Original subtitles

A Spanish settlement stained in innocent blood.

What begins as an unpleasant scheme leads to bodies lying in the dust.

In Wisconsin, a tranquil institution consumed by righteous anger.

As the national guards surrounded the area,

there were reports about the back and forth shooting that happened.

An Albanian hilltop citadel funded by one man's hubris.

This is an area of the world shaped by strong men.

And he was no exception.

But with a spectacular rise comes a spectacular fall.

And a subterranean lair in France,

designed with a disturbing objective.

Hitler is convinced that German technology can still win the war

and Joe Kennedy, heir to an American political dynasty

is going to die on his way here.

In America's Midwest

lies an isolated structure caught in the crosshairs

of a nation's mission to reclaim what was once theirs.

Tucked away from the road is a wide-open clearing

and in the middle of it there is this colossal

Georgian-style mansion.

It's far too big, too grand to be a single family residence,

but who built it and why is it standing empty today?

When you go inside, the stark concrete

offers few clues to its former purpose.

It's bare and cavernous, like it's been hollowed out to its core.

This was once a place of religious devotion,

it would become the symbol of a bitter struggle to be heard.

Some said that it existed on stolen land

and that conflict would come to a head

in a very dramatic confrontation.

This land is Menominee ancestral land.

As a people, we've been here since time immemorial.

On a cold January day,

a group descended on to this compound with shotguns and rifles.

Their motto was "deed or death".

This was a month-long, armed stand-off

and soon it gains national recognition.

Suddenly, you had everyone from national grass roots organisations

to movie stars, like Marlon Brando, showing up to the protests.

Chris Caldwell is President of the College

of the Menominee Nation.

His family was involved in the battle that unfolded here during the 1970s.

My aunt Chris talks about being in here,

ducking from gunfire, you know,

trying to make sure the kids that were with them knew to duck.

It's been a process to reconcile those things.

When this site was first built,

it stood on territory that had been taken away from the Menominee.

Its original function belies what would eventually transpire here.

This grand building was originally constructed in 1939

as a private residence for a wealthy widow from New York

and her sick daughter.

But sadly, she died before it can be completed.

Then, in the 1950s, the woman donated the unfinished house

and the land to the Alexian Brothers,

an organisation that was close to her heart.

The Alexian Brothers are a Catholic group

devoted to religious study and taking care of the sick.

And they turned the property into what's known as a novitiate,

somewhere where inductees would come to study and learn

and prepare to take their vows.

The novitiate operated like this for over 20 years,

but in 1972, they moved their operations to Chicago

and this building is left empty.

This could have been the end of the novitiate story,

but events were underway that would send it on a collision course

with an unfolding crisis

at a nearby Native American reservation.

Historically, the Menominee inhabited a vast area

that stretched across Wisconsin

to the Upper Peninsula in Michigan.

But a series of treaties with the US government during the 1800s

shrunk their land from ten million acres to just 230,000.

Still, the Menominee remained

one of the wealthiest native tribes in North America

because they had large interests in timber.

But in the 1950s, their way of life and land was threatened once more.

The tribe was doing so well

that the Bureau of Indian Affairs decided that they were ready

to be relieved from federal government support

and in the term of the time,

assimilated in to mainstream US society.

The government establishes a policy of termination,

which ends the tribe's sovereign status

and changes the responsibility

that the federal government has towards them.

With termination came an instant tax bill

for the 230,000 acres of our reservation lands.

We had to find a way to pay for that

and our communities declined.

It was a real disaster.

They went from being one of the most affluent tribes in the nation

to being desperately poor

with all the social ills that come along with poverty.

It just pushed the Menominee, I feel, over the brink

to, we really need to figure out, how do we get back our lands?

How do we get back that connection?

One faction of the nation felt the only way

to get their voice heard was direct action.

These were members of the Menominee Warrior Society.

During this period,

the same political activism that we saw on college campuses

and Vietnam War protests was also sweeping native communities

across the country.

Many of the members of the Warrior Society

were inspired by activist takeovers,

like that of Alcatraz in 1969.

In 1975, the Menominee Warrior Society

decided to make their stand.

The target was the Alexian novitiate, which had been vacant

for three years, apart from a lone caretaker and his family.

The Menominee Warriors

saw this as a visible symbol

of land that they believed was rightfully theirs.

On New Year's Day, a band of about 40 Menominee

armed with shotguns and rifles arrived at the compound.

They were led by a man they called The General, Michael Sturtevant.

They seize the property and they take the caretaker

and his family hostage.

The novitiate was now under the control

of the Menominee Warrior Society.

The local police came out in force and surrounded the building.

The Wisconsin state government acted quickly to contain the takeover.

The last thing they wanted was for the protest to spread.

Even the National Guard are called in,

eventually growing to a force of over 2,000 troops

and then, you have a standoff at the novitiate.

The situation had become a powder keg ready to ignite.

When the Wisconsin National Guard was called in by the governor,

there are different interactions between the Warrior Society

and the different local community groups

and so there was gunfire back and forth.

The Warrior Society is completely outmanned and outgunned

and the government doesn't want any deaths on their hands,

especially in this already tense situation.

The National Guard had one key advantage,

they were able to cut off the power to the building,

soon the heat was out.

It was cold at the time and supporters would find ways

to sneak into the building, you know, bring supplies

and other things like that to help.

The actor and activist Marlon Brando even arrived

at the novitiate to support the warrior group.

Despite the celebrity backing, local public opinion was divided.

In the surrounding white community of course, many were outraged

by what they saw as an insurrection.

Even on the reservation itself,

there were those who agreed with this dramatic tactic

and others who thought that it would undermine their chances

to have their rights restored.

On February 2nd, after a month-long occupation,

a deal was reached between the Warrior Society

and the Alexian Brothers.

The Brothers agreed to sell the novitiate

to the Menominee for the sum of $1.

At that point, the Warrior Society peacefully surrendered

and 39 of them were arrested.

Looking back, we have to give credit

to the cool heads on both sides,

it ended peacefully and with a resolution

that respected the rights of the Native Americans

and did not erupt in outright bloodshed.

Five members of the group

were charged including their leader,

Michael Sturtevant, who was imprisoned.

The Menominee Warrior Society felt that coming to the novitiate

was a way to promote those goals of the Menominee Tribe

and, in that way, that activism, you know,

it also brought light to the situation of Menominee.

In April of 1975, three months after the novitiate standoff,

the United States government restored the Menominee status

as a federally recognised nation.

This granted the Menominee the right to self-govern

their existing 230,000 acres of reservation land.

It's unclear how much this occupation influenced that decision.

Despite the efforts of the Warrior Society,

the Menominee were unable to maintain the building.

Eventually, they decided that the best course of action

was just to give the building back to the Alexian Brothers.

Over the next 50 years, the property sat empty

and suffered damage, including a fire that gutted the mansion.

In 2021, the novitiate was purchased by new owners,

who are busy restoring the property.

Its future is yet to be decided,

but the Menominee Nation is being consulted.

It was only a building in a moment of time

for the Menominee people,

but there's a lot of significance that came along with it.

There's a responsibility to both listen to our elders

and to learn the lessons from those events

so that we can figure out a better path

for our people going into the future.

In Northern France,

tranquil, green fields disguise a conspiracy

to lay waste to an entire population.

We're not far from the English Channel,

we are not far from Paris but here, it's the country.

And then you look around, you start to see evidence

that there's more here than meets the eye.

There are huge chunks of concrete that are really smashed apart.

What could have caused these massive holes

in the quiet French countryside?

Nearby, an entrance leading into the hillside

reveals something unexpected hidden below.

Parts of it look like it could be a railroad tunnel,

but as you look deeper, it's a lot more than that.

The architecture is very utilitarian

and it tells you that this was probably a military facility.

Masses of concrete,

the smell of slave labourers' blood and sweat.

This has got to be Nazi engineering.

This subterranean complex was built

in a desperate bid to save an evil empire.

The threat it posed was unlike anything the world had seen before.

It was a race against time.

Could the Allies stop this weapon

before the Nazis rained terror down on London?

In early 1943, things aren't going well for the Nazis.

The campaign in Russia is slowing down

and the Allies are gaining ground in North Africa.

Hitler thinks that if he gets German scientists,

German engineers, working in the right direction,

they will create "Wunderwaffen",

wonder weapons and those wonder weapons are gonna win the war.

On the 13th of June 1944,

seven days after the D-Day landings,

Hitler unveiled the first wave of a new destructive power,

developed under the wonder weapon programme.

They were called vengeance weapons.

The V1 was a flying bomb that buzzed when it went overhead

and when it was about to drop, it got totally silent,

meaning that the people below knew it was about to strike them.

Four months later,

the Fuhrer revealed the next stage of his plot,

to wipe London from the map.

The V2 rockets were essentially the first ballistic missile.

They're going to hit without warning

and at speeds that you just can't intercept.

Hitler really believes that by sending the vengeance weapons,

the "Vergeltungswaffen" into England,

he is going to break the British will to fight,

rob the Americans of their base for invading France

and the Nazi thousand-year empire will begin.

But the crazed dictator still had one last piece

of his destructive puzzle to complete.

It was called the Fortress of Mimoyecques.

Caroline Albert is an expert on this clandestine Nazi facility.

There were three really secret weapons.

The V1, the V2 and here,

the third secret weapon was supposed to be the V3.

And all these vengeance weapons were supposed to destroy London.

Construction on the site begins in 1943.

Over 1,200 workers arrive to begin digging out those tunnels.

Despite all this natural reinforcement,

they went ahead and put a 16-foot, reinforced concrete top over it.

The Allies were completely unaware

of the ferocity brewing beneath the French countryside.

It was basically a huge cannon

and it fired shells using multiple explosive charges along its barrel.

The round goes past firing chamber after firing chamber,

going faster and faster until it is able to fly all the way to London

and bang,

deliver a payload right into the centre of the enemy capital.

But this complex wouldn't house just one of these super guns,

each of the five firing shafts

was meant to hold five cannons, totalling 25 in all.

In theory, it could fire 600 shells an hour,

24 hours a day,

London would have been littered with bodies

and the city would have been flattened.

The Allies had no idea what was coming.

Yet French resistance fighters

spotted the sinister building activity

and alerted British intelligence.

When allied reconnaissance flights discover this space,

they're not quite sure what it is but they know that it's big,

they know that it's Nazi and they know that it has to be destroyed.

Between November 1943 and the spring of 1944,

British and US airmen fought through an onslaught of anti-aircraft fire

to try and really take this place out.

They drop over 4,000 tonnes of armaments and it's still there.

Something else needs to happen to destroy this.

The Allies turned to Barnes Wallis,

the brilliant engineer who was key to the success

of the iconic Dambusters Raid earlier in the war.

Barnes Wallis is the guy who figures out

the bouncing bomb that can destroy German dams.

Now, we need to destroy a German concrete bunker.

Who is going to design a bomb

capable of penetrating the ground? Well, it's Barnes Wallis.

He developed an extra large bomb that was called the Tallboy.

It would bury itself in the earth before exploding

and it would create an earthquake.

It was the perfect weapon to destroy underground structures.

Throughout the spring of 1944,

the Nazis rushed to complete the V3 cannons.

But before they could be deployed,

the skies darkened over Mimoyecques.

On July 6th 1944,

the Allies send over a hundred Halifax bombers.

They're carpet bombing the target

in order to destroy anything on the surface.

And then, the Lancaster bombers are going to fly in

with the Tallboy bomb.

Three near misses and then a direct hit.

With that hit, they've managed to smash

through that massive concrete roof.

This huge crater is due to one Tallboy bomb.

It's about 25 to 35 metres large to 20 metres deep, over there.

Despite this,

the Allies still feared the site could be made operational.

They couldn't take the chance

that Hitler's weapon could still flatten London.

US Navy airmen were tasked with a top-secret mission

to take Mimoyecques out, once and for all.

It was codenamed Operation Anvil.

This is a project designed to take worn-out bombers

and turn them into an early form of drone.

They would have pilots on board who had set the explosives,

parachute out and the plane would continue on to its target.

One brave pilot steps up for the mission

and that pilot was Joseph P Kennedy.

Joseph was the eldest of the Kennedy children

and his father had been grooming him to be president from a young age.

On the 12th of August 1944, he and his co-pilot took to the skies.

Kennedy radios in the codewords "spade flush"

to indicate that they were about to jump out of the plane,

but then those ended up being his very last words.

The whole plane goes up in two enormous explosions.

There is literally nothing left of Kennedy and his co-pilot.

It's said that when JFK heard the news he said,

"And now the burden falls on me."

Less than a month after Joseph Kennedy's tragic death,

Canadian troops arrived at Mimoyecques

to find it had been abandoned by the retreating Germans.

They also made another chilling discovery.

The fortress had already been destroyed beyond repair

by the earlier Tallboy bombing raid.

When Joseph Kennedy died in the mission to Mimoyecques,

at 29 years old, it was really for nothing.

Today, the upper levels of Mimoyecques can be visited

by the public, but the lower levels were so badly damaged,

some of the secrets of Hitler's vengeance fortress

will never be known.

One thing Winston Churchill is going to make sure of,

that this dagger pointed at the heart of England

is never going to be used again.

36 tonnes of high explosive are packed into this place

and it is blown to smithereens.

It is the mystery really, underneath,

because nobody never went down there since the war.

We still don't know how many galleries there are,

if they are part of the cannons

or even the number of persons who died here.

In a remote region of southern Spain,

an isolated structure conceals a story of forbidden love

and ruthless retribution.

We're in this landscape of rugged hills and dusty plains,

it feels like something more from the Wild West than Spain.

It's an arid, barren place,

even in the best of times, eking out an existence

here must have been hard.

Yet, signs of life reveal somebody

settled in this unforgiving landscape.

All the way out here, there's this structure,

it's kind of hauntingly beautiful,

standing alone against this vast, empty scenery.

Walking around, you can see a lot of the rooms are just empty shells.

It's hard to tell what this place once was.

Then you start to see clues.

With its bell tower and raised area inside for an altar,

you quickly realise this was a church.

You also get the feeling that this is a home,

you've got the kitchen and the pantry,

but apart from these details, many of the traces

of whoever lived here have long since disappeared.

In the beginning, this was a peaceful dwelling.

It became the scene of a shameful crime.

This place has been immortalised in books,

in plays and even Hollywood films.

Grooms jilted at the altar, lovers fleeing in the night,

violent confrontations, this story has it all.

It's like the original telenovela.

Growing up as a child, I've heard so many stories about this place.

The first time I came was roughly 17, 18 years ago

and I was so impressed actually.

Miguel Jaume Mora is a guide in this arid region.

Like many locals, he was drawn to the tale of intrigue

that took place within these walls.

This building is well known all over the country

for all its tragic happenings.

It is a very important part of the local culture.

It's a shame actually to see the state in which it is.

Essentially, it's a kind of farm complex

common in the south of Spain.

It was originally built in the 1700s by Dominican monks

and that's why it has such an elaborate chapel.

They were given the property

because no-one wanted to live here.

Life here would have been very difficult.

It was called the Cortijo del Fraile,

the Farmhouse of the Fryer.

But in the mid-1830s, the government decides it's gonna take possession

of many of the properties that were owned by the church.

They sold it to raise money and so the farm goes into private hands.

For almost a century, the rhythms of life

in this dusty outpost remained the same.

Farmers growing and selling their produce,

living in harmony with the seasons.

But in the early 1900s,

a new family arrived at the cortijo,

with them came scandal and murder.

One of the families that lived here

was a widower with his daughters,

Carmen and Francisca, who was known to everyone as Paca.

Paca was given a cruel nickname,

Paca la Coja, meaning Paca the lame.

While the family blamed her limp on polio,

it's said that the real story is her father beat her so badly as a baby,

he permanently damaged her hip.

Well, we're just in the house where Paca lived,

here at the farm.

This room was one of the bedrooms

and it could have actually been Paca's bedroom.

Eventually, the elder sister Carmen

got married and moved out of the cortijo

and Paca grew increasingly close with her cousin Francisco.

She was in love with her cousin when they were children,

the usual thing when they play,

"Well, you're gonna be my boyfriend

and when we're older, we'll probably get married."

But Paca's father paid no attention to her youthful infatuation.

And in 1926, he began looking for a suitable husband for her.

Whoever she married would receive a generous payment called a dowry

and would play an integral role in the running of the cortijo.

As it happened, Paca's sister came up with a plan

for who she should marry.

There was a local labourer named Casimiro.

He just so happened to be her husband's brother,

how convenient.

It seems like this was all part of a sinister plan

to marry her sister to someone inside the family

that they could control.

Carmen was very ambitious.

She wanted to try to gather all the properties

and get her husband to be the farmer

that was in charge of this farm.

Paca was completely unaware of her sister's cruel intentions

and agreed to the marriage.

It was a decision that ended in tragedy.

On the evening of the 22nd of July,

the year 1928, is the reception of the wedding.

The tradition at the time was to celebrate first

and then hold the wedding ceremony the following morning.

All the guests started to arrive

and among these guests that were invited to the wedding,

her cousin Francisco.

Francisco didn't come to celebrate, he was simply biding his time.

Francisco seizes the opportunity and he sneaks into her bedroom.

He begs Paca to run away with him,

so that they can be married the next morning.

She never was in love with Casimiro.

That's when she started to think about it

and she told Francisco, "It's now or never"

and that's when they escaped through this passage to the stables.

The lovers believed they will be long gone

before anybody realises what had happened

but they were wrong.

Carmen quickly realised her sister and Francisco had disappeared

and she was furious.

She told her husband Jose

and they got a horse and soon went chasing them.

It wouldn't be long before they found them.

It's said that they hid behind some undergrowth as the lovers approach

and then they jumped out to confront them.

Jose had a revolver,

he brought it out and he just shot three times,

three shots and killed Francisco.

And apparently, Carmen told Jose,

"I'll be in charge of my sister."

Carmen begins strangling her until...

..well, until she stops moving.

The murderous couple fled the scene

and left the bodies to be discovered by the other guests out looking.

They found Francisco dead on the floor

and Paca nearby, desperately clinging to life.

At first, Paca was unwilling to reveal who had attacked her,

fearing it would bring shame to the family.

But she eventually identified the assailants to the authorities,

who were arrested and a trial date was set.

Her sister Carmen was found guilty of attempted murder,

but she served just 15 months in jail.

Her husband, who killed Francisco,

was sentenced to just eight years in prison for the murder.

The events of that night were a media sensation.

Newspapers across the country wrote about this horrific incident.

The breathless coverage also caught the attention

of a well-known Spanish author.

It inspired one of his greatest works.

Five years on, Federico Garcia Lorca premiered his play,

Bodas de Sangre or Blood Wedding.

The play opens to nationwide acclaim

and to this day, it's performed around the world.

And the story of the terrible events that took place

on this farmstead are immortalised.

Paca died in 1987.

She never spoke about what happened at this remote farm.

She lived out her days as a recluse in a house near the cortijo.

She never married again

and it's said she wore black for the rest of her life,

in mourning for her true love, Francisco.

After the events of the blood wedding faded into the past,

life at the cortijo returned to normal.

Yet that all changed in the 1960s.

This is the age of the spaghetti westerns,

western movies with Italian directors, great soundtracks

and they're filmed in Italy and Spain.

Of all the spaghetti western directors,

none is more famous than Sergio Leone

and his iconic Dollars trilogy.

The cortijo would be chosen to play a key role in two of those movies,

1965's For a Few Dollars More

and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly in 1966,

both starring Clint Eastwood.

It's even said that the harsh Almeria sun

was so bright it forced Eastwood to keep his eyes half-closed,

giving rise to that famous, intense, gimlet stare.

But its fame couldn't save it from decay

and the abandoned farm slowly descends into ruin.

On the Albanian coast, stands the faded icon of an era

ruled by Europe's most obscure dynasty.

Perched on a hillside is one building

that looks weirdly out of time. It's neither ancient nor modern.

It could be, from some angles, a mid-century hotel,

but it also has the aspect of kind of a Moorish palace.

The inside is just as stunning.

The ceilings are adorned with ornate plaster

and the staircases are solid marble.

This was clearly built to impress.

The man behind this hilltop citadel

was infamous for his iron will.

Respected and feared in equal measure.

He was considered a traitor, a dictator

and one of the most important politicians

of the country during the 20th century.

His extravagance and his hubris brought in great wealth.

It's what built places like this.

But with a spectacular rise comes a spectacular fall.

Andi Pinari is a state historian

and expert on the period in Albanian history,

where one man revolutionised the country.

I mean, mixed feelings in here,

visiting the entrance of this beautiful villa...

..cos it reminds us of a time when aristocracy

and nobility managed to control the country.

It belongs to the most powerful man of the period.

In the early 20th century, Ahmed Zogolli

was a regional governor in northern Albania.

But his ambition stretched far beyond his home region.

Starting especially from the end of the First World War,

he became the Minister of the Interior

and slowly started to gain more and more power.

But in 1924, Zogolli was ousted after a leftist revolt.

He returned seven months later

with the backing of a mercenary army,

seized control of the country

and later installed himself as president.

But he was not what you would call an enlightened leader.

He was a brutal semi-dictator.

He had no qualms about killing off his political opponents.

He basically was not a nice guy.

They were a secret police

and they were controlling all enemies of the state,

not only in Albania, but even outside of the country.

The power-hungry tyrant, who had by now,changed his name to Zogu,

was still not content.

His dream was to be recognised

as not a prime minister or president, but as actual royalty.

With plenty of enemies, Zogu realised he wasn't going to succeed

without backing from abroad

and he found a willing partner in Mussolini's Italy.

Mussolini saw Albania as a strategic asset in the Balkan region

that could strengthen his own fascist dictatorship.

He was happy to pour money into the country

in exchange for influence over its economy and society.

Zogu now had the support he needed to fulfil his despotic ambitions.

In 1928, with Italian approval,

Zogu refashioned the governance of the entire country

and named himself Zog I, King of Albania.

So he was the man who controlled almost everything.

He even developed his own salute,

which was a flat hand placed at the chest with the palm down.

Next, the newly-crowned King Zog

embarked on a series of costly building projects.

This one was called the Royal Villa of Durres.

The palace was finished in 1937, it had Italian marble,

elaborate plasterwork, all the best finishings and art.

It was, as a country that has been under the Ottoman influence,

this type of architecture was something new

and we were totally, let's say, influenced

and modernised by contracting architects from Italy.

The idea was a place for the royal family to come

during the summer to escape the heat of the city,

enjoy the coastal vistas, welcoming visitors

to this stunning lookout on the hill.

But trouble was brewing.

Mussolini had loaned Albania in excess of approximately £4 million,

worth around £230 million today.

And he wanted to see a return on his investment.

King Zog's government began to struggle

under the burden of all these debts.

Meanwhile, Mussolini wanted to exert more control,

not just over the government even, over Albanian culture.

They were even mandating that Italian be taught

in Albanian schools but the King refused.

Mussolini became increasingly frustrated

with Zog's refusal to comply.

In April 1939, he ordered his troops to invade Albania.

They landed a small military force

and after some minor resistance, quickly took over the country.

This was a stunning fall from grace.

Zog had created a monarchy out of sheer force of will

and political power,

but he was deposed and exiled by his greatest ally.

King Zog would never again step foot in his homeland

and lived the rest of his life as an exile

in England, Egypt and France.

After World War II,

another political earthquake swept Albania,

when it was taken over by a communist regime

that operated under the protective umbrella of the Soviet Union.

A royal palace had no place in the new People's Republic

so it was repurposed as a civil government building.

But when communism crumbled in the early 1990s,

Albania's switch to democracy

created a new set of problems.

Zog's former palace was drawn into the turmoil that followed.

Like so many other previously communist countries,

they didn't have the economic or legal infrastructure

to really make the transition to free-market capitalism.

Corruption was everywhere.

The rudimentary financial system was soon dominated by Ponzi schemes

and even government officials backed pyramid schemes.

The pyramid schemes soon began to default on payments

and declare themselves bankrupt.

Almost overnight, hundreds of thousands of people

saw their savings vanish.

The government collapsed and anarchy ensued.

Protests spread like wildfire

and arms depots began to be looted across the country.

One report estimates that every Albanian male

from the age of ten upwards,

had at least one firearm in their possession.

This was absolute chaos. In the harbour below the villa,

people streamed on to ships to flee the country.

In March 1997, with Albania on the brink of civil war,

the violent disorder reached King Zog's lavish villa.

People came in, they took almost everything in here.

There were poor people trying to steal to get some money.

So after that, the villa was totally, let's say, abandoned

and it remains like this.

When you see it, you feel sad and you see that,

yeah, we built it, we have destroyed it.

Today, King Zog's villa sits neglected

above a modernising city.

His family returned to Albania in 2002

and later reclaimed the property.

They then sold it to private owners in 2023.

King Zog's grandson is the head of the royal family,

but any return to power at this point seems pretty unlikely.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media