Original subtitles

A compound in Seattle, rocked by a high-profile military scandal.

There was tremendous pressure on the American government

to assure the world that they would get justice.

A concrete shell in London,

devastated by the city's largest explosion.

Innocent lives were sacrificed in the name of war.

It was a tragedy that should never have happened.

A rural structure in Wisconsin

linked to the founding of an American institution.

It was a kind of hotbed for political movement

that would profoundly affect the country.

And an isolated stronghold in Greece

that incurred a sultan's wrath.

Tens of thousands were killed, enslaved or forced to flee.

In Seattle, Washington, on the edge of the Puget Sound,

a scenic park bears traces of a miscarriage of justice

during a national crisis.

It's a 534 acre expanse of hiking trails and wilderness.

But across the site are these smart properties

that don't look like your typical park buildings.

The houses are boarded up, the windows are boarded over,

this is a neighbourhood that has been shut down.

Inside, the buildings are in a really bad state of disrepair...

..there's peeling paint, holes in the walls

and exposed rafters in the ceilings.

Trying to piece together what this place was used for isn't easy.

One of these buildings has got cages in it.

Big cages.

These cells would hold men accused of a breakdown of order,

and a brutal killing -

but not all was as it seemed.

This starts as a scuffle, and it turns into a riot,

and then a murder.

The court martial brings in its verdict -

guilty.

But what we were able to discover was,

it was an absolute travesty of justice.

In 1985 I was a young news reporter

and I was assigned to one of the most dull, boring assignments

you could have at that age.

The local community was trying to decide what to do with

a sewage treatment plant.

But there was more here than just a sewage plant.

When a park ranger pointed out a strange headstone

in the military cemetery,

it sent Jack Hamann on a decades-long hunt for the truth.

It says Guglielmo Olivotto, Italian soldier,

and it said that he died on August 14th 1944.

What was an Italian soldier

doing being buried in an American graveyard

in World War II?

When you see something like this,

it just piques your curiosity.

I had no idea how big it would become.

When the United States Army began construction here in 1898,

many considered it a remote outpost.

That would soon change.

At the start of World War II,

after the bombing of Pearl Harbor,

this was one of the main avenues for soldiers and material

to be sent across to the Pacific.

Port companies, which were American soldiers

trained to on-load and off-load ships in combat zones

were preparing in Seattle

to deploy to the war in the Pacific.

This is Fort Lawton.

20,000 troops, including these port companies, were stationed here...

..but, reflecting wider society, they were not all treated equally.

More than one million African American men and women

served during World War II,

but at this point in history,

the military is still legally segregated.

The United States Army

tried to keep black soldiers in subservient roles

and away from combat.

Merely because of their race they were seen as manual labour.

And so you see a large number of black men

assigned to the port companies.

In 1943, following the Allied victory in North Africa,

huge numbers of Italian soldiers were captured.

Many of them were brought to Fort Lawton as POWs.

This building would have had not just Americans,

but a considerable number of Italian prisoners of war.

Those who were willing to pledge allegiance to the Allies

were given the opportunity to work in return for pay

and they formed what were called Italian Service Units.

The Italian soldiers for the most part absolutely loved being here.

Italy was poor, it was at war, but here they were given meals,

they were treated pretty well.

But the gravestone in the fort's cemetery

hints that relations at the base were strained.

Guglielmo Olivotto, now buried here,

was part of the 28th Italian Service Unit stationed at Fort Lawton.

They lived in barracks in a remote corner of the base,

right next to the segregated black American port companies.

August 14th 1944 was a big day for these black soldiers,

because on August 15th they were supposed to ship out.

As soldiers and sailors have done since the dawn of time,

here are some soldiers who are going to cut loose in town

before shipping out.

At the very same time,

Italians, too, were able to leave the base

and do much the same thing.

When both groups returned to the fort that night,

it would result in a tragic confrontation.

A couple of drunken black soldiers

and a couple of drunken Italian soldiers crossed paths in the dark.

Drunken insults are exchanged

and an Italian soldier hits the black soldier

hard enough to knock him out.

Other black soldiers started to shout out

"Hey, we've just been attacked!"

There were people who were not just being hit

but beaten and stabbed,

there are serious head injuries.

For 40 minutes,

40 long, long minutes,

it was just an all-out melee,

that should have ended quickly,

but it took an extremely long time

until the rest of the military police

finally found out that something was going on.

The military police were finally alerted to the riot

taking place in this secluded part of the base.

They restored order...

..but it soon became clear that someone was unaccounted for.

Early in the morning, one Italian soldier was found

hanging on some wires on the assault course.

It was the body of Private Guglielmo Olivotto,

and he had been lynched.

The prime suspects were the African American soldiers

of the port companies.

400 port company soldiers were imprisoned,

while the authorities tried to determine who to charge

with rioting and murder.

This is the guardhouse.

The biggest suspects would be housed here,

which was the most secure place.

A formidable military lawyer named Leon Jaworski

was bought in to prosecute the army's case against 43 black soldiers.

Unlike a civilian trial in America,

where you would have 12 jurors of their peers,

military courts were made up of officers,

and at that time they were all white,

and they were there to sit in judgment of these black soldiers

who were much lower than them in rank.

Just four months after Olivotto's death,

the court reached its verdict.

They found, of the 43 defendants,

28 of them guilty of rioting...

..and two of them guilty of manslaughter.

The sentences ranged from six months in prison

to 25 years of hard labour.

All but one of the black soldiers convicted

were dishonourably discharged.

It seemed that justice had been done.

But when you look closer,

you see that that is not what happened here.

It turned out that an important piece of evidence

was omitted from the court martial proceedings.

During their research, Jack and his wife discovered

that another branch of the army

had investigated the riots and the murder.

Their findings were handed over to the lead prosecutor, Leon Jaworski,

but, crucially, not the defence.

My wife came across this amazing report by General Cooke

that was classified for 50 years,

and in that big report, we were able to find

that the army had every reason to know that these black soldiers

pretty much didn't do what they were being accused of,

and beyond that, the reasons the riot went on

had all been completely covered up by Leon Jaworski.

Jaworski was a guy who was determined to get a victory,

not necessarily justice.

He had convinced this military trial

that black soldiers were upset about Italians

because they were being given no better rights

than these former enemies, these prisoners of war.

But there was more evidence of animosity

between white GIs and the Italians

which boiled down to white Americans being resentful of Italian soldiers

dating local white women.

They attracted the attention of a lot of the young ladies in Seattle,

many of whom's boyfriends or husbands were overseas

and it was a story, really, all across America

of an increasing resentment

of, "Why are these Italians being given so much freedom?"

The classified Cooke report

proved Jaworski had withheld evidence of these tensions from the defence...

..allowing him to present a one-sided story

of these black American soldiers

being guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt.

It also revealed explosive new evidence

about who really murdered Olivotto.

We suddenly realised who had the means,

the motive and the opportunity.

One white MP in particular, by the name of Clyde Lomax,

a man we later learn was himself quite racist,

who disliked the Italians.

He was the one who came across the beginnings of the riot,

who decided not to immediately intervene or call for help.

He was the one who disappeared when Olivotto was found missing,

and he was the one who "found" Olivotto

at five o'clock the next morning.

And the US Army has told us since that if he were still alive,

they would have prosecuted him for Olivotto's murder.

Jack and his wife published their findings in 2005,

shedding new light on the mistrial and scapegoating

of all 30 black American soldiers.

In 2007, the US Army review

decided to drop all of the charges.

The army also granted honourable discharge to the men -

but at the time of the ruling

only two of the defendants were actually still alive.

I can't speak for the families, except to say

that some of them were clearly and understandably overjoyed

to know that their husband, or father, or grandfather

had been exonerated from this.

But, for many others, it was delayed justice,

and delayed justice is not the same as real justice.

In the 1970s, most of Fort Lawton was converted into a city park.

For more than 30 years, citizens of Seattle enjoyed it

with little idea of the miscarriage of justice that took place here.

This is the story that belongs to these men

who were here, young, away from home,

trying to do their duty in a time of war,

and yet having to have this giant injustice for their entire life.

On the Greek island of Chios are clifftop ruins

once the scene of a vicious massacre.

We're just a couple of miles inland, but we feel worlds away

from the famous beaches and turquoise waters

this place is known for.

It's arid and craggy, with steep-sided mountains

and deep ravines carved into the landscape.

You can't imagine this was ever an easy place to live.

And then you notice it,

it's a town clinging to the hillside.

Given how well it blends with the surroundings,

it's pretty clear that this place

was designed to be secret and hidden.

Among the devastated remains, there are few clues as to who lived here.

This must have once been a bustling settlement -

it's now a ghost town.

All the buildings have been built right on top of each other,

so the people here were clearly petrified of something -

but who or what was it?

For centuries,

the residents of this isolated town stayed concealed...

..but in the aftermath of a rebellion,

they found themselves surrounded by a brutal force

hellbent on revenge.

They were there to carry out the sultan's orders,

complete annihilation.

Archaeologist Olga Vassi has spent more than 30 years

unearthing the secrets of this place.

But hiding wasn't their only defence -

the town sits upon a rock face at 1,300 feet

and on either side are these really deep gorges,

and there's only one way in and out,

one single gate.

This is the town of Anavatos.

More than two miles inland,

hidden inside their mountaintop fortress,

the residents were protected from the frequent coastal pirate raids...

..but their safety came at a cost.

The population built a cistern

to store what little rain fell in this arid climate.

It was just enough to eke out an existence.

Cut off from the world,

the people here cared little about the Italian merchants

who had ruled Chios for centuries.

They continued to speak Greek

and follow the Orthodox faith as generations before them had done.

For more than 100 years,

life at Anavatos remained relatively unchanged.

Until 1566, a new empire arrives, the Ottomans.

The Ottoman Empire controlled large swathes

of the Middle East and North Africa,

as well as much of modern day Greece.

Its domination of the region brought a new peace to Anavatos.

They had this really powerful navy,

so the threat of piracy really dissipated.

This meant that the residents didn't have to cram inside

the fortified village for safety,

they could start to spread out

and build bigger homes outside the walls.

For more than 200 years,

Chios was largely at peace under Ottoman control...

It seemed as if the harsh life of the residents

was beginning to ease.

..but in the early 1800s

a movement was gathering pace in mainland Greece

which would change the fate of the island.

Over the years, revolutionaries in Greece began to fight

and organise for independence

hoping to overthrow their oppressors and gain freedom.

But rebellions are expensive,

so they went to wealthy expat communities in the US,

Britain and across Europe for support.

After years of gathering resources and people,

on March 25th 1821,

a national uprising began -

but not on Chios.

There were more than 100,000 people living on Chios

who were now in an impossible position.

Their island was more than 100 miles across the Aegean Sea

from mainland Greece, where the rebellion had launched.

Turkey, home of the Ottoman Empire

was far closer.

Chios is just a little more than four miles across the water

from mainland Turkey.

If they took up arms against their occupiers

they're incredibly vulnerable to Ottoman attack.

But in March 1822

the Greek revolution arrived, whether they liked it or not.

A band of rebels from the nearby island of Samos

landed here and began launching attacks on the Ottomans.

The Ottomans responded

by sending tens of thousands of troops to the island.

Their orders were to unleash hell on rebels and civilians alike.

It would become known as the Chios Massacre.

For two weeks,

their army would massacre, torture and imprison thousands,

and completely level towns.

Anavatos wouldn't be spared either.

In April 1822,

Ottoman soldiers had made it to the foot of the mountain.

When they saw them approaching,

the residents terrified, retreated behind the old fortified walls.

This was now a siege, with only one way in or out.

The petrified inhabitants had no idea how long they could hold out.

But a traitor within their ranks

soon crushed their last hopes of survival.

It's said that someone was bribed

to betray the town by unlocking the gate.

Suddenly the Ottoman troops are rushing inside

and their orders are kill or enslave the population of the town.

These soldiers simply set light to the church,

burning to death everyone that was sheltering inside.

But that wasn't the end of the horror.

It's said that they jumped to their death

rather than meeting such a horrible fate.

In the aftermath of the Chios Massacre,

the population of Anavatos and the island was decimated.

It's said that 25,000 were killed,

45,000 enslaved,

and tens of thousands more fled.

Four fifths of the population...gone.

News of what happened here spread like wildfire around the world,

and rallied support for the Greek cause.

In 1832, Greece finally gained its freedom -

but Chios wasn't included in the treaty.

After the devastating response to the uprising,

little opposition remained on the island,

and it stayed under Ottoman control for another 80 years.

Those who survived continued to live in Anavatos,

but soon disaster would strike once more.

Only 50 years after this horrible massacre,

there was a massive earthquake.

This might have been in living memory

for those who had survived the massacre,

and now much of this medieval town has been reduced to rubble.

In the years after the quake,

some of the town's residents settled at the bottom of the hill

while others departed for good,

leaving the ancient settlement to fall further into ruin.

Since 1998, Olga and her team

have been working to excavate and restore the abandoned old town.

While many of these buildings have been, for years, devoid of life,

one person was drawn to the quiet majesty of this ghost town.

Mrs Smaragda first visited Anavatos as a child in 1949,

long before there were paved roads here.

Seeking a peaceful retirement, she returned in the 1990s

to make it her home,

with only her animals for company.

In the heart of London, on the banks of the River Thames,

stands a towering structure, witness to the city's darkest days.

In an area of modern skyscrapers

there's this 10-storey Art Deco building.

It's imposing, striking,

and looks entirely out of place.

It sits right on the waterfront

and you can imagine that the river was crucial to its original purpose.

But inside the vast edifice,

there is little evidence of what that purpose was.

It's like something out of a dystopian movie.

With these massive holes in the floor,

there are deadly consequences if you're not careful.

Once a vital lifeline for the city's population,

this complex became collateral damage during a brutal war.

But the greatest danger would not come from afar,

but right next door.

The catastrophe holds the record

for the largest single explosion in London.

At one time, this was part of the Port of London

which was the busiest and the most commercially successful port

probably in the entire world.

Fiona Rule has spent over a decade

studying this historic area known as Silvertown.

Silvertown was part of the Port of London,

which was an enormous complex of enclosed docks,

warehouses and factories

that lay along the banks of the Thames.

It would become the beating heart

of the capital city's trade and manufacturing...

..but in the early 1800s, this future seemed inconceivable.

The Docklands were a radical solution

to the growing problem of the Thames.

Goods and materials were flooding in

from every corner of the British Empire.

Ships were fighting for space.

The Port of London was thrown into chaos.

Silvertown was uninhabited marshland

which many thought was impractical to develop...

..but a visionary engineer named George Parker Bidder

believed it could be transformed into a dock

capable of handling hundreds of thousands of tons

of shipping every year.

It would cost more than £120 million in today's money.

Constructors began to dig deep to drain the marshland.

The new Victoria Dock opened in 1855.

It became a hive of activity providing thousands of jobs.

Over the next 50 years, many factories were built

and hundreds of thousands of workers

flocked to new neighbourhoods created in the area.

Among them was the family that built this structure.

Vernon & Sons wanted to construct a building

that would be the perfect example of its kind.

In 1905, they opened Millennium Mills.

It was one of the largest bread flour factories in Europe.

When it was in operation,

the grain would have been taken right up to the top floor,

and then, as it was being processed, it would come down floor by floor.

The mill was built using a revolutionary construction material,

reinforced concrete.

Its strength and durability even under extreme temperatures

guarded against the dangers of the mechanised flour-making process.

Because of the heat, friction

and very fine particles of grain dust floating around in the air,

these mills were particularly susceptible to fires

and even violent explosions.

Despite the owner's best efforts,

a tragic accident would lay waste to Millennium Mills...

..but it didn't come from inside these walls.

At the beginning of World War I,

the Ministry of Munitions were looking for a place

where they could produce their munitions.

They identified a building just a few hundred yards away.

This factory began producing vast quantities of an explosive called TNT

in the heart of Silvertown...

..surrounded by thousands of homes and businesses.

It was a risky decision,

but, in the name of the war effort,

the Ministry pressed ahead anyway.

In 1917, a fire broke out,

detonating 50 tons of TNT.

The blast could be felt right across London

and the shock waves heard over 100 miles away.

An organist at the Finsbury Park Empire,

which is some miles away from here

was said to have been blown off his seat.

Just 350 yards away,

Millennium Mills sat directly in the blast zone.

Burning debris was sent hurtling out of the factory

and some of it landed on the mills,

setting fire to the grain silos and the warehouses.

Many other buildings were also set alight in the area,

and this overwhelmed the firefighters -

and the mill was left to burn.

It was London's largest recorded explosion.

The entire area and the mills lay in ruins.

The blast tragically killed 73 people,

and injured 400 more.

Thousands of people were left homeless.

Out of the ashes,

Millennium Mills rebuilt its operation bigger than ever,

renovating the entire structure...

..but soon it would be caught in the crosshairs once more.

The mill had recovered from the Silvertown explosion,

but by the end of the 1930s, a new war was on the horizon.

The mills would soon fall victim to the devastating new face of war,

the Blitz.

As German bombers reached London in 1940,

they set their sights on civilian targets

to cause as much damage as possible,

and Millennium Mills and Victoria Dock became prime targets.

The Docklands were the most heavily bombed part of London,

with over 25,000 bombs dropped on this area alone.

On the 7th of September 1940,

the Millennium Mills sustained heavy damage.

Despite the carnage caused by Hitler's Luftwaffe,

in 1953 the mill was rebuilt a second time

and it entered a period of great prosperity and productivity.

Between 1953 and 1980,

peak flour production reached 3,000 tons of flour per week.

However, the boom wouldn't last,

and the next threat to Millennium Mills

came not as destruction, but replacement.

The demise of the Port of London can be summed up in one word -

containerisation.

Once these enormous ships started to be used,

they were simply too big to get down the Thames.

With this development,

London's central docks saw a steady decline.

In 1993 the mills finally closed their doors for the last time.

For many years these towering structures remained abandoned

as the modern city grew around them...

..but their haunting decay

would soon find them a place on the silver screen.

These ruins piqued the interest of some big names in Hollywood.

The derelict mills featured

in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket,

The Batman, and many other films.

Today there are plans to transform them

into a hub of work and creative spaces

surrounded by thousands of new homes.

These developments will bring a new chapter

of regeneration to this site,

which has followed the remarkable journey of industrial Britain.

In the rural town of Philmore, Wisconsin,

is a compound with links to a national sensation.

We are in the beautiful Wisconsin countryside.

It's a small community,

but a look at the graveyard will tell you this place has deep roots.

By the main road,

a timber-framed structure appears to stand alone.

This building has almost a European look to it.

This is the kind of architecture you'd see in England,

or the German states in the 1600s,

but it's very rare in the United States.

You see the remains of a large cellar behind the building.

The product that was made here

would become something of a sensation across the country.

But the changes it brought about would shift

the country's political landscape into what we see today.

Retired history professor Michael Besch

first visited this unusual structure in 2019.

I came out here, looked at the place,

and I got drawn in.

He quickly realised there was more here than initially meets the eye.

It's become quite a journey.

We're discovering something every time we come here.

Many of the original buildings now lie in ruins,

but the central structure gave Michael

a clear indication of their roots.

It's what we call a half-timber construction,

so you've got timbers going crosswise

and then filled in, in the middle, with bricks,

and then...they also put stucco over the top.

It was erected by a man named Ernst Klessig.

He was part of a wave of immigrants fleeing Europe for Wisconsin

after a series of failed revolutions in 1848.

In Germany, many residents believed they would find better prospects

if they could emigrate to the United States.

By 1854, more than 200,000 Germans had made the journey to the US.

In fact from 1830 to around World War I,

about 90% of German immigrants

chose the US as their home.

Many of these Germans bought with them the knowledge and skills

for a life in agriculture,

and naturally they wanted to migrate to the areas

where they could buy the land affordably.

This bought them to Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota,

the whole Upper Midwest became a land

where you were as likely to hear German

in your local market as English.

Ernst quickly settled down in eastern Wisconsin

and started a family farm in the image of his previous home.

In 1850, he married another German,

Liberta Poetzsch,

and they began building Saxonia House.

This construction was common in the area that the family came from,

which is in Saxonia in Germany,

but it was totally unique for this part of the country.

It was much more than just a family home.

The size of the structure reflects its function as an inn...

..the local church...

..and a space capable of hosting social gatherings.

At its heart was a product,

the driving force behind the whole operation.

Tucked away in the trees are the remnants of this business.

It was actually built by hollowing out a hillside,

building the archway over the top,

so it's a built cave.

This cave was part of a brewery Ernst constructed in 1860.

It produced a drink completely new to many across the United States.

This was a beer produced at lower temperatures,

and it produced a lighter, crisper drink, a lager.

German-style lager was relatively unfamiliar

to the US drinker,

who generally preferred, until the 1880s,

more British styles, like ales -

but this new refreshing, effervescent drink

would take the country by storm.

If you look at some of the famous names in American beer

like Pabst, Schlitz, Miller,

those companies got their start during this era.

At Saxonia House, the Klessigs' business

was becoming a considerable operation,

and they had the capacity to produce about 1,000 barrels a year.

Saxonia was a social hub reflecting German traditions

with drinking and dancing -

but this lifestyle wasn't embraced by everyone.

On one hand there was a lot of alcohol abuse in the 19th century,

to a degree that might shock people today -

but there was also a strong temperance movement

that really descended from the values of the puritans

who had settled New England.

So a lot of those people were suspicious

of these hardy immigrants getting together

and brewing this beer

and enjoying these oversized mugs of refreshing lager

on a Sunday afternoon.

This tension didn't just happen in Wisconsin, but across the country,

as German taverns and beer became more and more popular.

So-called nativist parties

such as the Know Nothing Party were gaining traction,

running on an anti-liquor, anti-immigration ticket.

They began to crack down on taverns,

on beer drinking,

and on this kind of culture in general.

In Chicago in the summer of 1855,

tensions came to a head in what became known as the Lager Beer Riot.

These riots were a response to increased licensing fees,

but also Sunday closure laws.

A protest by supporters of eight German saloon keepers

who had broken these laws

sparked a brutal police crackdown

ordered by the nativist mayor.

It resulted in one death and several dozen arrests.

These shocking events mobilised immigrant voters across the Midwest.

Groups began to meet at places like Saxonia House to discuss politics.

These German immigrant activists were known as Forty-Eighters,

inspired by the 1848 revolutions that had swept across Europe.

Forty-Eighters were known in Germany

as people who pushed for democracy and human rights.

So they found a natural home here in the US

in a growing political party.

They called themselves the Republican Party.

The party had formed in nearby Ripon, Wisconsin,

and the Forty-Eighters were at the heart of its development.

Their overriding ideal was freedom, self-expression,

ability to pursue your own interest,

your own desires, your own business.

So those ideas would have been talked about here.

This Republican Party would become the driving force to ending slavery,

the conflicts over which, of course, led to the Civil War.

Through that period, Saxonia House continued to operate as a tavern,

cos, of course, the Civil War didn't have as much of a disruptive impact

in regions like this.

Ernst Klessig died in 1864

and his wife took over the running of the brewery with her new husband...

..but by the early 1900s, the family had moved on for good.

The building and farm changed hands several times subsequently.

Eventually it was left vacant and began to fall into disrepair.

In the late '90s,

the Klessig family's descendants held a reunion at Saxonia House.

About 400 family members showed up,

and one of the first things they decided was,

"We have to restore this whole place."

The Friends of Saxonia House was created,

and they purchased this land in 1999.

In addition to the house, there are plans to build and restore

other buildings on the property

to make it a visitor's attraction,

and, of course, there will be a beer hall.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media