Original subtitles

In Poland, an imperial bastion

provides the backdrop for powerful propaganda in the US.

A successful film in favour of the Germans

could really have changed the course of the war.

In New Jersey, a powder keg of injustice set to explode.

In those conditions it wouldn't take much to kick off a riot.

A remote outpost in Namibia

built to exploit the desert's riches.

A discovery in these dunes changed this region for ever.

And in England,

a haven of privilege harbours radical fugitives.

It was a common occurrence to have the police knocking on the door.

Decaying relics,

ruins of lost worlds,

sites haunted by the past,

their secrets waiting to be revealed.

In central Poland are the battered remains of a once-feared complex.

You've got this big walled facility hulking over the river.

Really what's striking is the variety of styles.

This was clearly something that was worked on over the ages.

You can see casemates designed to protect gun emplacements

and ammunition storage.

We can see all of the signs that this is military construction.

Inside you have these rows of beds,

and it's clear this place could have really held

thousands and thousands of people.

You really are well prepared to guard the entire region.

This was once a key battleground in an era-defining conflict,

a place you wouldn't expect to find a pair of outsiders from the US.

Two Americans and their sports car

happened to be pinned right in the middle of a war

between two great powers.

Yet their mission could have dramatically changed the outcome.

It had the potential

to bring the United States into the First World War

on the German side.

Elzbieta Wiercinska knows the secrets of this imposing structure.

This is Modlin Fortress.

Its origin dates back to the early 1800s,

when Europe's great powers fought for control of this region.

Napoleon defeats the Kingdom of Prussia in 1806

and then he takes possession of much of what is today Poland.

As Napoleon's power grew, he looked to dominate even further east.

Napoleon is going to invade Russia in 1812,

and he needs a firm base

to push off from, to attack.

So he starts to build this fortress

with all of the very best French military technology.

However, the Russians captured the fort in 1813, only a year later,

after pushing back Napoleon's advance.

And so this state-of-the-art French fort

suddenly becomes a state-of-the-art Russian fort,

and they modernise the fortress

to oppose any reconquest from the west.

For the next century, Modlin Fortress and its surrounding area

remained firmly under the control of tsarist Russia.

But in 1914, when the First World War broke out,

it found itself on the front line

between the warring German and Russian empires.

A year in to the global conflict, this far-flung stronghold

was thrust into the international spotlight

thanks to a brash journalist from Chicago,

Wilbur H Durborough.

He was working for the Newspaper Enterprise Association,

and they decided they needed a man on the front,

and Durborough leapt at that chance.

He wants the new medium of cinema

to become a tool of documentation.

He is going to create a documentary

about World War One on the eastern front.

But Durborough wasn't going to cover the war from the perspective

of the allied forces of Russia, Britain and France.

He was going to embed with the Germans,

who had their own motives for granting him access.

This was a really interesting time in American history

because the United States was still neutral in World War One.

American entry into the war on the side of Britain is not guaranteed.

But English-language propaganda coming from London

all about German war crimes,

some of which are true,

is turning American public opinion against Germany.

The last thing Germany needed was for the US to join the war

in support of Russia's ally, Great Britain.

The German government wants American journalists

to the tell the German side of World War One in America.

A successful propaganda film in favour of the Germans

could really change the course of the war.

In March 1915, Durborough and his camera operator, Irving Guy Ries,

set sail for Europe.

When they arrived one week later,

the pair drove to Berlin in Durborough's beloved sports car

that he insisted on taking with him,

complete with stars and stripes.

Before long, arrangements were made

to take the filmmakers to the eastern front of the war.

By July 1915, German forces are pushing Russians back,

and Durborough and Ries are right there with them.

We're getting a real glimpse of everyday life

of German armies in action on the eastern front.

But as the Germans advanced, one thing stood in their way -

Modlin Fortress.

This was really one of the biggest, most impressive,

most modern fortifications of its day.

In theory, it should have been an impregnable fortress.

Modlin had been designed not only to protect the soldiers inside

but to withstand a drawn-out siege.

They built this water tower but they disguised it,

using decorative facade to kind of camouflage it from the enemy.

They also built a grain storage facility

in the middle of the river,

which was a really cool idea

because this meant the grain was safe from any invading forces.

So the Russians had provisioned this fortress

to hold out against the Germans for months.

A victory at Modlin Fortress

would be a massive military success for Germany.

But officers knew their troops

could be stuck outside in the trenches indefinitely,

while a 90,000-strong Russian garrison

was secure inside the fortress.

A long siege was the last thing that the Germans wanted.

They wanted to make their way to Russia as quickly as they could.

The stalemate was also bad news

for the two US filmmakers embedded with the German army.

So Durborough and Ries face the prospect

of filming hundreds of German soldiers sitting still,

staring at hundreds of Russian soldiers.

The siege of a fortress is going to be terrible film.

German high command had hoped

that compelling coverage of their sophisticated manoeuvres

would help their overall objective

and convince the US to stay out of the war altogether.

As the siege wore on, their hopes were fading fast.

And then the Germans had the most amazing stroke of good fortune.

If you saw this sort of movie, you would think it had gone too far.

A Russian officer was touring the outworks

and is captured by a German patrol.

Amazingly, he had detailed plans of the fort

with annotations marking where the weakest spots were.

I mean, you could not make this up.

On the 10th of August, 1915, the assault on Modlin Fortress begins.

If the Germans had tried to bombard the whole fortress,

they'd have got nowhere.

Because the Germans can focus, they are able to blast a way in.

The Germans pound the two weakest parts of the fort,

reducing them to rubble,

and then they launch an all-out assault.

Thousands of German infantry breached its innermost defences.

In just ten days, Modlin had fallen.

It's a huge loss for the Russians, and it spells the end of their plan

to use this place as a kind of hurdle,

slowing up the advance of the German army into Russia.

The defeat was a coup for the Germans,

and the American filmmakers decided to take some creative licence

to cement the victory.

They were instructed not to film German emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II,

and they say, "The hell with that. We're Americans" and they film him.

Having taken the bizarre initiative

of plunging themselves into a warzone,

these two fellows are able to get back to America

with their film and their car,

and they're heroes.

On The Firing Line With The Germans premiered in Milwaukee

in November 1915.

While it received good reviews, many people thought

it was a piece of propaganda that lacked objectivity.

For a number of reasons, but chiefly

because of German submarine attacks on American shipping

that was crossing the Atlantic,

this confluence of factors leads the Americans

to join the war against Germany

despite the efforts to make the Germans look

like a heroic party on the eastern front.

When Germany was finally defeated,

Modlin Fortress became part of newly independent Poland.

It remained key to the nation's defences

until it finally shut down in 1995.

Wilbur H Durborough's film lay forgotten until 2016,

when it was restored by the Library of Congress.

This is a really foundational piece of war documentary

because today we take for granted

that we're going to see all kinds of video footage of combat.

But it really begins over 100 years ago in World War One.

In the suburban streets of Newark, New Jersey

hide the decaying remains that, for some, became a symbol of rebellion.

We're just a half-hour from downtown Manhattan.

It's a pretty typical street

with office buildings and a hospital across the way.

But you'll notice one block

is a little bit more dishevelled than all of the others.

You can barely see in through all the overgrown trees

spilling out into the street.

Through the foliage you can spot the walls of an imposing building.

The construction within is falling apart,

but evidence of its original function still lingers.

You can see different wings and sections

and the foundations of a few structures.

There's holes in the roof, rusty metal bars,

and vegetation is working its way through the windows.

Despite all this decay,

you can still make out what this building once was.

It's the long corridors and barred doors. They're a dead giveaway.

During a decade of change,

the violent struggles taking place outside this jail

would permeate its walls.

New inmates were pouring in, and the jail was full to the brim.

One of those new inmates, within the course of one generation,

his family's narrative arc would go from solitary confinement

to the mayor's office.

I grew up four or five blocks from here in downtown Newark.

I was always really interested in abandoned structures,

particularly that speak to moments in American history.

Myles Zhang is an urban historian and artist

with a lifelong passion for this building.

When I think about why this needs to be preserved,

it's the story that this building allows us to tell.

It's a story of the common people that are held behind bars.

This is the Old Essex County Jail.

It opened in 1836,

a period when the population of Newark was rapidly expanding.

It cost about $70,000 at the time,

and that was the largest municipal expense.

It makes this the oldest government building in Essex County.

It was designed to be state-of-the-art

by the famed architect, John Haviland.

He's known as the father or the inventor

of the form of the modern prisons.

He designs a prison that isolates people in individual cell blocks

in confinement for long periods of time

in the hope that maybe this makes them better people.

In later years, two additional wings and a hospital

were added to his design.

But as the population of Newark grew,

the jail would become disproportionately overcrowded.

Over the course of the 20th century,

over six million African Americans

would leave the south for the north and the west

to escape the harsh reality of Jim Crow laws and segregation.

But in Newark, the predominantly White population wasn't welcoming,

and police arrests among African American newcomers were high.

By the 1930s, I believe Newark is about 20% or so Black,

but the prison population is 70% Black.

So you see increasing incarceration of Black men.

With more and more African Americans coming north, by 1967

Newark had become one of America's first majority Black cities.

Although Newark's population was now mostly African American,

the city's law enforcers remained overwhelmingly White.

This imbalance would soon reach a tipping point,

and the Old Essex County Jail would be caught in the crosshairs.

By the 1960s, the jail had really deteriorated.

Decades of overcrowding

had led to poor, poor conditions,

and it was about to get much worse.

Tensions between law enforcement and Newark's Black community

were rising.

During the long, hot summer of 1967,

over 150 urban rebellions broke out all over the country,

and in July Newark reached a boiling point.

During a traffic stop,

a Black cab driver was arrested and brutally beaten,

sparking a week of protest and violence.

In total, 26 people were killed by the National Guard

and 1,400 were arrested

in what became known as the Newark Rebellion.

Many of those people were taken to the Essex County Jail.

Activist Fredrica Bey is a Newark resident

who remembers the rebellion.

Two of her siblings were also incarcerated

at Old Essex County Jail.

The tombs, it was called in Newark.

Of course, tombs is for dead people,

and my brothers and the people who were confined here...

I mean, "We're in the tombs,"

while they are living.

And I had to come here and put my head on this dirty screen.

And when I left out every time,

I'd have this dirty screen print in my forehead.

And to think about it... it makes me angry.

On the first night of the Newark Rebellion

controversial writer Amiri Baraka was also thrown in the jail.

An influential poet, Black activist and native of Newark,

Baraka has attracted criticism

for including anti-Semitic elements in his work.

To many, he was one of the greatest Black writers of his generation,

but to some his writings reflected violence, misogyny and homophobia.

Baraka had been pulled over by the police, fiercely beaten

and charged with carrying a weapon.

Amiri Baraka got his head bashed in by the Newark police.

He shed blood and was locked up in this place.

And he did it while he was advocating for us, for Black folk.

To be willing to give your life for your people...

I honour him.

Placed in solitary confinement when he entered the jail,

he detailed his experience years later in his autobiography.

He recounted watching through a window

while inmates screamed helplessly

as police shot down people in the streets outside.

After he was released,

Baraka never stopped campaigning for the people of Newark.

That was a volatile time.

The Newark rebellions, I remember that.

It definitely changed things, the rebellions did.

I remember I got my first real job after the rebellion.

Things opened up.

But Newark's lawmakers still hadn't addressed

the injustices inside the jail.

There was severe overcrowding in the Essex County Jail.

A jail designed for 200 or 300 people

at that point had over 500 people confined here.

In some of the cells right here,

cells barely four feet wide by six feet deep

would have two people confined here in rooms without electricity.

So people are locked in their cells and in this narrow corridor here

24 hours a day for weeks on end.

In those conditions it wouldn't take much to kick off a riot,

and in 1968 the violence spilled over into Essex County Jail.

Several of the inmates in the west part,

when it's time to go back into their cells at the end of the day,

they said, "We're not going back. We're spending this time outside."

So they set fire to the place.

Over the course of two hours,

the inmates clashed with the wardens,

breaking furniture and setting fires.

They burn a hole in the roof and the fire department is called in.

In the aftermath of the riot,

over 100 inmates were transferred to other locations

in order to try to ease the tensions.

Finally the city was forced

to deal with the jail's overcrowding problem.

It built a large, modern facility on the outskirts of town,

and in 1971 the original jail closed down.

Today the Old Essex County Jail stands as a powerful reminder

of Newark's struggle with injustice.

Some of the activists that fought for change

and were incarcerated here

still inspire hope.

Baraka's career would go on to span some 52 years.

Baraka's influence on Newark lasted generations.

Almost 50 years after he was locked up in Essex County Jail,

his son, Ras Baraka, was elected mayor of the city.

NO SOUND

Baraka went on to serve the people of Newark for multiple terms.

In Namibia, the desiccated remains of a settlement sink into the sand.

It's a foreboding landscape

where the Namib desert clashes with the Atlantic Ocean.

You can just about notice a train track,

and just a few miles down the line

a lone station in the middle of nowhere.

Why would anybody have any reason

to run a small-gauge railroad through this area?

At the end of the line,

a series of ramshackle remains may yield the answer.

It's the last place in the world you'd expect to see a town,

but there are signs of a settlement.

It's a collection of houses, some of which are residential,

that have been taken over by the sand to such an extent

that there are sand drifts in the inner hallways of these buildings.

But there's also rusted machinery littering the ground.

When people come to a desolate place like this,

there's usually a very good reason for them to be here.

Today, this site sits in an area called Das Sperrgebiet,

"the forbidden zone".

Local historian Heinz Manns has special permission

to access this restricted area.

This railroad was built

by the German government for the German army

to move their armament to the interior of the country

and to do business with the interior,

to do trade with the local people of Namibia at that time.

The railroad was completed in 1906

and ran from the coast into the heart of Namibia,

which the Germans called South West Africa

and had controlled since 1883.

The Germans established this colony

in an attempt to counter the British,

who had established the South Africa colony.

In 1907, a young railway surveyor from Germany

decided to come to this desolate outpost

hoping the arid climate would help to cure his asthma.

August Stauch worked for the railroad,

and he had a team of workers under him

clearing the railroad track of dune sand.

He was the station master, you can call it.

He came here for health reasons,

but soon he found himself on a quest

for something far more lucrative.

There was supposed to have been diamond finds in the area,

but nothing was ever confirmed.

He just couldn't let go of that idea

that somewhere hidden in these sands were precious gemstones.

Stauch was scorned by geologists, who'd already scoured the area.

But he remained determined.

He instructed his workers

to keep an eye out for gemstones in the sands.

Well, Zacharias Lewala was one of the workers

clearing the railroad track.

He came to August in the morning

and said, "Mr Stauch, look, I found a pretty stone."

Stauch took it and scratched the glass of his watch.

It left a deep cut.

It confirmed what he had long suspected -

that there were diamonds in the sands of Namibia.

Stauch also had them tested at a government laboratory.

They all came back confirmed as genuine,

and the diamond rush was on.

Between June and December 1908,

40,000 carats' worth of diamonds were found

and prospectors were buying up land as fast as they could.

By 1912, the industry had grown so quickly,

a town was built to support the flourishing trade.

It was called Pomona.

Over the next few years,

prospectors would pull nearly five million carats from the sand,

worth almost $20 billion in today's money.

Pomona was the richest area in diamond mining.

There were teachers here, there was a doctor here, two hospitals,

340 permanent employees.

That included wives, children, everything.

Pomona was complete with a mess hall, a school,

even a bowling alley to make the German employees feel more at home.

To get the right people to work here, to get the expertise,

you have to look after the people.

This was a very well thought-out mining town,

not unlike the mining towns that you'll see in the American West.

But not everyone who came to Pomona found such comforts.

This is part of the labourers' quarters,

the workers, the two-year contractors.

Each one had his own little cubicle.

They could park their stuff on top there, their personal belongings.

This is where they lived for two years.

800 local labourers did the manual work,

the brutal task of searching for diamonds in the sand.

These rickety sheds and rusting machinery

were designed to assist the process.

These are the classifiers.

These were used to sift out the diamond gravel.

So these machines were hand-operated.

The first process worked with the material shaking in the water,

so the heavy stuff goes to the bottom.

Diamond is the heavier material around.

That's what they were looking for.

It was painstaking work,

and for those who toiled under the desert sun

it exacted a punishing toll.

The Germans overseeing the operation

treated the local labourers with distrust.

For the mine owners, there was the constant paranoia

of workers smuggling out diamonds with them,

and they went to extreme lengths to prevent this.

They were checking you inside and out

to see whether or not you were stealing the diamonds.

Some suspect they forced the workers to take laxatives

to make sure, even if they swallowed the diamonds,

they couldn't hold on to them.

By 1914, Germany was in control

of a third of the world's diamond supply.

August Stauch, the man who started it all,

had become rich beyond his wildest dreams.

Germany's great diamond rush would soon grind to a halt.

On the night of August 4th, 1914,

the radio station at Luderitz received a report

that Germany and Great Britain were now at war.

During the war they were allowed to mine minimal scale

just to sustain themselves.

But the companies didn't operate, really.

Within the year,

Britain's South African colonial troops invaded Namibia,

forcing the Germans to abandon the town.

They took everything they could,

and they also destroyed a lot of stuff,

the same with the railway line,

so it didn't fall into the enemy's hands.

By the end of the war,

the defeated Germans had lost control of Namibia and the mine.

In 1919, the German-born industrialist Ernest Oppenheimer

took control of Pomona.

Operations continued until deposits ran out in the 1930s,

and the town was left deserted.

Pomona turned into a ghost town

because, with the disappearance of the people,

the desert reclaimed what belonged to it before.

Meanwhile, the man who started Namibia's diamond rush

met a similar kind of fate.

August Stauch was a millionaire overnight,

but he did a lot of wrong investments.

He died a poor man. He had no money.

Today, prospectors in Namibia have reached new frontiers

in their continuing search for diamonds.

There is still mining going on around, sporadic,

but the main diamond mining is happening in the sea now,

so it's offshore.

After being uninhabited for so long,

today the region around Pomona

has some of the highest biodiversity in the country.

Its unique desert plants,

reptiles

and herds of antelope

led to the area's preservation as a national park in 2009.

To the northwest of London, England

a ghostly manor house gives little hint of its radical past.

It's a beautiful sandstone building.

It stands at the end of a quarter- mile-long tree-lined driveway.

The brickwork is crumbling but you can still see

that this place must have been a real sanctuary.

Inside there are trappings of privilege and wealth.

We've got these fine plasterwork ceilings, opulent woodcarvings,

stone-framed windows.

This might seem like a place that would be a home

for upper-class aristocrats

who would resist any kind of social change.

But this mainstay of the Establishment

was once pivotal to a vicious struggle for civil rights.

It was a real hotbed for one of the most important battles of its day.

It was a common occurrence to have the police knocking on the door.

Amanda Pitcairn has a deep family connection

to this sprawling estate.

This house was owned by my great-grandparents.

When I was growing up, I heard lots of stories about this place.

I've never been here before. This is my first time.

It's really exciting actually to see it

because I recognise it from photographs.

This dilapidated mansion was once home to Agnes and Henry Harben.

Harben was very wealthy

because he'd inherited a fortune from his grandfather,

who had built up the Prudential insurance company.

At the time, in the homes of the elite

strict rules of etiquette were still being followed.

This is the room that was pretty much a male preserve.

Men would sit and drink port and smoke cigars and tell bad jokes

until they got very drunk.

This is Newland Park,

a 550-acre estate and 50-room house

with rigidly manicured gardens.

But, despite appearances, Henry Harben was far from conventional.

He was basically what my mother calls a smoked-salmon socialist.

He didn't see any contradiction

between his lifestyle and his political leanings.

He made friends with all sorts of radical people

regardless of their social background.

Henry and Agnes Harben turned their home into a kind of salon

where people with new ideas, people interested in social change,

could gather and discuss the kind of world

they wanted to see in the future.

The first decade of the 20th century

was a time of unprecedented reform in society.

This was a period of great liberalising in social norms,

an embrace of a more egalitarian approach to life.

So in the 1900s, Henry and Agnes became involved in

one of the biggest issues of the day.

All women, regardless of social class,

were still barred from voting.

It's almost hard to remember today, but the world's great democracies,

like Britain, like the US,

they weren't actually all that democratic.

In both Britain and America

women had been fighting for the right to vote, known as suffrage,

since the mid-19th century.

But after decades of getting nowhere with politicians,

a new, all-female group would emerge and take Britain by storm.

Emmeline Pankhurst was this very dramatic leader of the movement,

a real magnet for press attention.

Emmeline had been an ardent campaigner for women's suffrage

for decades.

But her increasing frustration with peaceful tactics

had forced her to form a more radical action group.

This was a very different type of organisation.

Fed up of broken promises given from men in power,

only women could join.

They began a campaign of direct action

with the motto "Deeds, not words."

In an attempt to belittle them,

a journalist labelled them "suffragettes",

as opposed to "suffragists",

which they sort of embraced and took as a badge of honour.

Agnes was a member of the suffragette movement

and totally committed to it.

Henry funded the cause to a great extent.

The Harbens frequently played host

to Emmeline Pankhurst at Newland Park.

Henry used his inherited assets to bankroll the nationwide movement.

But as women's rights continued to be denied,

the suffragettes became increasingly militant.

Emmeline Pankhurst proclaimed that it was her duty to break the law

in order to bring attention to their plight.

Women started smashing windows,

setting post-boxes on fire.

They even chased after Winston Churchill with a horsewhip.

Then it escalated, and the fight got very intense and ugly.

Bombs were sent to the homes of government officials.

In their minds, their actions were completely justified.

In response, many hundreds of women were arrested and imprisoned.

In protest, the women began a campaign of hunger strikes.

If one of these women were to die of starvation,

it would be a political disaster for the country.

So the government began a policy of force-feeding the women.

A warden would restrain a woman,

take a rubber tube, put it down her nostrils into her throat,

sometimes directly into her stomach.

Women broke teeth. They were injured.

Emmeline Pankhurst's sister actually died

after being force-fed in prison.

This was exactly the kind of attention

the government wanted to avoid.

So they changed their tactics.

So hunger strikers would be kept until they were extremely weak,

and then they'd be released long enough to recover,

and then they would get picked up again

and serve out the rest of their sentence.

Emmeline Pankhurst herself was constantly arrested and released,

as many as 12 times in the space of 12 months.

Once released, many suffragettes escaped to Henry and Agnes's home.

My great-grandparents would have felt angry

about the treatment of the suffragettes

and the way they had been brutalised,

and they would do anything to help.

And these poor women were in a bad way.

They had this huge place and there were women with nowhere to go,

so they offered their home.

Newland Park became a place

for the malnourished women to hide out and recover.

For the suffragettes, fresh out of prison,

coming here was like stepping into another world.

The suffragettes were from a different class, basically,

and they would not have been used to

the sort of lifestyle that was led here.

This is a testament to my great-grandmother,

who would have done her utmost to make them feel welcome.

But rumours of the Harbens' involvement in the movement

led police right to their doorstep.

A well-timed tip-off allowed Agnes and Henry to conceal the fugitives.

This is where, in the cellars,

is where they hid Emmeline Pankhurst and more suffragettes.

The story was that they hid them rolled up in lino in the cellar.

Well, it feels so much like a... like a cell, actually,

that they must have felt they were back into jail.

Thanks to their hideout at Newland Park,

the suffragettes were spared a return to prison.

A year later, the outbreak of the First World War

transformed society's view of women

and confirmed their place in a changing world.

Male politicians could no longer claim

that women were unfit to vote.

If they could work in munitions factories and drive ambulances,

why couldn't they walk into a voting booth?

In 1918, the government finally conceded

and the process of allowing women the vote began.

But life at Newland Park wasn't so successful.

Agnes and Henry separated

and their home changed hands several times

before it eventually fell into disrepair.

Today, developers are turning this valuable real estate

into a complex of luxury homes.

It'll feature Harben Drive

and a central statue of Emmeline Pankhurst,

ensuring the importance of this site to a vital social movement

will not be forgotten.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media