Original subtitles

Once, they were some of the most advanced structures and facilities on the planet.

The best achievements in design and construction .

Today they are abandoned, contaminated and sometimes deadly.

These empty buildings are filled with the lost lives of real people,

leaving many questions unanswered and mysteries unresolved.

In today's show, we explore the world's strangest abandoned buildings,

which created empty Silent Cities.

Why did an abandoned air base become a restricted area?

Zeljava is an underground airbase shrouded in secrecy.

This is the kind of place that had to look really good on paper.

We will hide the airfield in the hill, so no one will see it.

The mountain was supposed to protect it against the nuclear weapon that was dropped on Hiroshima.

How Japan's tiny mining island came to be

the most crowded place on the planet ?

It is one of the most claustrophobic places on Earth .

More than 5,000 people lived in the tiny community .

In fact, they were able to increase the surface area of ​​the island quite easily,

because the necessary materials were obtained from the ground.

A 200-meter-deep mine was dug into the sea next to the island

it is an incredible feat of engineering.

Is it the layout of the streets of the model city of the Soviet Union

became a matter of life and death for this population ?

The abandoned city of Pripyat is the modern day Pompeii.

Life changed very quickly overnight and it was very bad.

It was inextricably linked to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster,

but it must be taken as it was intended.

At that time, the Soviet dream was there and people wanted to be a part of it.

And how did Nazi Germany turn a resort into a mind control facility?

Prora was the last element, the ideological missing piece,

which was to ensure that everyone thought alike.

This was mind control at its best.

Abandoned Buildings

Silent Cities

One of the most sinister and forgotten abandoned communities in history

is located in northern Germany on the island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea.

A huge building is hidden behind the pines that line the coast

A forgotten remnant of Hitler's Nazi regime .

Being one of the longest buildings constructed in Europe,

its huge mass dominates the peaceful landscape.

Its name is Prora and it was built as a resort for thousands of Germans.

But how did this huge structure get here

and what was its real, sinister purpose?

Prora resort is like a modern center of willpower.

The workers were supposed to rest here, but what really happened?

People were woken by pain annunciators telling them what to do,

how and when to do it, everyone ate at the same time,

in the so-called free time, everyone watched the same propaganda films

and read the same propaganda literature.

Considering the time and money spent on the Prora complex ,

it is understandable that this project was of vital importance to the Nazis.

It was a long-term project to create a master race,

who would think like the Nazis.

Katja Lucke is a local historian and an expert on this place.

He discovered that although Prora was a resort for industrial workers,

its true role in Hitler's Germany was much more obscure.

People were controlled and manipulated here

according to Nazi ideology.

The Nazis came up with the idea of ​​building a resort by the sea,

specifically for German workers,

who didn't have much money

so that they too can rest by the sea.

The idea was that people could rest and recover as much as possible,

without having a single moment of free time.

To be healthy and strong for the war, to achieve better work results

and would actually be fit for mass murder.

But how did an ordinary rest camp become

play a role in Hitler's plan for genocide and world domination?

The concept of Prora started with the organization Kraft Durch Freude

or "Strength through Joy."

It was led by top Nazi Robert Ley

and on the face of it, Strength Through Joy offered little more than a subsidized vacation

to millions of low-wage German industrial workers.

But its real function was to unite them behind Hitler.

"Strength Through Joy" had very big plans for this,

they wanted to bind people behind the Nazi regime

and even more, people were tried to be brainwashed

and prepare them for a possible war.

For Prora, Ley planned to go even further

than the organized pastimes that "Strength through Joy" dealt with until now,

The huge complex offered people all the possibilities for recreation.

Of making weapons for the Third Reich

swimming pools, cinema, bowling alleys, cafes and cabarets.

However, the background of all activities was non-stop propaganda.

In terms of its intentions, this complex was far ahead of its time.

Yes, it was rather spartan, but at the same time a powerful complex,

which, of course, had a built-in control element.

But for the average German worker it was like Nirvana.

They came from industrial cities and had never seen the sea,

so its appeal can be understood.

Its purpose was to make those coming from the ship say:

There must have been a lot of nationalism.

You could even say that this is Nazi ideology set in stone.

In fact, we can see in the stone that

how the Nazis envisioned a human commune.

The program would last the whole day and would start with a morning assembly,

followed by swimming in the sea, lunch and the closing ceremony.

Everything would be organized in detail.

The 4.5 km long building was divided into 8 6-storey accommodation blocks,

all built of reinforced concrete, which was a great innovation at the time.

It was something unprecedented,

"Oh, it's modern technology,

it's progress, we're at the forefront here."

Reinforced concrete can seem boring these days,

but at the time it was very exciting.

Each block had several dozen rooms with a sea view,

all deliberately quite simple in construction.

In Prora, it was not luxury that mattered, but power.

The large lobbies had to give the same impression as the Nuremberg stadium.

This room belongs to the reception hall.

It is tall and must have influenced and intimidated the workers who came here.

This is one way to make a big impact.

You felt discouraged when you came here ,

but at the same time were excited to be a part of such a big idea.

That's how the manipulation worked.

I don't think you could see the building in the 1930s ,

that would look like Prora and not be overwhelmed by it,

"Oh, it 's already something, and it's ours."

An important part of the Prora complex must have been a huge auditorium,

which could simultaneously accommodate 20,000 tourists.

It is harsh, it represents everything that is great about the so-called Aryan race

and it was designed to emit national doom

and you had to believe it would have that effect.

We have been creating huge halls for a very long time,

the romans coped with it particularly well,

they contain tens of thousands of people on a fairly small surface area.

I believe the view in front of you would be quite mesmerizing

and perhaps this psychological effect worked in Hitler's favor.

It is one of the major architectural legacies of the Nazis,

although this building did not start to function as planned.

You begin to understand what it meant to get used to their ideology.

At the end of the war, Prora was taken over by the invading Russian forces,

who turned it into a military prison for opponents of the communist regime.

When the Berlin Wall fell in the 1990s, Prora was abandoned

and it was only recently that it began to be restored into luxury apartments with sea views.

Many think that the complex should be razed to the ground.

Let's forget about this forced will program,

it belongs to our dim past and let's move on.

The fact that it is now being renovated into luxury homes,

in its own way symbolizes the victory of capitalism.

Ironically, this represents what we see in those happy posters,

but for a different reason.

Abandoned Buildings

Silent Cities

Abandoned Buildings

Silent Cities

Reinforced concrete, an innovation used in Prora,

helped to build a home for an entire community as well,

which stretches along the southwestern coast of Japan near the port of Nagasaki.

This is the small island of Hashima.

140 years ago it was just a narrow ridge jutting out from the sea.

But when coal was found there at the end of the 19th century ,

the island grew larger with the help of land reclamation,

to accommodate the huge number of miners and support facilities.

How it became the most crowded city in the world

and why was it eventually abandoned?

Taking land from the sea is a major engineering challenge,

because you have to work with water that moves.

It rises and falls, it can be acidic and salty,

it consumes man- made materials quite quickly.

And you try to bring in loads of new material,

stack it in a moving environment

and create a solid structure where you can live and work

and erect huge buildings on top of it.

Hashima was called the island without greenery for a reason.

It is one of the most claustrophobic places on Earth .

More than 5,000 people stay in the narrow and tiny community .

But they got used to it and felt uncomfortable going to the mainland.

Today's tourists can't wait to get out of here.

Locally, Hashima is called Gunkanjima - Battleship Island.

Tomoji Kobata is a former coal miner who worked on the island,

until it was closed in 1974.

Tomoji remembers very well how he first came here.

When I saw the island for the first time from the ship.

It seemed to me that this island resembled a warship.

I couldn't see the whole island when I landed.

I looked out the office window and saw a mountain of coal,

shafts and working miners.

I saw it was a coal island.

A very rich coal seam was discovered under Hashima

and the engineers made a 200 m long shaft to bring it away.

Working conditions so deep under the sea were often unbearable.

The underground was a very dangerous place.

Stones fell from the ceiling.

It was like doing hard work in a steam room.

As the island produced more and more coal,

more and more workers were needed to bring it out of the ground

and there was less and less space.

It was a big logistical challenge.

In my opinion, Hashima is an incredible engineering feat.

Next to a small island in the sea

it was necessary to dig a 200 meter deep mine

"I have a mine that produces material,

where do I put it and who do I sell it to?" There is nowhere to put it.

So you have to think about how to transport it,

how close the ships can be brought, how to put the material on the ships

and then the ships spread it back to earth again.

This is a big logistical challenge

and I think they did a pretty good job of it.

The amazing thing about Hashima is that it is a self-replicating entity

the deeper you dig, the more material you bring up.

You use it as padding and make your island a little bigger,

to accommodate more miners to dig even deeper.

It keeps going round and round and where does it finally stop?

Over the years, the workforce grew tremendously,

the pier was extended to enlarge the island

and to protect against storms.

It seems that reinforced concrete was invented just for

to build something like that on the small island of Hashima.

You have little space and a lot of material to build with,

so reinforced concrete is the best solution - you pour it where you need it

and once it's set, the job is done.

The first thing that surprised me were the reinforced concrete residential buildings.

I didn't know much about the island.

I didn't think I would see on the island

so many tall concrete residential buildings.

Bringing residential buildings near the mine is a difficult task for an engineer,

because there are many things going on underground - you can't see them, but they are there.

You remove the ground where the foundation will be,

you take less material and thus weaken the ground

and then you try to build big structures on top of it,

so the foundation must be made as strong and stable as possible.

It was also important for Hashima that reinforced concrete is fireproof.

Reinforced concrete cannot be set on fire

and when it comes to coal mining, it is probably the best material.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, the mine's production was at its peak.

At its peak there were 5,000 miners on the island ,

who produced almost 500,000 tons of coal annually.

The island was overcrowded, noisy and polluted.

Minoro Kinoshita was born in Hashima and remembers the conditions there well.

There were a lot of people there.

There were an incredible number of them. Chaos reigned.

We lived in the 30th building.

There were four of us in the family and we lived in one room.

The room was very small.

It was very small indeed.

Despite the harsh conditions , the people of Hashima survived

and learned to adapt to their unique situation.

The island had a kindergarten, a primary school, a primary school,

hospital, Pachinko parlor, bar, hairdresser and flower shop.

There were no elevators in high-rise buildings.

So people moved around horizontally

and there were many footpaths for it.

You didn't go down the stairs to go around the residential buildings

moved horizontally between apartments.

Maybe Hashima has an element,

such a human factor and overall well-being

and the fact that you don't have room and there are too many people,

I don't know if I even thought about it.

Everything had to be functional. Hashima had to be functional

and I don't know if I thought about anything else besides work efficiency.

Despite the inhumane conditions on the island,

it was the children who constantly found solutions to problems.

Children used their brains to play here.

They played cards on the stairs,

played a ball game when they found an empty seat.

The roofs of the buildings were their playground.

We found our way to play baseball,

to play on the island we had to use our

not someone else's brains.

The population of the island had grown to 5,500 people

who were accommodated on a 160,000 square meter island,

making it the most densely populated place on the planet .

The Hashima mine was closed in 1974.

During its 84-year history

the Hashima mine produced a whopping 16.5 million tons of coal,

but eventually the deposits were exhausted.

When the heart of the island stopped, so did the community

and Hashima was left to the mercy of the forces of nature.

Abandoned Buildings

Silent Cities

Abandoned Buildings

Silent Cities

The city of Pripyat, the pride of the former Soviet Union,

is similarly left at the mercy of the forces of nature.

But why was its new design so important when things went wrong?

Pripja had to offer modern living facilities

to the workers of the nearby Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

Now it stands abandoned in the pine forests of Ukraine,

it is guarded by armed guards and protected by security barriers.

A warning about how quickly a dream can turn into a nightmare.

The abandoned city of Pripyat is the modern day Pompeii.

Overnight, even within a few hours, life changed.

You see a huge wheel,

where locals could rest, you will see children's toys.

You realize that something happened very quickly and it was very bad.

The explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986. A. April

unleashed a stream of radioactive waste into the atmosphere.

A huge part of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia was contaminated

and radiation levels rose across Europe.

The irony is that the area has become a popular tourist destination.

Why? I believe it is due to morbid curiosity,

have watched many B-movies and want to see in real life,

what happens on a larger scale when something goes terribly wrong.

Pripyat was only 3 kilometers from Chernobyl

and its deadly radioactive cloud.

At the time of the disaster, it was home to nearly 50,000 people.

It's easy to look at Pripyat now and think it's a disaster city.

It is associated with a nuclear disaster and is located right on the road to Chernobyl.

But it has to be seen as it was intended

and what life was like there before the disaster.

Iconic images that we imagine when it comes to Pripyat

the ferris wheel that's still there and spinning,

gas masks floating on the ground,

they all tell the same story and you can see it when you watch the beating.

While it was up and running,

it was the Soviet dream and people wanted to participate in it.

When Pripyat was founded in 1970 to house Chernobyl workers,

it was supposed to be a model city for the entire Soviet Union,

which would promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy

and would be a model for urban planning.

Guide Sergei Chernov first saw Pripyat as a young man

and he had no doubt that it was the city of the future.

The city was never finished. The entire construction was planned in advance.

It was a thriving city.

It was the first place I saw in my life.

There were so many roses and children.

City planners had endless space and they took advantage of it.

Residential blocks were separated by parks and gardens

and with an average age of less than 30, the city had many sports facilities.

The heart of Pripyat was the city's central square.

Right now we are in the middle square

and the house in front of us is a cultural house and it was called Energeetik.

To our right is the hotel. Its name was Polissija.

At the time of the explosion, it was a modern and modern hotel.

And there is a five-story building with a slogan on it that says:

"Let the atom be a worker rather than a soldier."

The new model city glorified the triumph of socialism

and soon the reason for its existence was ready.

The first reactor of the Chernobyl power plant was completed in 1977. A.

By 1983, all four reactors were operational.

On the morning of April 26, 1986, at 1:23 a.m.,

the bright future of Pripyat was broken.

The fourth reactor exploded and spread radiation all over Europe.

Two reactors were permanently shut down.

It is the world's biggest nuclear accident.

The explosion in the fourth reactor of Chernobyl

released a huge amount of radioactive material,

but the inhabitants of Pripyat were not warned.

Within hours, people started getting sick.

Another day passed before the authorities ordered the evacuation of the city.

Hundreds of cars and buses arrived to take away the residents of Pripyat.

They were told they were only leaving for a few days.

The layout of Pripyat with huge avenues and open spaces

actively contributed to what happened in the next 48 hours .

The entire population, nearly 50,000 people, had to be evacuated from the city.

If you try to do this in an organically grown collection,

where there are narrow streets and cross streets everywhere,

is much more difficult, it would be a hell of a challenge.

Taking the structure and taking it apart and planning the evacuation

and having arteries to carry people away,

this made the evacuation much more efficient.

53,000 people were evacuated in just 48 hours .

From Pripyat and its neighboring areas.

To keep people away from the contaminated area

a 2,500 square kilometer exclusion zone was established.

Abandoned Buildings

Silent Cities

Abandoned Buildings

Silent Cities

The destruction of Pripyat by the atomic power that gave it life was ironic.

500 km to the south is another Cold War commune,

which would have easily withstood radioactive fallout,

but proved vulnerable to the bitter hatred of civil war.

In 1958, the people of southwestern Yugoslavia realized that

that intensive construction works are taking place in the area.

The secrecy was so strong that the locals had no idea

that one of the largest and most expensive constructions in Europe

takes place right in their backyard.

Zeljava underground air base.

Zeljava is the kind of place that must have looked really good on paper.

We hide the airfield in the hill.

Nobody can see it.

It wasn't really unusual. There were other places in Europe,

for example in Switzerland and Italy where there were similar projects.

In fact, the Russians and the US used it throughout the Cold War

aircraft reinforced shelters to shelter aircraft

and for defense against tactical nuclear weapons.

Urban explorer Goran Les is an expert on abandoned military bases

and has thoroughly researched the Zeljava base .

The Cold War had a major purpose for this airfield and air base

repel an initial attack by the Soviet Union or the West.

That is why it was built here in a secluded location.

It was protected by a mountain from the south

and the northern side was formed by a plateau with good visibility.

Hiding the planes underground seems like a good idea,

but in Zeljava it took a whole 20 years,

to dig a 3 kilometer long tunnel into the mountain.

Zeljava was to become the cornerstone of the Yugoslav Air Force.

In order for the base to be used by three fighter squadrons,

five two-kilometer runways were built.

The problems started when they started digging a tunnel into the mountain.

When they started building tunnels in the mountain in Zeljava ,

was surprised to discover that there are natural caves in the rock,

it was not as solid a mountain as it was thought to be.

So they were challenged - how to continue the tunnel through the air.

They had to restructure these places ,

to extend a tunnel through the air of these caverns,

instead of building it through the rock.

This is what the engineers learned on the job

and that's why they used concrete to strengthen the mountain

and to create the large spaces they needed to store their planes.

Hangars for 80 aircraft were dug into the rock,

as well as command and control facilities, generators,

for bomb and fuel depots and housing for a thousand people.

Special arrangements were added to reduce the effects of a nuclear explosion.

The entire entrance is a blast chamber that turns 90 degrees away,

the force of the nuclear explosion is absorbed in this chamber

before entering the main tunnel.

On the roof you can see these concrete diaphragms,

which were meant to reflect the explosion.

The back door is located at the end of this curved tunnel.

This hundred-ton concrete swing door.

Placing the Air Force underground protects it from any attack

or from an explosion directly affecting it.

But burying planes underground,

yes, here's a mountain overhead for protection,

but if the explosion were to occur at some opening,

through which one goes in and out,

then the tunnels magnify and direct the blast

towards the very thing you are trying to protect.

Zeljava could cut herself off from the world for a whole month

and still use its five runways.

The base had to withstand the impact of a 20-kilogram nuclear weapon

a bomb with the same destructive force destroyed the city of Nagasaki.

The planes were kept behind their airtight doors,

they were lined up behind each other

and the plane that was about to fly away

was transported to the beginning of the runway and took off from there.

This shape was purposely built to accommodate the Mig-21 aircraft,

since it had one vertical stabilizer,

that's how it got through under the concrete shield.

Are those tunnels with movable concrete barriers

would have really prevented a nuclear explosion

massive explosive force from penetrating the mountain?

We don't know because the mountain was not attacked.

But it was supposed to protect against such a nuclear bomb,

as it was dropped on Hiroshima, but the bombs became much more powerful.

You also have to think about the logistics of this whole operation.

1000 people could live inside the mountain for a month,

but if you come out after a nuclear attack, will you survive?

What's next? Who do you send planes against when there is no one left?

And all this was not cheap.

Zeljava cost six billion dollars to build,

making it one of the most expensive constructions in post-war Europe.

However, despite the huge waste of time and money,

which made Zeljava the largest air base in Yugoslavia

and one of the largest in Europe, it was all for nothing.

When Yugoslavia broke up in 1991,

rival forces fought over an air base.

When Bosnian forces were about to take over the area,

they mined the area around the airfield so that the armed forces would not take it back.

The Serbs detonated a large number of explosives,

which were buried on runways and in tunnels.

The base was completely destroyed after one year of fighting.

Considering its huge cost

and the fact that it was only used.

Against the people of Yugoslavia in the civil war in the early 1990s,

then it was a great white elephant among military objects.

With ruined tunnels and mined airstrips, Zeljava was abandoned.

Today, few people risk entering

into the polluted tunnels of this once impressive military base.

Zeljava can be considered the era of Cold War paranoia.

It was shrouded in such secrecy decades ago ,

that it cannot be a tourist destination due to excessive preparations ,

one must come here with extreme caution to avoid losing one's life .

Places like the huge Prora building, the tiny concrete-clad Hashima,

the grassy streets of Pripyat and the tunnel network of Zeljava

show how engineers overcame challenges

to make life possible in unusual places.

The concept of an abandoned community - a ghost town

leaves us feeling like what went wrong here?

What happened to abandon it? Could it happen again?

It creates a sense of what life would be like in a post-apocalyptic world.

Some of these abandoned ghost towns are getting new life.

I always imagine futuristic sky bridges connecting buildings

and it's amazing that Hashima did it decades ago.

Is it a glimpse into the past or the future?

The population is growing by leaps and bounds,

so it's a view of who and how we're going to live,

but also to how we can fade away.

In Pripyat, tourists can see a Soviet city frozen in time,

and after the end of the tour, the excitement of radiation control follows.

The point is not to go see how people who are not there lived.

The question is instead why it happened.

Because you don't believe what the media is saying and conspiracy theories are circulating

and that's what feeds people's imaginations.

I am surprised that when the disaster happened in Pripyat,

and they were able to evacuate the entire city so quickly

it was not used to analyze future disasters.

But Prora, the huge Nazi recreation complex,

is becoming a real success story.

For many years, people wanted it demolished.

Now one block has already been converted into luxury holiday apartments.

The second one will soon become a five-star hotel.

Prora is located in the middle of beautiful nature and it is teasing.

The idea of ​​demolishing it was natural.

But it cannot be demolished because it is such a historical place.

As an engineer, it's really nice to give an old building a new purpose,

especially if it was used for something a little colorful in the past.

Leaving this ugly history behind

and seeking new purposes, new things

and it will definitely give you a sense of satisfaction.

After so many years of gloom and decay

turns an abandoned place into a resort, as it was originally supposed to be.