fingers

but actually they are side chapels for the trainee priests

to have private prayer.

And this cavernous space at the heart of the complex

was devoted to the main service.

Mass.

Here we are in the middle of what was the chapel,

the main chapel,

what the architects called the colonel

of the whole complex.

The sides here we would have the trainee priests

sitting in pews along here with the focus on the main alter.

And that's the most dramatic space in the complex

highlighted by these remarkable stone alters.

But with its striking form came a problem.

The building looks incredible and almost space age in style

but practically speaking it was in many ways a disaster.

There's fantastic accounts in the student magazine

of coming down and this whole central area of the,

of the chapel being underwater.

What you also see here is something that

isn't that uncommon with ground breaking architecture,

they still had a few bugs to work out.

The heat didn't work that well, the windows were cold and draughty,

there were leaks, it was damp, kind of mouldy.

Yet it wasn't design flaws that spelled disaster here.

A momentous decision made over 1,000 miles away

doom st Peters seminary before it even opened its doors.

And it came from the very top.

During the second Vatican council which ran from 1962 to 1965

it was determined that the training of priests

would be more a visible part of the community.

They decided they should be learning among the people

they would ultimately serve as priests.

So, st Peters seminary didn't really reflect that.

As vast cultural changes swept across Europe in the 1960s

the catholic church moved to bring themselves more in line

with the modern world

but with construction already underway,

st Peters would be left behind.

It was here out in the woods in this beautiful quiet setting

but it certainly wasn't part of the community

and engaged in public life

the way that priests were now expected to be.

I interviewed priests who taught here

and what they said from the very beginning is that

there were far too many alters,

the ideas from the second Vatican council

had been that you were to...

To preach together with the community

in groups of priests rather than solitary praying

so they almost became redundant from the very beginning.

By the time it was finished it was already out of date

and basically doomed to failure.

St Peters limped on as a seminary for only 14 years,

after it was abandoned

and the old house at its heart had burned down,

it became its best known self.

The beguiling ruins in the forest.

In many ways it's become much more celebrated as a ruin,

as an abandoned building

than it ever was as a functioning complex.

It attracts visitors from all over the world,

curious about its original purpose

and it has a cult status among architects

and urban explorers alike.

Today, after years of campaigning

to preserve this iconic structure hope is on the horizon.

What do you do about a work of architecture

that was really ground breaking and important in its time

but never really delivered its purpose?

Do you repurpose it?

Do you save it?

Do you turn it in to something new?

Not every ambitious building succeeds in its initial purpose

but that doesn't mean they all need to be torn down.

Currently a charitable trust is trying to develop a new vision

with education at its core.

In the Italian mountains is a quiet village

made famous on the silver screen.

It all looks exactly

like what you'd expect central Italy to look like.

Olive groves, rolling hills,

mountains and beautiful old historic villages.

Except for this Italian village is a ghost town,

we see the remains of a battle scarred church

and we see sort of tumbled down homes and shops

all along these old winding lanes.

As you move through the village

you can see that the old stone houses

have been absolutely smashed,

you can still see fragments

of what must have been roof beams or furniture,

everything has become a sort of chaotic ruin.

The story of this place is tied to a man

who came here 80 years ago.

He was used to bending other people to his will,

he was the ruler of the crew

and assaulted the surrounding mountains.

These chaotic ruins and its hard-nosed visitor

set the stage for an audacious deception,

one that would cement this decaying village

in history forever.

Historian gaetano de angelis Curtis

has come to tell the story of the place he knows so well.

This scene that captured gaetano's imagination

was the site of a fierce battle,

one that was witnessed by millions in a ground breaking documentary.

In the end of October 1943 until the middle of December,

San Pietro and the surrounding ground

was the scene of some of the bitterest fighting

on our 5th army front.

Nothing like this had really been seen,

this kind of combat footage

you know, raw and honest including the...

The death and destruction.

No-one had really seen it in quite like this.

And the film was replete with you know, scenes of heroism,

it showed you know, gritty American gi's struggling

against heavy German fire.

So, for Americans, this was a good story

because they saw American boys

succeeding in defeating the Nazis in Europe.

And for Italians this was a story

of getting back their national self respect.

The film was praised by Hollywood's best

but this documentary was a lie.

Two years earlier an American serviceman came to Italy

with a very special assignment.

His name was John Houston.

John Houston was an interesting figure

you know, he was a guy who had been working in Hollywood

after drifting around america as a boxer, a painter, an actor

but then he really finds his metier in Hollywood.

Houston's first movies had been a success

so in 1943 he was deployed to Italy

to make documentaries of the allied victory.

So, Houston says I'm going to go up in the mountains,

I'm going to go to a place like San Pietro

where the fighting is heaviest

and I'm going to film the battle there

for the American home front.

But he missed it.

When Houston and his crew arrived at San Pietro

they were bombarded by German shelling.

The Germans have already withdrawn but it's a careful tactical withdraw

just to the northern rim of hills beyond the village

so they're still firing on San Pietro,

German artillery is still in position.

They took cover with the sheltering residents.

After several long hours the shelling stopped.

So, once the Germans have covered their retreat

to their next defensive line

the German artillery switches off

and at that point the villagers of San Pietro

are able to move back out in to the fresh air

and John Houston and his crew are able to move out with them.

When Houston emerges from these caves he looks around,

he shoots some b roll of corpses and shattered buildings

and shell casings but there's no real combat going on.

The battle of San Pietro was over, Houston had missed his moment.

So, Houston has the idea

I've got all these gi's milling around

that have been through the battle,

that they remember what it was like

and the experience is fresh in their minds.

Ok, I'm going to recreate the battle of San Pietro.

So, armed with a stock of film and a cast of soldiers,

Houston's cameras started rolling

on a reconstruction of the battle of San Pietro.

So, they're firing their weapons,

they're taking cover from incoming German fire,

they're flinging grenades,

he took care to use concussion grenades

not fragmentation grenades

but the viewer can't tell the difference

and he kind of recreates the harrowing mood of the place.

He instructs these gi's to occasionally turn

and look directly at the camera

so as to like communicate to the stress they're under,

the strain of battle.

And it gives it a really immediate effect,

all of which become trademarks of this you know,

award winning battle of San Pietro film.

Some 200 yards forward,

they encountered mines and automatic fire from pillboxes.

In the heat of battle the camera pans,

an allied soldier is shot, he falls.

Everyone in the cinema is shocked,

they have just watched the extinction of a human life.

And then Houston shouts cut and the guy gets back up again.

But not everything that Houston captured

at San Pietro was fake.

The grim toll of the battle of San Pietro

was caught on film

and real soldiers being wrapped up

and eventually shipped home...

That was part of the reality of war

being communicated to American's back home.

The military brass initially didn't like that

they kept pushing them to change it to soften it,

they didn't want the people back home

or the troops in training to see these images of...

Of young Americans who'd been, been cut down in this battle.

And there was something else that Houston captured for real.

An aspect of this film that is not stage

is the relief of the survivors,

you see these children and adults coming out of hiding

where they've been in the caves

to avoid the allied and German bombardments

and they come in to their shattered town

and they're kind of milling around in the rubble of their old homes

and shops and church.

But they're beaming, they're happy

because for them at least the war is really over.

At the end of the war,

Houston's San Pietro was shown across the United States and Italy,

it was praised for its depiction of a fight to the death

between good and evil

but John Houston kept the secret of his documentary

to the end of his life.

A lot of people criticised Houston later

when it came out how little of the film

had really been shot documentary style

and about his dishonesty and how he portrayed the film

but director Martin scorsese later said that...

He was working in a service of a greater truth, a harder truth.

In eastern Germany on the outskirts of Berlin

is an entire village that's fallen silent.

The trees do a pretty good job

of hiding just how extensive this site is.

That you can still just about see the tops of the buildings

poking out above the canopy.

It is a major facility

of some kind surrounded by a great wall.

What I see here is a lot of utilitarian buildings,

almost as though they're big sheds up close to each other.

And the outside walls are littered with revealing details.

Some of the walls have plagues or stone carvings on the outside

which hint at how this place might have been used.

You have these beautiful murals

on the various buildings all relating to the animal kingdom.

There might be some kind of zoo or animal husbandry function

to this sprawling facility.

So, who or what was it all built to house?

The story of what happened here

has not travelled far even to this day,

its secrets remain

only in the hands of a few keen locals.

Brigitte baumann is one of them.

And it's the grand nature of this place

that makes it so intriguing.

These buildings are really starting to fall apart inside.

But they still maintain a sense of grandeur.

We've got gorgeous lavish rooms,

clearly built to impress people.

And when you look at them empty they make me feel chilly.

This was once the grand krampnitz cavalry school.

A lot of really famous German generals

come through krampnitz to complete their training.

In the 1936 Olympics

the German's get gold and silver medals

in events like show jumping and dressage

so there's this real cavalry tradition in Germany.

But this luxurious world would soon be tipped upside down.

With the arrival of the second world war

the old traditions here were supplanted by new technologies.

There needs to be a place to train people

to do the old horse cavalry tasks

and that's going to be done now by soldiers

in fast moving reconnaissance vehicles and light tanks.

Instead of horses.

The age of the German tank known as the panzer had arrived.

Krampnitz quickly developed to prioritise training

of these new armoured vehicles.

In a way the panzers are attacking in the style

of the old shock cavalry

where you'd have this heavy cavalry

with steel breast plates galping at the enemy.

They could cross ditches and crush barbed wire,

there was no denying it,

toe to toe with a horse the panzer

was by far the meaner beast on the battle field.

Panzers played the key role in a revolutionary new tactic

called blitz...

Or lightening war.

The armour forces

in the German army are not just tanks.

They're fast moving tanks with radios,

that means that a German tank commander

handles his tanks differently from everybody else.

These armoured spearheads that will rip through the enemy line

and be followed by infantry

that will come in quickly behind them

to consolidate the victory.

At first, this achieved great success

but when Hitler turned his tanks towards the vast expanses of Russia,

their fatal flaw would be revealed.

Advancing wasn't a problem for the Germans in Russia,

the real challenge was waiting

for the vital supplies of food and fuel to catch up.

Panzers are only as good as the logistical train

that's following them,

the fuel trucks,

the motorised infantry

that has to be able to keep up with the panzers

so they don't get surrounded and isolated and,

and picked apart by anti tank weapons.

The freezing temperatures

also played havoc with all the German vehicles,

the engines just gave up

and turned whatever they were powering

in to huge road blocks.

But the vast distances

and the horrific weather on the eastern front

exposed a more fundamental weakness in the Nazi war machine.

The German army of world war two

it's really a great illusion in many respects,

it looks imposing from outside but if you get right down to it...

It has these kind of gleaming armoured spearheads

but the rest of it is, is really a 19th century army.

To keep their armies progressing,

the Germans relied on some unlikely heroes.

And many were trained here at krampnitz.

A horse could carry on

as long as you put good shoes on them,

they get on through mud,

a horse didn't need to have its fuel

delivered from Romania or Germany,

a horse could eat the local grain, the local fodder.

Despite the Nazi's grand ambitions for mechanised superiority,

in reality their armies depended heavily on horses.

One of the great ironies of the war,

of course, is that you know, the panzer gets all the credit

and yet at the end of these long supply lines

the panzers are often being kept in the field

by long lines of horse drawn fuel trucks.

More than 80% of the German combat strength

was pulled by these beasts of burden.

But despite the best efforts of the 625,000 pack horses

active on the eastern front,

the Nazis advance crumbled.

Leaving 300,000 soldiers trapped behind enemy lines at stalingrad.

The German soldiers

were unable to look after themselves never mind their animals,

they couldn't keep shoes on their feet

and food in their bellies.

So, without food,

many of the Nazi soldiers

ate the only things that were available to them.

They ate rats and, of course, before that, they ate the horses.

Eventually, the Soviets would push the Nazi forces

all the way back to within 15 miles of here,

capturing Berlin and ending the war...

And while the common soldier was left to fend for themselves

the prized horses and trophies at krampnitz

were handed over to American troops.

Though it was Hitler that ordered the Nazi armies on...

To the eastern front, it was not he who suffered there.

Not only did the German soldier die

in the service of their insane fuhre,

it meant that the German horse innocently died

in the service of their insane fuhre.

Deep within the atacoma desert,

isolated from the modern world sits a time capsule of Chile's past.

From the dust of this expansive desert,

suddenly there's this sprawling town.

The whole place is derelict as far as the eye can see.

There's an industrial section, there's retail,

there's residential.

This is or at least this was a proper community.

Set in one of the most inhospitable places on earth,

why would anyone choose to make this their home?

There's a real feeling of utter isolation.

In this town...

No-one can hear you scream.

There has to have been a reason for being there

and these reasons usually revolve around some sort of resource.

This explains the industrial machinery

but there are some things here that don't add up.

When you look around the perimeter

you see that people took the trouble to put minefields down.

This place was designed with a utopian vision of the future

but by the end it became a nightmare.

Local researcher, Luis Enrique silva guerrero,

knows the difficulties of living in this harsh climate.

Looking to the horizon, the north south east and west,

the only thing you see is dryness.

It is in a place that calls man, er, to settle down here,

er, it's very hostile.

It would have been no small feat to basically build this site,

there's almost no natural resources to sustain itself on its own.

And yet there has to have been something,

something there in the ground that makes it worthwhile

but what exactly was it?

But if you know what to look for,

the reason for chacabuco existence is in plain sight.

Over there you can see the deposits of nitrate.

In the early 19th century

it was discovered that nitrates known as salt Peter

were a miracle fertiliser.

Here the concentration of salt Peter

was actually at the surface so it was very, very easy to mine.

The raw material went through those tunnels

in to the crushing machine

and once it was crushed in fine pieces

it was transported to that building over there.

These huge vats of boiling water

were used to gradually dissolve the chemicals

out of the pulverised rocks.

All of these pipes and networks and so on are part of this process

by which you're able to try and purify the ore

then essentially reprocess and reprocess

along different sections

to completely purify the final product.

With a global intensification in agriculture,

the demand for salt Peter sky rocketed.

Chacabuco became a boom town.

The mine became very successful

in fact some of the other local areas

were bringing some of their resource to the mine to be processed

because it was actually that efficient

at being able to generate the ore.

And it wasn't just the industry here that was revolutionary.

This town was created

with a sort of corporate welfare vision,

that if we can pull the worker away

from cramped living conditions in the city

and provide them with clean living arrangements

and leisure time then they might be better workers

and they might be healthier.

They were provided for, they were looked after,

they had lovely houses, they had shops,

they had a church, they had a community centre,

they had a theatre.

But there is evidence that life here was not entirely utopian.

What's interesting about the layout of this town

is that it seems like it's almost designed

to surveil the people there,

that at the centre of this community you have the tallest buildings

with the tallest roof tops

and from there they can almost see the inner workings

of everything going on in their community.

We now know that the people who lived in this community

were being watched

and we have records of peoples intimate lives

being surveiled by company security.

They maintained records

of which house was making too much noise

or causing too much trouble

or other instances where workers

were passing out socialist newspapers.

But corporate surveillance

was nothing compared to what came next.

Before too long

this community became something very different, a darker place.

The last kind of vestiges of life

that you can see in and around the buildings

is the graffiti...

And this is graffiti of a very political nature.

In 1938 the industry here ground to a halt.

And the town was left to the elements.

But in 1973, everything changed.

Allegedly with support from the CIA a right wing group launched a coup,

their leader Augusto pinochet.

Augusto pinochet was a ruthless dictator,

he controlled Chile in a way that was brutal,

it was repressive.

Pinochet's political opponents could be anyone

but it could also be their families and also their children.

Anyone who disagreed

with the new juntor quickly vanished.

And where better to make people disappear

than in the middle of a desert.

So, not only were the buildings already there

but you didn't have to go far from the buildings

and you were in the harshest driest desert on the planet,

it became the ideal place to lock people away,

away from prying eyes.

And these homes that used to belong to individuals

suddenly became great cells for prisoners.

Roberto sepulveda is part of the organisation

that now preserves chacabuco.

From the moment the prisoners arrived,

conditions were brutal.

Most of the prisoners faced harassment

and few had enough rations to barely keep them alive.

So, people who were held here were expendable

as far as the Chilean regime was concerned.

At its height over 1,000 people were held here,

most of them innocent...

But their spirit of resistance is etched in to the walls.

The concentration camp at chacabuco was closed after only two years

and the authorities quickly tried to cover up what they did here.

They stripped away a lot of the evidence

and they tried to purify this place.

Today, chacabuco lies derelict

but it's history of pioneering industry

and cruel repression leaves a complicated legacy.

It's important to remember

some of the unsavoury elements of history

so that we can continue to learn from them,

that we can see warning signs of authoritarianism

when we see them again.

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