Original subtitles

[narrator] In Sicily, a ghost town steeped in corruption.

[Alexis Pedrick] Government troops

were brought in to patrol the city

and what had become, really, an all-out war.

[narrator] The secretive Pennsylvanian institution

that shocked America.

They had 80 cages,

metal cages with people in it.

[narrator] And an aristocratic mansion in Ireland,

embroiled in a bizarre terrorist plot.

[Rob Bell] The kidnappers took to driving around

using a book about Irish stately homes as their guide.

[opening theme music playing]

[narrator] In Sicily, skeletons of hundreds of structures loom

over the capital's most sought after area.

You see this vast collection of monolithic ruins,

perched precariously on the hillside

that seems completely out of place

with this picturesque spot.

[narrator] Vestiges of luxury

suggest that these cavernous shelves

were intended to house the city's elite.

Inside, you find bathtubs and unfinished rooms.

And roof terraces, all with that sweeping view.

[Alexis] The logistical challenge to build this must have been phenomenal.

Why would you pour so much money into it

and then just walk away?

[narrator] It's a stark symbol of the greed and brutality

of those who once dominated Sicily.

[Rob] They ran violent extortion rackets

and started taking control of entire industries.

[Jim Meigs] One of the things that gave them so much power

was their willingness to murder anyone who got in their way.

Police, prosecutors, judges, politicians.

Nobody was safe.

[Alexis] The killings made front page news

and sent shock waves across Europe.

[Rob] It would take the action of two brave judges

to finally rid the city from this evil,

but they would pay the ultimate price.

[translator] The first time I went inside one of these houses,

it felt like the aftermath of a bombing.

As if these abandoned houses

had been destroyed by something apocalyptic.

[narrator] Local documentary maker, Andrea Di Gangi

runs an organization that aims to put a spotlight on what happened here.

[translator] In the 1960s, this mountain was untouched.

There were no houses.

It was just earth and greenery,

and lots of vegetation.

This greenbelt was famous across Europe for its beauty.

[narrator] But being so close to the capital, Palermo,

this prime real estate

soon attracted the attention of Sicily's lawless underworld.

[Meigs] This half finished neighborhood is a legacy of the time when Palermo

was completely ruled by mobsters.

[narrator] This is Pizzo Sella,

a ghost town of more than 200 buildings.

It's got Mafia fingerprints all over it.

[translator] Pizzo Sella symbolizes corruption, Mafia,

malfeasance, and illicit construction.

[narrator] Sicily is the birthplace of the Mafia.

It emerged here in the 1800s, a time of political unrest.

[Alexis] Lawlessness was running rampant, you know.

Smuggling, banditry.

All of that was kind of taking over Sicily.

Eventually criminal brotherhoods formed, known as families or clans.

[Alexis] By the early 1900s,

politicians would support them,

help them out in exchange for their kind of persuasive tactics.

[narrator] But in 1922,

when the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini took control of Italy,

he vowed to wipe out Sicily's notorious mobsters

and imprisoned them by the thousands.

The Mafia lay low until Mussolini himself was ousted in 1943,

as Allied forces advanced, leaving Italy in turmoil.

[Rob] Sicily was left in a power vacuum, and in this chaos

many inmates escaped from prison.

[narrator] After breaking out of jail,

Sicily's Mafia families were reunited,

and determined to regain their unscrupulous control

of the capital's business.

Especially the construction industry.

[Meigs] The war had done enormous damage to Palermo.

150,000 residents were without homes.

But the process of rebuilding was open to immense corruption.

Mafia connected construction companies

began to build apartment blocks wherever they could.

[narrator] Eventually, one mobster kingpin

turned his attention to the city's greenbelt.

[Rob] In the 1970s, a 250-acre parcel of the mountainside

was sold to a company owned by the sister

of a notorious Mafia boss,

Michele 'The Pope' Greco.

[narrator] Sometimes seen carrying a Bible,

Pope Greco was the head of the Greco Mafia clan.

He controlled much of Palermo's business,

including the drug trade.

[Rob] At his country villa,

he hosted not only influential Sicilian politicians,

but also a heroin refinery.

To give an idea of the money involved,

at this time around a third

of all of the heroin in the United States was produced in Sicily.

[narrator] The Pope needed an outlet

to launder his ill-gotten gains,

so he bribed a Mafia supporting politician to sort it for him.

Vito Ciancimino,

Palermo's head of public works,

was the Mafia's inside man.

[narrator] Together, they laundered millions.

And Pizzo Sella was one of their biggest projects.

Construction began in 1978, with plans for over 200 homes,

ranging from vast multi-level villas with pools,

to two story houses.

They finished building some of the villas and sold them to buyers.

[Meigs] Did they know that they were built by the Mafia?

Maybe they did. Maybe they didn't.

But it was hard to escape [chuckles] things

that were controlled by the Mafia in that society at that time.

It was like a fish trying to avoid water.

[narrator] But before Pizzo Sella was complete,

vicious rivalries began to rupture

Sicily's powerful Mafia families.

Toto Riina, head of the Corleonesi faction,

wanted to rule Palermo,

and get a piece of the Greco family's heroin trade.

[Alexis] A war broke out,

thanks to the bloodthirsty ambitions of the clan boss Toto Riina.

[Rob] He wanted to dominate and started a vicious campaign

which left around 1000 people dead.

After two years of violence, the Mafia war was over.

[narrator] The conflict had involved the entire Palermo Mafia,

and on the face of it, it looked like Toto Riina had won.

But ordinary Sicilians were tired of the violence and corruption.

[Rob] And in 1985, they voted in a new mayor,

who promised to break the Mafia.

[narrator] One of his first jobs

was to clean up the construction industry,

which included the activities of Pope Greco.

[Rob] He halted all construction contracts

approved by the previous administration,

and work at Pizzo Sella stopped.

[Meigs] They conducted a big investigation

into the Pizzo Sella project,

what they found was, not surprisingly,

it was deeply connected to the mob.

[Rob] The court also ruled that every single property

should be confiscated by the city of Palermo,

and the whole development completely demolished.

[narrator] It was devastating news

for those who had already moved in.

Meanwhile, Pope Greco had lost the front for his drug profits.

The heat on Palermo's ruling Mafiosi was far from over.

[dramatic music playing]

In the 1980s, in Palermo, Sicily,

a notorious Mafia boss, Pope Greco,

was using a hillside development to launder the vast proceeds

of his illegal drug trafficking.

But an extraordinary move

by a high ranking mobster

was about to blow his cover.

[Alexis] A gang member decided to cooperate with police,

and reveal the inner workings of the organization.

[narrator] Tommaso Buscetta entered a witness protection program,

and became an informant.

[Rob] He was the Sicilian Mafia's first supergrass,

and his evidence helped build cases

against 475 Mafiosi.

It became known as the maxi trial.

Among the accused were none other

than the architects of Pizzo Sella,

and the urban planner Vito Ciancimino,

and Michele 'The Pope' Greco.

[narrator] Pope Greco was given multiple life sentences.

He would end up dying in jail.

[Rob] In retaliation, the Mafia would mete out

its own deadly brand of justice.

[narrator] Corleonesi boss Toto Riina,

who in the end, had been secretly aligned with Pope Greco,

ordered the assassination of two judges

who had presided over the case.

It was a step too far.

Government troops were brought in to patrol the city

in what had become, really, an all-out war

between the Mafia and the government.

[narrator] The government won, but the battle is still ongoing,

as are their dealings with Pizzo Sella.

The idea that they could just take over and demolish these houses

was easier said than done.

The legal battles went on for years.

[narrator] Eventually, the people who had already bought houses

were allowed to keep them.

But it was too expensive to tear the rest down.

The question of what to do with the villas remains unsolved.

[narrator] But in the meantime,

Andrea keeps Pizzo Sella in the public eye.

[translator] We organize guided tours,

and we organize events inside the unfinished houses.

[narrator] In eastern Pennsylvania,

is an institution so shocking

it sparked a national revolution.

[Hadley Meares] We're about an hour away from Philadelphia.

There's these buildings with names like Mayflower and Quaker.

So perhaps we're at some kind of college.

[Alicia Gutierrez-Romine] There are resting swing sets, slides, and jungle gyms.

But as soon as you step inside,

it's clear that this was no ordinary school.

There are hospital beds with guardrails on the side and abandoned wheelchairs.

[narrator] Supposedly built to help those in need,

this facility soon became hell on Earth.

The horrors that took place inside these walls

were hidden from the outside world for years.

[narrator] It would take a dogged journalist

and a tenacious reformer

to expose it to the public,

and begin a fight to transform thousands of lives across America.

I've been in the news business for 44 years,

and it is undoubtedly the best story I ever did.

[Jim Conroy] Because of what happened here,

I could say to all the spirits who died,

your lives were not in vain.

[narrator] Jim Conroy first visited here

more than 50 years ago, as a young medical researcher.

[Conroy] I was 21 years old, fresh out of college,

and I had not a clue that places like this existed in America.

[narrator] What Jim saw inside these structures changed his life

and inspired him to take action.

[Conroy] I saw people lying in cribs all day.

Open wounds, untreated broken bones,

and noise and smell and naked people and head banging.

It felt, there has to be a better way.

[narrator] The devastating scenes Jim witnessed

can be traced back to the founding principles of this complex,

eugenics.

[Conroy] The eugenics movement became prevalent in the 1880s.

It was very big in America.

It was a universal belief.

[Alicia] Eugenic reasoning held that genetic traits

could be improved through selective breeding,

and that inferior qualities could be suppressed.

[Sascha Auerbach] Leading eugenicists

argued that those with certain characteristics

should be prevented from reproducing

so that those conditions could be bred out of the gene pool.

[Meares] These theories contribute to the mass institutionalization

of people with intellectual disabilities.

They're hidden away from the rest of society,

like some sort of dirty secret.

[narrator] This is Pennhurst State School and Hospital.

It opened in 1908,

to house people with a wide range

of physical and intellectual disabilities.

[Conroy] Families had to get help.

And so people like me with PhDs and MDs,

they would say to parents, Pennhurst, that's what we have.

And that's what parents did because professionals told them to.

[narrator] But from the beginning,

this institution was a deeply troubled place.

In 1912, Pennhurst is already massively overcrowded,

and this would be a huge problem throughout its sordid history.

[Alicia] So what we end up with

are these really unsanitary conditions,

and that the individuals with the most complex needs

were being left alone unsupervised,

and opportunities for violence and self-harm were rife.

[Conroy] Parents were never allowed to know

what the real conditions were in.

They saw their sons and daughters in a fixed room

in a special place, not back here.

No one knew. Not even the families.

[narrator] Pennhurst continued to operate for decades.

By the 1960s,

thousands of people were living here in appalling conditions.

And almost no one on the outside knew it was happening.

[Sascha] But soon the world would learn the truth

in all its excruciating detail.

[Meares] This revelation would not only spell the downfall of Pennhurst,

it would also spur a national revolution.

[narrator] In the late 1960s,

the conditions in a grisly asylum in Pennsylvania

were about to be exposed to the American public.

It came about thanks to a chance encounter

between news reporter Bill Baldini, and a Pennhurst volunteer.

[Bill] T hey told me about it,

and I said if 10% of what you're telling me is true, I'll do a story on it.

And I found out that 300% of what they told me was true.

And that's when I decided I'm coming up the next day with a camera.

[narrator] At first, the institution's workers were skeptical

that Bill's reporting would have any impact.

But they quickly realized his story

could initiate the change that they also wanted to see.

They were helpless. They were government employees.

If they complained, they're going to get fired.

So I became their voice, which was great.

They would hand me notes in the hallway,

telling me where to look and what to do.

[narrator] Eventually, even the bosses got behind Bill's work.

And what the staff showed Bill shocked him to his core.

[Bill] In one ward, they had 80 cages,

metal cages with people in it.

And I said, "Why are they in the cages?"

And they said, "Because we don't have enough people

"to take them out of the cages."

It was the cruelest thing I've ever seen in my life.

It was the byproduct of poor state funding.

[narrator] Bill figured out that Pennhurst

received less funding than the local zoo.

And over the course of the next five days, his expose shook America.

[Bill] The initial reaction was stunning.

Me, the crew, our bosses, were stunned.

The public was stunned.

They couldn't believe what they were watching.

[Alicia] Soon, this story was picked up by news outlets

all throughout the state and country.

One even described Pennhurst as the shame of Pennsylvania.

[narrator] With the truth revealed in the early 1970s,

a legal campaign began on behalf of the residents.

Jim Conroy took part in an unprecedented class action lawsuit

intended to get Pennhurst shut down.

It's the civil rights movement that nobody knows about.

[Meares] In America, you have three indelible rights.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Pennhurst is failing at all three.

They died young, they couldn't leave,

and it was absolutely miserable.

[Conroy] Anything that deprives people, citizens,

of those rights, is a civil rights issue.

And that affected people with physical disabilities and sensory disabilities

and every kind of medical and mental disability.

[narrator] The violation of the residents' civil rights

gave the lawyers a case to argue in court.

Pennhurst was the epicenter of legal activities that changed the world.

[narrator] But at the time,

society deemed the patients unable to testify on their own behalf.

Jim and his team had a fight on their hands,

to find concrete evidence to support their claim.

We were able to prove through records and individual observation

that the average person who came to Pennhurst

had been here for about 28 years and they had gotten worse.

People came in able to speak, and in a year or two they didn't speak anymore.

They lost skills, and quality of life went down.

And that's how the lawsuit was won.

This was the first time that a US Federal Court

indicated that an institution must be closed

for violating the patients' constitutional rights.

The Pennhurst case was a groundbreaker,

and about 17 states immediately copied the lawsuit

and started closing institutions all over the country.

[narrator] These legal victories marked a vital change

in how people with disabilities were cared for

across the United States.

Overwhelmingly, people were recognizing

that essentially warehousing people

with disabilities was not the solution.

[Meares] There was increasing pressure to give people

with intellectual disabilities and other illnesses

services that they needed within the community.

[narrator] In 1985,

the courts ruled that Pennhurst should be shut down for good.

The federal court said everybody has to go to

a small family-like community home.

[narrator] Many of those leaving Pennhurst had no families to go to.

Others had relatives, but with no means to care for them properly.

[Conroy] There wasn't any such community support system yet. We had to build it.

We really stood out as the first to take this chance,

and it was a great success.

[Meares] With the last person moved to their new home,

the doors of Pennhurst closed officially on December 9th 1987.

[narrator] While much of Pennhurst

was left to decay by the state,

before being sold to private owners,

many former residents came together to speak on their own behalf.

It's a long time since Pennhurst closed,

but there are still about 600 people living.

Many get together every year and they're an active self-advocacy group.

[narrator] Ireland's county of Tipperary is a haven of tranquility.

Ireland is known to many as the Emerald Isle,

and when you look at this place, you can really see why.

There's virgin fields, rolling hills,

and a majestic river running through it all.

[narrator] On a prominent hilltop,

sits one of the largest manor houses in the country.

There are clear signs that this was once very opulent.

Given the size and faded splendor of the place,

whoever lived here was clearly of some importance.

[narrator] But in the 1970s,

their dignified world would not escape the bitter conflict

that has long divided this nation.

[Dominic Selwood] This place would be dragged into a web

of international political intrigue.

[Rob] One dark night, this safe haven

became the scene of a terrifying assault.

They were taken not because of who they were,

but because of what they represented.

[narrator] During the 1960s,

in County Tipperary, Ireland,

Jackie Aird was raised on this imposing estate.

[Jackie] I have really special memories of here.

I had a lovely upbringing.

And I'm sad to see the way it's gone dilapidated so much.

[narrator] She is returning for the first time in more than 40 years.

This room was the drawing room,

and there was a favorite fireplace there as well.

As you can see, it had a crest in there.

[narrator] The crest belongs to the noble family of the Earls of Donoughmore.

They had been granted the land by the English,

who had conquered Ireland in the mid-1600s.

And the Earl of Donoughmore commissioned this Grand House

to suit his noble status.

[narrator] He named it Knocklofty House.

[Selwood] This was clearly once a grand building,

covering almost 23,000 square feet,

and 63 acres of parkland and gardens.

[narrator] By the 1970s,

the seventh Earl of Donoughmore still lived here.

And Jackie remembers its former grandeur.

[Jackie] This is the library.

They always have beautiful portraits

of paintings up there very high up in the wall.

[narrator] Jackie was not allowed in these grand rooms.

Her father was the Donoughmores' gardener.

[Jackie] He loved gardening.

It was his life.

[narrator] Jackie lived with her family

in one of the 22 outbuildings scattered around the estate.

This was our kitchen, our sink was here.

And that was our hearth press.

And our fire, the same.

My goodness, we used to dry all our clothes up on that.

[narrator] It was a very different world to the aristocratic mansion.

We were not allowed to cycle on the avenue in front of the house.

And when we'd meet Lady Donoughmore,

we always addressed her as "My lady."

[narrator] When Jackie lived here in the 1960s,

Ireland wasn't only divided along class lines.

The country had been split since 1922.

The south gained independence and would become the Republic of Ireland,

while the largely Protestant Northern Ireland

remained part of the United Kingdom.

Catholic Irish revolutionaries in both north and south

have been trying to overthrow the British ever since

the country was divided in two.

[Selwood] The Provisional Irish Republican Army, the IRA,

wanted independence from the British crown,

seeing it as an occupying nation.

But in 1969, the British government

sent troops to Northern Ireland,

but it only served to inflame the conflict further.

Bombings, shootings and assassinations became a common occurrence.

[Selwood] In 1972, the leadership of the IRA

decided to plan a series of attacks in England.

[narrator] The actions of one pair of IRA operatives

would soon bring The Troubles

to the grand doors of Knocklofty House.

[Selwood] The Price Sisters grew up in west Belfast.

They've been involved with the Republican movement for years,

but in 1971, they both joined the IRA.

[Rob] They put together what was called an active service unit.

Their plan was to bomb key locations in London.

[narrator] On March 8th, 1973,

the Price sisters helped plant a bomb

at London's Central Criminal Courts.

[Rob] Over 200 people were wounded in the blasts,

and there were scenes of carnage across central London.

This was a strike at the heart of the British establishment.

[Luke Pepera] 10 of the IRA bombers were caught

as they tried to flee through Heathrow Airport.

[Selwood] The Price Sisters were sentenced to life in prison for the attacks

and were put in English jails.

But the sisters, along with other members

of the bombing team, went on hunger strike.

They demanded to be transferred to Northern Ireland.

[Rob] But returning them home to Northern Ireland

would be a symbolic victory for the bombers

that the British authorities just couldn't allow.

[narrator] Back in Ireland,

certain factions of the IRA had other ideas.

[Pepera] Their plan was to kidnap someone

connected to the British establishment

and use them as a bargaining chip

to get the Price sisters and other hunger strikers

released to a Northern Irish jail.

[narrator] In June 1974,

a rogue unit of the IRA decided to take action.

They went in search of the ultimate prize.

An aristocrat with deep links to England.

[Rob] Unable to find their first two targets,

it's reported that the kidnappers took to driving around,

using a book about Irish stately homes as their guide.

It's perhaps just bad luck that they ended up at Knocklofty House.

[narrator] The kidnappers terrorized Lord Donoughmore's staff,

before realizing that the 71-year-old Earl was out to dinner.

As they were looking around, the attackers heard the sound

of the Donoughmores returning home.

They sprang into action, pistol whipping the Earl,

and throwing him and his wife into a waiting vehicle.

[TV broadcaster] Lady Donoughmore's cardigan and an earring

still lay in the driveway as evidence of the fight she put up.

[narrator] In the 1970s,

life at a tranquil Irish estate

had been turned upside down

when the Earl of Donoughmore and his wife were kidnapped by the IRA.

[TV broadcaster] Groove marks in the gravel suggest that

at least one of them had to be dragged to the kidnap car.

There were also two pools of blood,

both now covered with sheets of cardboard.

[Pepera] The elderly Donoughmores were taken to a remote house.

They were now prisoners of the IRA.

[narrator] It was an anxious wait at Knocklofty House.

[Jackie] The family were here in this room.

They sat at the table,

beside the phone, waiting for-- to know what was happening.

Everyone just waited and waited and waited,

and that's all anyone could do.

[Rob] A few days after the couple had been taken,

the Price sisters were told that their conditions

to stop their hunger strike had been agreed by the British government.

Around the same time as the hunger strikes came to an end,

Lord and Lady Donoughmore were released.

-How are you feeling? -Gorgeous, thank you. Very well indeed.

[TV broadcaster] The kidnappers had bought Lady Donoughmore

carpet slippers for comfort.

Her husband with a bruised eye,

wore a raincoat soaked in blood

with a deep cut over his forehead.

[Jackie] It was fantastic.

They came back to Knocklofty, and they just wanted to continue on,

and they just wanted to be back to normal.

[narrator] Lord Donoughmore's kidnappers were never caught.

And the Earl himself spent the rest of his life

living quietly at Knocklofty House.

After his death in 1981,

the family sold the estate, and it became a hotel.

[Rob] The business eventually failed.

The property changed hands a number of times in the following years.

Slowly, it fell into ruin.

Today, fortunately, there are plans in the works to halt its decay

and return it to its former glory.

[Selwood] One of the suggestions

is that it might become part of a retirement community,

and who knows? Some of the local people who grew up

only looking at it from the outside,

may yet be able to live inside the building.

[narrator] Off the coast of Estonia,

a chilly island was once the vital outpost of a superpower.

[Natasha Billson] It's extremely cold,

and most of it is densely forested, with tall pine trees.

[Geoffrey Wawro] And then you come across

these large concrete structures and turrets,

which look completely out of place.

[Katherine Landdeck] There's nothing in them. They've been completely stripped

of anything that would identify them.

[Wawro] They go many stories underground, so that raises the question,

what were they intended to do?

They seem to have been created for war.

[Landdeck] And then there's that deeper feeling

that maybe somebody's spent their last moments down here.

[narrator] These structures played a pivotal role in the clash

between the two most notorious dictators of all time.

The battle for this island formed part of a siege

in which almost a million people lost their lives.

[narrator] Ain Tahiste was born on Hiiumaa Island,

now part of modern day Estonia.

He's studied the history of the structures hidden in its forests.

[Tahiste] It was the border zone.

That means the coasts were closed.

There was razor wire, fences.

There was armored patrol, there were watchtowers.

This island is strategically important.

Its position means that it borders Sweden,

it borders Finland, and most of all, Russia.

St. Petersburg is only 325 miles away.

This island is the gateway to attack Russia.

[narrator] When Hiiumaa was first fortified in the early 20th century,

it was part of the imperial Russian Empire.

And the czar needed to protect his capital, St. Petersburg,

from the possibility of enemy warships coming up the Gulf of Finland.

So this is the basement of one gun place,

and here the gun starts.

It must be as high as these trees are right now.

The gun has to shoot on the north direction,

where the Gulf of Finland is open, see,

because these guns are designed to destroy the warships.

[narrator] But construction stopped in 1917,

after the communists deposed the czar and took over Russia.

The Soviet empire was born.

And St. Petersburg was later renamed Leningrad.

In the 1930s,

communist leader Joseph Stalin

took his own steps to protect Leningrad,

in the buildup to World War II.

[Onyeka Nubia] So in 1939,

a Mutual Assistance Act defectively gave Russia control

of most of the territorial waters of Estonia,

that included the island.

[narrator] Stalin could now send troops to occupy Hiiumaa,

to expand and update its fortifications.

[Landdeck] According to some reports, by 1941,

there are over 40 miles of trenches across the island,

with 30 miles of barbed wire.

And it is now a true fortress.

[narrator] It was a small part in Stalin's overall defense plan,

but it would become a piercing thorn in Hitler's side.

[narrator] At the start of World War II,

the notoriously paranoid communist leader, Joseph Stalin,

had re-fortified Hiiumaa Island,

to help defend Leningrad from naval attack.

But he was ill prepared for Hitler's fanatical determination

to conquer the Soviet Union as part of his master plan.

[Nubia] T he people of the Soviet Union were going to be exterminated,

and their land was going to be used

for the Aryan or the German people.

[Landdeck] We have a memo from Hitler himself

saying the Fuhrer has decided to wipe Leningrad from the map.

In June 1941, Hitler invades the Soviet Union,

in Operation Barbarosso, the greatest land invasion in history.

Both sides, you have 10 million troops locked in combat.

[narrator] Hitler's armies swept across Europe toward Leningrad.

Within weeks, the city would be besieged.

With the siege potentially grinding on for months,

the Germans couldn't risk having the Soviet-held Hiiumaa Island

behind their lines,

endangering any crucial reinforcements

sailing up the Gulf of Finland.

So in July 1941,

they invaded Estonia and headed toward the island.

[Wawro] The Germans launched the attack on Hiiumaa Island

by playing this verse on the radio.

"Der Tanz kann beginnen". The dance can begin.

They approached under a barrage of artillery fire.

[Nubia] They land at the south of the island,

and after weeks of fierce fighting, begin to move further north.

[Wawro] The Soviet garrison, which is pushed back by this German advance,

concentrates on the Tahkuna peninsula for a last stand.

[Tahiste] This was their last defense line.

The Soviet soldiers, they had very little training,

and they were as well used as like cannon meat.

[narrator] The Soviet military would sacrifice any number of its lower ranks

to ensure the survival of Leningrad.

[Landdeck] Those Soviet soldiers are ordered to hold the line.

Them being sacrificed on the island

was essential for the fate of Leningrad.

[Wawro] At 6:00 a.m. on the 21st of October,

the German troops on the island

take the final Soviet position on the Tahkuna peninsula.

[narrator] With the island finally under their command,

the Germans now had near total control of the Gulf of Finland.

Now their troops could move on from Hiiumaa,

to escalate the siege of Leningrad.

[Wawro] The suffering of Leningrad during World War II was epic.

You've got 100,000 Russians dying every month, chiefly from starvation.

First the dogs and cats were eaten, then rats.

And then from the dead people, they cut pieces of meat and eat that as well.

It's hard to have an exact number,

but historians agree that around one million people died during this siege.

Despite how close the Nazis get to taking Leningrad,

they never do.

And eventually Soviet counterattacks

drive them away and free up the city.

The siege of Leningrad has ended.

The island of Hiiumaa is free of the Germans.

But for the people of the island,

the nightmare was far from over.

[narrator] The Soviets went on to retake Hiiumaa.

They reinstalled a garrison on the island,

and further defenses across Estonia,

which was now part of the communist buffer zone,

which the Soviets claimed they'd put in place

to protect themselves from the West.

The Soviets maintained control over Estonia,

until independence is formally declared in August 1991.

[narrator] Today, Hiiumaa's battered fortifications

remain a constant reminder of its precarious location.

[Tahiste] Liberty has always the price.

And we have to protect ourselves,

because the nature of our big neighbor

has not changed at all.

[Wawro] This is no less relevant today,

where areas that we had regarded as being pacified

are suddenly in play again and very much embattled.