Original subtitles

Tonight, a closer look inside

the world’s most sinister castles and strongholds...

Nobody can fathom a mind

that would create a place

that seems welcoming, that seems safe,

but was designed to kill.

From an iconic torture tower...

It must have been terrifying for prisoners

to be led down into the dungeon.

Your hips are being pulled apart.

Your knees, your wrists, everything.

It took some real time to get his head off the body.

To a hotel of hidden horrors.

They’re going to be murdered

and the skeletons sold for money.

It’s a tomb. It’s a trap.

These are the origin stories of true temples of doom.

Not all inventions are made with good intentions.

Unlock the twisted history

behind the world’s darkest marvels.

Looming over the north bank of London’s River Thames

is an imposing stone structure

that has been a fixture on the city skyline

for nearly a 1,000 years... The Tower of London.

The Tower of London covers about 12 acres,

which is about nine football fields of area.

It’s surrounded by a huge moat.

It dominates with its breadth.

It dominates with its width. It dominates with its walls.

The Tower of London is a phenomenal,

spectacular building.

It was in many ways the archetypal medieval castle.

This intimidating stronghold

is ordered to be built in the 11th century

by King William I.

In 1066, William the Bastard conquers England

and becomes known forever as William the Conqueror.

Once he takes the reins of power,

the Tower of London is built as his first main fortress.

William the Conqueror orders this tower to be built from stone.

This is very unusual,

because people haven’t really started crafting homes

out of stone yet in England,

and the reason why William the Conqueror

wanted it to be made out of stone

is because the idea was stone would last forever.

The whole point of a castle was to say,

"I am here, this is my land,

and I have now built this structure

that will outlast even me."

But construction isn’t complete until 1097,

ten years after William’s death.

The Tower of London was originally

what is now just the White Tower.

It was meant to be impregnable.

It was the part of a castle that was then known as a keep,

and the word means that you could keep safe there.

Keep the royal family safe. Keep the royal jewels safe.

Retreat there from an angry mob or an invading enemy.

Over the course of the next three centuries,

the White Tower in the middle was successfully,

as we would say today, militarily hardened

by the construction of two encircling curtain walls,

moats, and drawbridges.

Each of those walls had towers built on them.

The tower is considered so safe

it serves as the royal living quarters

throughout times of great upheaval.

In 1348, the first cases of the bubonic plague show up.

Now the bubonic plague of course

decimated the population of medieval Europe,

killing six million people.

There’s a recession, there’s economic depression.

There’s famine.

There’s a drought, which doesn’t help.

And at the same time,

you have the English monarchy

pressing its claim to the French throne

using English resources.

And so that leads to dissent among the English population.

On May 30th, 1381,

that dissent turns into an uprising

against the king and his advisors.

King Richard II came into power in 1377 when he was only ten.

So in an England that’s run by a boy king,

that’s still reeling from the bubonic plague

and thirty years of economic upheavals,

1381 marks a watershed moment

in which the peasants, the farmers,

the people who produce the food are fed up.

Richard II wants to appease the peasants,

so he leaves the tower to go to talk to them.

But naively, the gates are left open,

because it’s assumed that no one would ever go into the tower

because it is such a large fortress.

Unfortunately, the peasants see their opportunity,

and over 400 of them storm the tower.

They go in, and they want to get major leaders.

They do get a hold of one of those advisors of the king

who they consider an enemy of the people,

and that is chancellor and archbishop of Canterbury Simon Sudbury.

Along with him and several other royal officials,

they drag them out of the tower across to Tower Hill.

And there they proceed to behead these officials.

The beheading of Simon Sudbury appears to have been done

with, let’s say, a rather blunt axe...

and it took some real time to get his head off the body.

And they take these heads

and put them on spears

and display them on London Bridge.

Several days later, the revolt would end

with the heads of some of the leading rebellers on pikes

and used to replace the heads on the bridge.

King Richard manages to crush the rebellion,

but ultimately meets his own grisly fate.

Even though Richard is only 14 when this happens,

his reign becomes very unstable after the Peasants’ Revolt,

and he is seen as more and more authoritarian as his reign progresses,

until he’s deposed in 1399 and likely starved to death.

After the Peasants’ Revolt,

the monarchy stops using the White Tower

as a primary residence.

In the late 15th century, early 16th century,

the center of power shifts.

The monarchy moves around a lot more,

and actually Windsor becomes

one of the primary royal residences.

The Tower of London becomes a seat of government.

But it also serves another crucial purpose...

As a prison for people accused of high treason,

including a queen.

Of Henry the VIII’s wives,

Anne Boleyn is perhaps the most famous.

Henry VIII, his main concern

is to produce an heir for the kingdom.

Anne Boleyn was not able to provide him this male heir whom he sought.

He wanted to get her out of the way.

She is accused of incest, adultery,

and she’s even accused of witchcraft...

The idea that she bewitched Henry

into divorcing his first wife, Catherine of Aragon,

so he’d marry her instead.

Ultimately, she is found guilty,

and she’s thrown into the tower and condemned to death.

She is shut up in the same apartments

where she had prepared for her wedding

a mere three years before.

While she’s held there for 17 days,

she can watch the construction of the gallows

on which she is to be beheaded.

Henry wants to orchestrate a spectacle for her execution.

But Anne was very afraid that an English axeman would botch the job.

So Anne Boleyn asked and was granted

the right to have a French swordsman come over from Calais.

French beheadings at this time

were done with a very sharp, very skilled swordsman.

He was paid 23 pounds, 6 shillings,

the equivalent of $10,000 today,

to execute the first queen who’d been executed in English history.

This is unprecedented.

Anne Boleyn is led to the site of her beheading,

the Tower Green, cementing its legacy

as a stage for bloody executions,

which includes another of Henry VIII’s wives

just six years later.

Catherine Howard is Henry VIII’s fifth wife.

She’s very young when she marries Henry.

Some historians believe that she’s only 15 years old.

But Catherine is repulsed by him,

and so she starts having an affair

with a young member of court,

and she doesn’t even really hide it.

So Henry VIII orders her to be sent to the tower to be executed.

In comparison to the quite regal death

that attended Anne Boleyn,

Catherine Howard’s was without pageantry.

It was hurried. It was inglorious.

And this is very likely due

to Henry’s extreme humiliation

at not only having been cuckolded after just one year of marriage,

but also having married someone

who so openly was disgusted by him.

Her body is buried beneath the floor of the chapel.

There’s not even a box.

Catherine Howard is buried with lime.

And there’s every suggestion

that he just wanted to dissolve her body and move on.

During the course of its bloody history,

many more meet their end beneath the executioner’s axe.

There is currently on display

in the top of the White Tower

one of four axes that was used for executions.

It’s a very distinctive axe because it has a wide blade,

and then it tapers into this almost hooked shape.

And that axe, of course, very notoriously

becomes an emblem of beheading in England specifically.

But the tower becomes even more well known

for its brutal methods of torture.

Hidden beneath the Tower of London

are several dungeons responsible for its bloody reputation.

It must have been terrifying

for prisoners to be led down into the dungeons,

where they would have heard other prisoners screaming,

moaning in agony.

They would have also heard the torturers

and what they were doing.

Torture was extremely prolific

under the reign of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.

And this is because of Henry VIII’s growing paranoia

of people working against him.

And so, anybody who he even suspected

of possibly being treasonous would get thrown into the tower.

In the dungeons at the Tower of London,

you would have had three main forms of torture.

One of them is the rack.

When somebody’s attached to a rack,

they’re stretched, and what you hear is the popping sound

of their joints and the cartilage

as they are slowly dislocated.

Your spine is being pulled apart.

Your hips are being pulled apart,

your knees, your wrists, everything.

It would leave somebody completely and totally incapacitated.

Then you would have also had the manacles

that could be employed when someone was accused of stealing

because one is being hung by the hands.

Manacles were meant for imprisonment

or to suspend somebody in a distended form.

Someone’s hands are tied behind their back and they’re lifted up.

So somebody in manacles could be suspended

at varying angles that cause varying degrees of pain.

And then, of course, you also had the scavenger’s daughter.

Like the rack, the scavenger’s daughter

is used to elicit confessions.

But instead of stretching victims, it compresses them.

The idea of the scavenger’s daughter,

it’s a metal frame that holds someone’s hands and their feet

so that they are forced into a stress position for a length of time.

And it is designed specifically

to cause severe pain and cramping.

Perhaps even worse is being locked up

in the most fearsome dungeon of all,

a dark four-by-four cell known as the Little Ease.

If you’ve ever had to even bend over

for longer than you’d like, you know how painful it can get.

People would be locked in it for hours or even days.

But it’s also solitary confinement.

You cannot see anyone. There is no window.

And in my opinion, except for deaths that happen bit by bit,

nothing is worse than solitary confinement.

A horrific fate experienced by its first

unfortunate victim in 1534.

There was a young woman named Alice Tankerville who had been accused of theft,

convicted for it, and imprisoned in the tower.

However, one of the guards of the tower named John Bawd

fell in love with her.

So one night they sought to slip out

of the tower together.

They made their way toward Tower Hill,

when they were caught by one of John’s colleagues,

who of course called other guards in.

As punishment, John Bawd is locked

inside Little Ease until he’s almost dead.

Then he’s hung outside until he dies of exposure

and his body is picked apart by ravens.

John Bawd goes from being one of the guards of the tower

to one of the tower’s victims.

Alice, because she had originally committed

a theft on the Thames, was convicted of piracy.

And in keeping with the crime,

she was hanged from the side of the River Thames as were all pirates,

either to die of hanging first

or die as the tide rose over her.

In 1640, torture is outlawed in England,

bringing this dark chapter in the tower’s history to a close.

But over two centuries later,

an even more menacing castle emerges.

July 1895, Chicago, Illinois.

While conducting an investigation of a South Side hotel,

police make a shocking discovery.

In the basement, the police find a dissection table.

They find a kiln for burning things,

and they ultimately find evidence of bones and jewelry inside this kiln.

Also, a tub full of quicklime,

which is a classic way to dissolve and dispose of a body.

And they find so many jumbled remains

that it’s impossible for them to determine

exactly how many corpses they’ve found.

News headlines dub the hotel "The Murder Castle,"

and investigators start to dig deeper

into the building’s owner, Dr. H.H. Holmes.

Holmes was born in May of 1861

as Herman Webster Mudgett.

And then it is upon his graduation from medical school

that he decides to take on an assumed name.

Holmes also displays a macabre fascination with cadavers,

with bodies, with dissection,

and some of his earliest known scams

are taking out insurance policies on fictitious people

and presenting a cadaver as the dead person,

collecting the insurance money.

After leaving New York and Philadelphia

under suspicious circumstances,

Holmes moves to Chicago in 1886 to work at a pharmacy.

Soon after, he buys the vacant lot across the street

to build a new endeavor... A hotel.

Holmes is a guy who wants to keep his business secret.

So no contractor, no carpenter, no bricklayer,

does more than a couple of weeks work before they’re fired,

which means they won’t see the diabolical plan in full.

When this building of Holmes’ springs up

in the middle of the town, it is so singular,

even down to the turrets.

It has the resemblance of a castle,

and it is so tall and takes up so much real estate,

that it is eye-catching.

The ground floor of Holmes’ hotel

is built out as a conventional retail space.

But the second level is a maze of hidden passageways,

trap doors, and dead ends.

On the second floor, we’re looking at approximately,

say 8,000 square feet,

and you’ve got roughly 30-some-odd rooms

and about 50-plus doors. That’s a lot.

He folds asbestos into the plans.

This makes everything silent. Why is this important?

Because you can’t hear someone in a muffled room.

Holmes wants to keep you in. So, the hallways are mazes.

The exits are not clear. The windows are boarded over.

So, it’s almost the opposite of what a hotel should be.

It’s a tomb. It’s a trap.

In late 1892,

H.H. Holmes’ hotel is open for business.

And his timing is deviously perfect,

because in just a few months

the World’s Fair will open in Chicago

in the spring of 1893.

Holmes put ads in newspapers around the middle-west,

and incredibly, he has women answering his ads

who are planning on coming to Chicago.

These people have no idea what they have walked into.

He would put them in rooms

where he knew that he could either control them entirely,

or he could control their sense of perception.

The hotel itself is set up like a maze.

It’s a labyrinth. There are dead ends.

They’re staircases that lead nowhere.

There are doors that open out onto alleys with a drop.

And if a young woman is disoriented

and tries to leave her room, she’d get lost.

They are put to sleep,

because Holmes has introduced gas

into their sleeping chamber.

And then they sadly wake up in the basement

strapped to a table.

And he might be experimenting on them.

He might be torturing them.

For those unfortunate enough to actually see this basement,

they must have felt like they were seeing some new form

of a medieval torture dungeon.

A rack for stretching human bodies,

a dissection table for experimenting and for torture.

A vat for quicklime, a vat for acid.

A huge furnace that could accommodate a full human body.

And then so many surgical and dissection tools all around the room.

Ultimately, they’re going to be murdered,

the soft tissue disposed of,

and the skeletons sold for money.

Holmes is a spider,

and the Murder Castle itself is the ultimate spider’s web.

He was charming and could convince women to come with him.

Most of the victims of H.H. Holmes were young women,

many of them who had resources, who had wealth.

The best example of that is the Williams sisters,

Minnie and Nannie Williams.

Minnie comes to Chicago, and she and Holmes

not only take up with one another,

but Minnie begins to work for Holmes as a stenographer.

They become engaged.

Minnie Williams is convinced

to sign over all of her material wealth,

and Holmes does the same thing with young Nannie Williams.

And now he really has no use for the sisters Williams.

Minnie is killed. When Nannie gets there, she is killed.

That’s sort of the distillation of Holmes’ kind of MO,

drawing in young vulnerable women,

ultimately killing them, and acquiring their property.

But after a series of suspicious fires,

by the summer of 1893,

his crimes start catching up with him.

Holmes had taken out insurance on the castle,

and so he was trying to collect.

But because of the really, really sketchy nature

of the fires, he was not paid off.

Undeterred, Holmes cooks up a new scam

with his business partner Benjamin Pitezel.

Holmes and Benjamin Pitezel have a plan to defraud

an insurance company in Philadelphia,

where they will present a dead body

after taking out an insurance policy

on Benjamin Pitezel.

Pitezel, sadly, he thinks he’s a partner,

but he’s actually going to be the victim,

because Holmes is going to present the real body

of one Ben Pitezel to the insurance company.

Holmes had a tendency to eliminate

anybody who knew his secrets.

Pitezel knew of his fraud.

He kills his business partner,

and then acquires possession

of Benjamin Pitezel’s three children.

Holmes goes on the run

with Pitezel’s children in tow,

ultimately killing them.

After two of the bodies are discovered in Toronto,

police search his Chicago hotel in 1895,

and what they uncover is truly horrific.

When the police arrive, this one-time fortress

is in tremendous disrepair.

And so they’re looking around,

and they see these nefarious and weird rooms.

But it’s when they go to the basement

that they are greeted with the sight of bones and blood and bloody clothing,

and a basement that looks like it had been a medieval torture dungeon.

Nobody can fathom a mind that would create a place

that seems welcoming, that seems safe,

but was designed to kill.

Ultimately, Holmes is sentenced to death

for the murder of Benjamin Pitezel.

But before he’s executed, he writes a shockingly detailed confession,

admitting to a total of 27 gruesome murders.

Because the stories of Holmes’ crimes is nationwide news,

the tabloid medium makes him into a celebrity.

Now that he knows he can do no further,

he wants his crimes to be revealed.

Whether or not he reveals accurately

or exaggerates and embellishes his own reputation

is impossible to know.

H.H. Holmes hangs on May 7th, 1896.

But the building dubbed the Murder Castle

stands as a grim reminder of his crimes until 1938.

The city of Chicago, they take possession of this building,

they bulldoze it, and they build a brand-new U.S. post office,

using in part the original Murder Castle basement

as the basement for the new post office.

And so in that regard, this hotel, this fortress,

this monster is still there.

Just because this building was torn down

doesn’t mean that whatever happened there didn’t happen there.

The horrors that took place on that ground,

the blood that was shed there, is still there.

The Murder Castle might never escape its bloody past,

but about 1,800 miles away, there’s an island where escape

is said to be downright impossible.

A mile and a half from San Francisco

stands one of the most notorious

maximum-security prisons in America... Alcatraz.

The nickname of Alcatraz was The Rock.

Someone once wrote about Alcatraz

that it was the great garbage can in San Francisco Bay,

into which all the federal penitentiaries sent their most rotten apples,

so it had that reputation of being a terrible place.

Ironically, Alcatraz,

a place known for locking people in,

was initially built to keep people out.

Alcatraz has history going back to the 1850s

as a U.S. Army post, the first fortress built

by the American government on the West Coast.

After a major natural disaster in 1906,

the fort gets a new purpose.

The thing we need to remember

about the San Francisco earthquake of 1906

is that it wasn’t just an earthquake.

It was also a great fire.

Fire sweeps through and obliterates San Francisco.

Alcatraz is an island just a mile away,

and it becomes the dumping ground for all of the people

who had been incarcerated in San Francisco.

Ultimately, it would be decided

that building would be torn down,

and rebuilt by a much larger prison building.

When the prison building that we see today was completed,

it was the largest reinforced concrete building

ever built at that time.

In 1934, it officially opens.

Letters were sent out to the wardens

of other federal prisons,

"Make your prison safer.

Send us your worst."

They wanted to round up

all the most troublesome prisoners,

and the most dangerous prisoners,

and put them all in one place.

Al Capone ended up at Alcatraz.

Machine Gun Kelly as well.

And in a later date, Whitey Bulger.

So lots of well-known criminals who had made headlines

before they ended up getting incarcerated.

Most convicts are housed in three blocks,

A, B, and C.

But the worst offenders

are sent to solitary confinement,

the dreaded D block.

The lower floor of D block contains six dark cells.

The door leading in is a three-inch thick steel door filled with concrete.

And when they closed that cell door,

you were in there in the dark.

The diet was basically bread and water

with a real meal every third day by government order.

Some prisoners who would be taken to the dark cells,

and they would be complaining, "I have pain.

I think I’m really sick. I should see the doctor."

And on a couple of occasions,

when they were checked on, they had died.

They had six cells that were psychotic cells, you know?

Sort of where you put the guys that are cracking up,

that are uncontrollable.

There’s nothing but a hole in the floor. That’s all they got.

No bed, no sink, no toilet, nothing. Just a hole in the floor.

The solitary confinement wasn’t completely solitary,

because being in the center of the bay and very, very isolated,

the prisoners, they were able to hear the ocean waves outside.

If there were boats sailing by with people celebrating

or even just people laughing,

prisoners could hear that very clearly.

It was like freedom was just at the tip of their fingers

but they could never touch it.

The most high-profile guy that was there when I was there was the Birdman.

They gave him life in solitary confinement.

Now can you imagine that? Never to come out.

They did the same thing to a guy in later years,

only they put him actually underground in a cell.

They buried him alive.

Solitary confinement is the most brutal punishment

a prisoner can receive.

If you’re in a room like that day after day after day,

it’s been proven that your mind completely breaks down.

Solitary confinement isn’t the only form of punishment.

In the early years, you’re not allowed to speak at all.

The theory was it was a good idea to keep order.

But it actually was terrible for the psychological well-being of prisoners.

Conditions are so bad,

some inmates contemplate drastic measures.

To build a prison, you have to understand

that the people inside will do everything in their power

to try and break out of that prison.

And so you have to keep that in mind

as you’re designing and building it,

human beings inside are very creative

and they’re very effective at finding weaknesses.

Preventing any attempts to escape

are armed guards who patrol 24/7 from the gun galleries,

a maze of walkways protected by bars and mesh.

They had holes where they’d stick their gun through the window.

Any time there was a fight in Alcatraz,

they’d shoot one shot, a warning shot.

If you didn’t break it up, they would shoot you.

We hated the.

In addition to all of these guards,

highest percentage of guards to prisoners than anywhere in the country,

is a system of tear gas canisters that are suspended from the ceiling.

So, if there’s a prison uprising or an escape attempt,

they can release this tear gas and immobilize the prisoners.

But these defenses don’t stop prisoners

from risking it all to break out.

In the 29 years the prison is open,

few inmates are daring enough

to put the escape-proof Alcatraz to the test.

One of the most violent attempts

occurs in May of 1946.

Bernard Coy is a bank robber, and he’s hell-bent on escaping.

He enlists the help of several other inmates

in a scheme to find a way to break out.

They study for a period of months

the movements of the guards and the changing of shifts.

Bernard Coy successfully navigated

his way to the gun gallery

when the guard had gone around the corner.

When he came back, Coy punched him unconscious.

He succeeded in getting his guns,

a .30-06 rifle and a handgun.

Their plan was to retrieve the key that hung on a chain

from the gun gallery, and it wasn’t there.

Coy and his cohorts grab the keyring off the unconscious guard.

They try as many keys as possible in the mechanism,

but they jam the mechanism, and they can’t get out.

One of the prisoners says,

"We’ve gotta kill these guards because

they’re gonna testify against us

and send us all to the electric chair."

So Coy kills one, seriously injures several others.

This ultimately leads to a tense three-day standoff

between the escaping inmates and law enforcement.

Marines come in with grenades

and the real heavy equipment and begin blasting away,

not really caring whether they take down the building

or kill a lot of innocent prisoners.

It’s all about simply suppressing the insurrection.

And there was no escape,

and they would die in the plumbing corridor

under gunfire by guards and the Marines.

The prison launch takes aboard the bodies

of the three leaders of the mutiny...

Coy, Hubbard, and Cretzer.

The deadly mayhem

reminds prisoners that the harshest torture

is knowing that escape is all but impossible.

I thought about escaping from Alcatraz. Everybody did, of course.

But I learned very quickly that if you’re gonna escape from Alcatraz,

you have to be willing to give up your life.

’Cause if you don’t make it, you’re either gonna drown

or they’re gonna shoot you... One or the other.

There’s no second chances.

During the federal penitentiary era,

from 1934 to 1963,

we had 1,576 federal prisoners sent to Alcatraz.

There were 14 official escape attempts.

36 men took part in those.

And we just have five men unaccounted for

out of that number.

Even if on the off-chance

those five survived, an escape rate of 0.3%

makes Alcatraz one of the most escape-proof prisons in U.S. history.

While Alcatraz proves effective at locking evil away,

there’s a temple of doom built to help unleash it out into the world.

Germany, 1933.

As the Nazi party continues its rise to power,

Adolph Hitler’s chief deputy Heinrich Himmler

begins searching for a base of operations

for his elite soldiers, the Schutzstaffel,

otherwise known as the SS.

The SS under Himmler is exploding.

It’s an enormous number of new recruits that are coming in,

and they need to be trained.

And Himmler needs a place to do this.

The Nazis have for a long time been associated with the occult,

especially Himmler, who’s absolutely invested

in medieval chivalric culture.

Himmler’s obsession with medieval culture

leads to the perfect location

deep in Germany’s Teutoburg Forest.

The Wewelsburg Castle is very near a site

where it is believed that native Germans

were able to defeat invading Roman armies

in the first decade of the common era.

This space is so important to Heinrich Himmler

and the Nazi regime because it connects it

to a storied and ancient history.

And this fortress, which is built in the 17th century

on much earlier medieval foundations,

comes to symbolize the heart of the Nazi regime.

All of this is coming together

in this kind of soup of symbolism

that Himmler distills into a vision

of this being the heart of the SS,

and a place to educate the future leaders of the great new Reich.

Himmler signs a 100-year lease on the castle

and forces prisoners to help renovate it.

One of the most insidious aspects of Wewelsburg Castle

is its association with the death by work program.

And over 4,000 workers

were brought in from the concentration camps.

Himmler used the enforced labor

of individuals at concentration camps nearby,

and he then put into practice what he was teaching,

how to force people to death by laboring.

Over a 1,000 people died in the reconstructing

and building of various aspects of this castle.

They were either starved to death,

worked to death, or they were beaten, or they were shot.

So this castle is literally built on the blood of the people

who were interned in those concentration camps

and forced to work to fulfill this sadistic Nazi ideal.

In 1941,

with construction of his temple of doom well underway,

Himmler plans his sadistic hub of Nazi ideology.

They wanted to create a sort of academy of Nazism within this castle.

It was in Wewelsburg that Himmler

would have taught his philosophy to willing men.

They were going to become these elite, the ubermensch.

They would have been educated

and taught in the rooms of this castle

about the Final Solution and about their role in it,

and their role in essentially exterminating anybody

who was not of pure Aryan blood.

After training, recruits would be led

to the Obergruppenfuhrersaal, or the General’s Hall.

In the Obergruppenfuhrersaal,

he has a mosaic of a black sun on the floor,

because he believes that the astral significance

and the alignment of the building itself

would somehow endow them with a sense of immortality.

In this chamber,

there would have been a large round oak table,

evocative of the Round Table.

Around the edges of the room, there are twelve seats

for the twelve knights of the Round Table.

And of course, there’s the central seat,

which is for the king himself,

which for Himmler would have been the Fuhrer.

The Nazis are not inventive enough

to create their own mythology. They’ve got to borrow it.

It’s especially ironic that they take

the whole Arthurian myth from the English

and try to put it in Germany and make their own version

of a kind of dark Camelot within this castle.

It is here that members of the SS

would be officially indoctrinated.

Every cult needs to have its initiation,

and part of that is to give these SS men

a death’s head ring, something that will bond them

as though in a marriage to the cult,

but also as a reminder to future recruits,

"You belong to us."

Himmler would go so far as to have SS members

renounce the Judeo-Christian holidays

in favor of the pagan holidays that largely preceded them.

So in order to isolate them

from the lives they had lived previously,

you got to get rid of those things like Christmas.

Himmler even goes as far

as to make plans for the afterlife.

In the north tower, he has the room constructed

with a domed roof like a Mycenaean tomb.

The crypt, or as Himmler called it, the gruft,

was the cistern of the castle that was modified

to become sort of a symbolic tomb

that Himmler himself wanted to be interred in.

In this room, there are twelve niches

set up along in the circle along the walls

for the urns of elites of the SS.

And there’s an eternal flame in the center,

and that flame was meant to last as long as the Reich.

A vile legacy Himmler and the SS work towards cementing.

Probably the most important event

that ever took place at the castle

was the meeting to plan for the invasion of the Soviet Union,

Operation Barbarossa.

The people belonging to this death cult

they were told, "Go out and kill as many people as you can."

It was assumed 30 million would die

who were mostly civilians or political officials or Jews,

and it was the SS’s job to do this methodical killing

in order to make it so that you purified the country

as you moved along in the battle.

But Himmler’s dream of making this fortress

the center of a new Aryan empire

is ultimately crushed.

March of 1945, the Allies have landed

and are advancing across Germany.

And Himmler runs like a coward

and gives orders to destroy Wewelsburg Castle behind him.

And of course, all that happens

is small fires throughout.

Tapestries, flammables burn, but for the most part

the castle itself is still standing

and the local population loot it once the Nazis vacate.

Today, Wewelsburg Castle is home to a museum

commemorating the victims who suffered violence

at the hands of the Nazi SS.

So Wewelsburg Castle, which was meant to be

the physical stone fortress

that symbolized the heart of the Nazi regime,

ultimately becomes a place for young German students

gaining a broader perspective of their history.

The storied halls of these dark places

remind us that even though they were originally designed to protect,

they can just as easily become bastions of evil.