Original subtitles

- The more you walk around Villa Winter,

the more questions you start asking yourself.

- [Narrator] 1937, a mysterious lone structure appears

on an isolated beach in the Canary Islands.

- [Patrick] It's hard to imagine a place more isolated

and cut off from the rest of the world.

- There's no one and nothing on the island.

- You wouldn't have been able to hear

a scream for miles around.

- [Narrator] The owner, a German engineer

named Gustav Winter.

Though it reports to be a seaside home,

there's an eerie quality to it.

- You walk down into the bunkers

and that's when your skin starts to run a little cold.

- [Narrator] Military grade walls, tunnels,

and a tower overlooking the Atlantic coastline.

- This was all by design.

- [Rob] What possible reason

would you need a room like that for?

- [Narrator] Within three years,

these waters would become a hunting ground

for German U-boats preying on Allied merchant ships.

Though Spain remained neutral,

rumors swirled that Villa Winter had become a U-boat base,

a waypoint for Nazis fleeing Western Europe,

and even a hospital performing plastic surgery

on some of Germany's most notorious criminals.

- What is this structure all about?

- Why would something like this be in a non-military house?

- [Narrator] What secrets lie behind these fortified walls?

- There's a mystery here that needs answering.

[dramatic music]

[door banging]

- [Narrator] 1937, German engineer Gustav Winter

signs a lease for a rugged strip

of coastline in Fuerteventura.

The site is remote, 20 kilometers from the closest town,

barely accessible by all-terrain vehicles.

The beaches are desolate

and a strong current makes swimming dangerous.

What could Winter have wanted with this barren stretch

of land so far from civilization?

- The last thing that would come to mind

when you first see the villa, especially from afar,

is that there's anything sinister about it.

From the outsides, you could take it as a holiday retreat,

a holiday villa, but when you put it

in its surroundings as well, it's so remote.

- Lots of rich people like to live in isolated locations

away from people but it's not exactly a nice place to be.

There's nothing around.

- The location is so remote that it would be difficult

at best to even get there.

There's not a major port, there's not paved roads,

there's not a major airstrip.

There's no one and nothing on the island.

- Today the Canary Islands, you know,

they're a popular tourist location,

but that wasn't the case in the '30s

when we believe this villa was built.

It's hard to imagine a place more isolated

and cut off from the rest of the world than that island.

- Everyone wants an escape from the city

but few people go to an island

that was virtually uninhabited in the middle of nowhere

and build on a volcanic rock

that resembles a lunar landscape.

- So why would anyone in their right mind decide

to place a building of that size

and that weird construction in that location?

- Around the time of the Second World War,

the Canary Islands just seemed so remote,

so out of the picture.

There's no way you'd associate that

with any kind of Nazi activity.

But then when you get a little closer

and when you start to investigate

what might have happened here a little bit,

ooh, things start to take a very sudden turn.

- [Narrator] A few years later,

and a much more lethal threat lurked

in these remote and dangerous waters.

Nazi U-boats patrolled the oceans,

targeting Allied merchant ships.

- The Allied naval forces clearly controlled the seas

with one exception: the U-boats.

- U-boats were able to slice through the seas undetected

and attack enormous ships

without anyone ever noticing they're there.

- [Robert] They sunk over 1,000 merchant ships

during the war which was a form of economic warfare.

- In terms of U-boat technology,

Germany is definitely a leader

and they are building their fleet at real speed.

- So the U-boats are absolutely essential

to Hitler's larger strategy.

- [Narrator] Could Gustav Winter have merely guessed

that the waters stretching out before him

at Villa Winter would soon be teeming with Nazi U-boats

or was this Germany engineer wise

to Hitler's plans all along?

- So who was Gustav Winter?

- He's a man of means.

We know that he's a German engineer

but he's not some eccentric billionaire

who goes around buying islands.

- He studied electrical engineering.

Then he'd been arrested as a spy.

He then escapes, makes his way to Valencia.

It's a slippery past.

- He was not completely secretive

but yet his home is literally in the middle of nowhere.

It's just awfully intriguing.

- He goes ahead and buys some remote land

and starts developing and building a home

on it which doesn't align

with any reasonable engineering principles

on how you might build a home with this purpose.

- [Robert] Could Winter have been an opportunist

who realized that this place

could be strategically important

and I could position myself in an advantageous way?

- Or was he some kind of nefarious agent

for the Third Reich acting on behalf or with them?

- [Narrator] Winter made his fortune

as a power plant builder in Argentina and England

before moving to the Canary Islands.

When Winter arrived on Fuerteventura in 1933,

he set to work building.

Records show he planned to build a cement plant,

a fish cannery, and a power plant, but his ideas are upset

by the outbreak of the Second World War.

Were Winter's plans of his own making

or part of a larger Nazi scheme?

One man has been single-handedly investigating

this mystery for years.

Pedro Fumero's relatives built and lived in the villa

from the very first days it was constructed

for Winter until now.

- [Translator] My name is Pedro Fumero

and the connection I have with this house

is it's my grandparents' house

and they were neighbors of Gustav Winter.

We were kids and my grandfather would tell us

a lot of stories about the Winters' house,

stories like they had a landing strip for aircraft,

that Cofete Beach had an airstrip

where military men arrived.

So that made me question what they said

about the house being a farm,

knowing that the house had a bunker,

prison cells, autopsy tables, and crematory ovens,

and it just didn't make sense to me that this was a farm.

- Pedro is the closest thing we have to a primary source,

someone who was actually there and saw this.

- Tapping into that information has been useful

but it also contradicts the story that the paperwork shows.

How do you decipher what is truth?

- [Narrator] Officially, Gustav built the house in 1946

and settled to raise cattle and farm.

By the time Winter leased the land,

Spain was one year into a civil war,

one in which Hitler and Germany played a huge role.

- Hitler had sent troops, planes, to aid General Franco,

the leader of Spain, in his civil war with the republicans.

- Franco does win that war and he owes part

of the victory to Hitler and the Germans.

- [Narrator] But Germany's help comes at a price.

When World War II breaks out, Hitler comes calling

and pressures Spain to join with the Axis.

- As far as Hitler's concerned,

Franco and Spain owe him one.

- So one can understand why the Spanish government

doesn't really wanna discuss any potential collaboration

between Franco and Hitler.

- [Narrator] After three years of fighting,

Spain is on the brink of collapse,

so Franco declares Spain a neutral party

but not without first conceding

to allow German merchant ships into Spanish ports.

- These may well be technologically advanced machines

but they still need to be repaired, refueled.

The crew need food.

- The problem for the Nazis is a lot of the territory

that they occupy, it's landlocked.

They need ports.

- For the German U-boats to carry out Hitler's plans,

a safe base for them to come and resupply

in the Canary Islands would have served them rather well.

- [Narrator] One of the the ports open

to German merchant ships in the Canary Islands

was at Las Palmas.

- It's kind of the perfect position

to have a secretive U-boat storage place.

- [Robert] Access to Africa,

access to the Mediterranean from the south.

- And controlled by a country

that's neutral in the Second World War

but on pretty friendly terms with Nazi Germany.

- [Narrator] On a remote beach only 80 miles away,

Winter was settling in.

A huge villa claiming to be a residence

and agricultural site faces out across the water

directly toward Las Palmas, and years later,

a piece of evidence emerges that hints

at the location's true purpose.

- There's a letter that exists

that was sent within the German high command

that talks about German U-boats being supplied

by a guy called Winter in the Canary Islands.

- And that's drawing attention to any U-boats

that could be operating in and around

or hiding in and around the Canary Islands.

The letter seems to have gone to Hermann Goering.

In some ways, that doesn't make sense

because he was the head of the Luftwaffe

but he was also Hitler's number two

and was also a very powerful force within the Third Reich.

- And if there's one thing

that the Nazis were very, very good at,

it was about documenting their activities

and their operations, but there's no Nazi documentation

about U-boats refueling from Fuerteventura.

- Maybe something was going on and it was so secret

that the general and officials who received the letter

or wrote the letter didn't even know about it.

- There's a mystery here that needs answering.

- [Narrator] Was Gustav Winter a bystander

to the Battle of the Atlantic

or was he operating a covert U-boat supply base

right here on the beaches of Cofete?

And if Villa Winter was a farming home,

what's to be made of Winter's unusual towering fortress

surveying the beach?

As World War II spiraled into a total war,

a suspicious house on a remote shore

in the Canary Islands was built

by a reclusive German engineer,

its exact details and purpose unknown,

yet its location and structure belie

its stated agricultural purpose.

As the Allies joined the War

and the battle of the seas escalated,

Nazi U-boats were in desperate need of safe ports of call.

- There's a huge discrepancy in the timeframe

around when Villa Winter was built.

Locals claim that they saw the villa

being constructed around 1937.

The Spanish authorities will claim

that it was built in 1946.

- Gustav Winter is on record

as saying it was built in 1958.

- So hang on, there's a 21-year discrepancy here

between when this villa might

or might not have been constructed.

- We have three different dates that span decades.

It just deepens the uncertainty

around when was this structure built?

What was it built for and why?

- Could it be that because Spain was neutral

during the war that they just did not want

to have any potential ties to Hitler?

And so they delayed the actual building date

in order to separate themselves from that piece of history.

- If we were talking discrepancies of a year or two,

that's understandable maybe, but decades?

It doesn't make sense.

- What is going on here?

- [Narrator] The building's origins are clouded in mystery.

Some eye witnesses say construction

on Villa Winter was heavily guarded,

with workers barred from coming and going.

Others suggest the villa was actually built

using forced labor from a nearby prison camp.

- Using forced labor is a bit of a Nazi signature

for the structures that they needed built

for their war effort, that they needed built quickly,

that they needed built in secrecy as well.

- Knowing how that was such a hallmark

of the way that Nazi Germany would construct properties,

you do start to ask yourself the question,

is there something more going on here?

- [Narrator] But if the house itself seems strange,

what lies beneath is shocking.

Pedro Fumero, current occupant of the villa

and relative of workers at the site,

is convinced this was a Nazi base.

He spent years and all his efforts to uncover the truth,

starting with the actual structure.

- [Translator] Well, according to our grandfather,

he used to tell us the bunker was built

by the Spanish military.

- If you look at two facts surrounding the villa,

some pieces of this puzzle start to come together.

Organisation Todt, we know,

had almost an MO to used forced labor,

and then when you see some of the walls of its cellar

or basement, they look very much like German bunkers,

bunkers that Organisation Todt had built elsewhere.

- [Narrator] In the course of his research,

Pedro has uncovered many oddities about this house.

- You walk down into the bunkers

and that's when your skin starts to run a little cold

and shivers come up your neck because, I mean,

what is this structure all about?

- [Translator] To me, it is a very well reinforced bunker

that was made in case of a bombing attack on the house.

They kept that in mind because they thought it could happen.

- So the basement is built like a typical German bunker.

Walls and rooms constructed

exactly like everything else we've seen

in other areas that were occupied by Nazi Germany.

- [Translator] It is not normal in an agricultural house.

There are walls that are 1.4 meters thick.

Also, they are arch-shaped.

It is built this way in case there was a shockwave impact.

The arch is strong enough

to hold the impact and avoid collapse.

- Why would you build incredibly thick walls

when they only need to be 10 inches thick?

It doesn't make a lot of sense

from a residential point of view.

- I have never been in a house

that has a private bunker basement,

especially one in such a remote location.

- Today we build foundation walls out of concrete

or masonry block and all wood framing above it,

because wood is sustainable, it's light, it's easy to use.

You don't need a concrete floor in a house.

- I've been inside bunkers from various wars

throughout history and this has the look,

the feel, of a bunker.

Hollowed out areas below, reinforced spaces in the basement,

and yet everything else is bunker-like and reinforced.

That raises a lot of questions.

- [Narrator] Pedro is convinced

there are even more secret rooms

hidden under the bunker floors.

[stick banging]

- [Translator] The floor sounds like this one here.

[stick clanging]

The sound, it is a loud sound, very loud.

There is a strong concrete basement,

but this one over here,

[stick thudding]

the sound is completely different.

[stick thudding]

- [Narrator] Pedro has uncovered clues

to a secret excavated area beneath the house,

but for what purpose?

- [Translator] It sounds hollow, and right here,

scans I've done show that there is a ramp.

The ramp goes two meters down

and where it ends, there is a door.

- Why would you excavate something if you don't need to?

That's a lot of work and effort to do that.

- [Translator] The research we've done

goes up to three meters down.

We believe there might be two more floors.

- [Narrator] As a child, Pedro played

in these underground rooms

and recalls strange metal objects on the walls.

- [Translator] When we were kids,

we used to take the keys from our grandpa

and come down here to play.

This was our fort.

We used to play here.

That's why I can assure you that there were shackles here

because I saw them.

This is how they used to be.

This way, they were handcuffed.

And here we have the ventilation system and exit.

These are torture prisons.

The only ventilation the prisoners had was this one.

- I can't fathom a purpose to that room

if this was my house.

If I had a house, there is no need for that room.

- [Narrator] Were these secret rooms and hallways

the unconventional work of an odd engineer

with an abundance of resources

or is this all pretense to covertly build a structure

for a military use?

- If indeed Villa Winter is a holiday luxury mansion

that was built for an eccentric German,

you have to ask yourself the question,

why is there military-grade thickness walls in the bunkers?

Why are there these shut-off rooms

and long corridors everywhere?

- Winter's an engineer, Winter knew what he was doing.

This was all by design.

- [Rob] It makes me feel like this is a place

that had defensive capabilities designed and built into it.

- You don't need a bunker if you're farming.

You don't need a bunker for a vacation villa.

You don't need a bunker if there's no neighbors

and no town and no people.

You need a bunker for defensive purposes.

- [Narrator] Did Winter choose this remote location

because it's the perfect get-away spot

or because it made the site difficult to locate

and easy to defend?

- There's no road into this place

and you've got these imposing mountains behind

and it makes the villa look very isolated.

Why would he build something that's so remote,

so difficult to access?

That has a feel that very far away from anything residential

with its bunkers and its thick concrete.

- Why would you have a completely isolated sealed structure

under a house?

There's an alternative usage there

that has no link to residential usage.

- You could build something of this size in that location

and probably no one on the neighboring islands

would have any idea what's happening.

There would be people on that particular island

that wouldn't even know you were doing it.

That's how remote it is.

- Without knowing much about Mr. Winter and his intentions,

it tells me that he had something to hide.

- [Narrator] The deeper Pedro digs,

the more questions need answers.

[metal creaking]

Villa Winter reports to be nothing

but a seaside retreat for a German engineer,

yet its remote inaccessible location,

windowless rooms, and bunker-grade walls fuel whispers

of the villa's darker purposes.

As the Battle of the Atlantic was fought

on the doorstep of the Canary Islands,

rumors of a secret Nazi U-boat base

at Villa Winter circulated among the islanders.

- Is this the project of an extreme recluse

who went to great efforts to isolate himself

from the rest of the world

or is there something

maybe a bit more sinister going on here?

- Was there a connection between Mr. Winter and the Germans

or was this simply all a coincidence?

- When it comes to the Nazis,

there are so many conspiracy theories.

It's hard sometimes to separate fact from fiction

but one of the things historians to detectives

to anybody does in trying to track down a story

is to look for people that were actually there.

- Local villagers have told Pedro that they saw many things

that collaborate the Nazi story here at Villa Winter.

There are eyewitnesses reporting

that they saw German soldiers at the villa

and reporting that they saw U-boats in the vicinity of it.

- [Translator] My grandfather told us

that submarines would surface

and he would see them while he was fishing.

They would be fishing next to the Roque del Moro.

Submarines would surface.

He called them upside-down boats.

- [Robert] It would be hard to imagine Nazi soldiers,

planes, ships, submarines, without locals seeing it.

- It's difficult to discount living testimonies

from local residents who spent time there

and saw things progress throughout the war.

- [Narrator] There were also older people

like my grandfather that remembered

how planes landed on Cofete Beach.

There were also many fishermen who saw the submarines.

They said they wore uniforms of the German army.

- If you're living in the Canary Islands in the '30s or '40s

and a Nazi soldier walks by in uniform,

that's not something you see every day.

- [Narrator] If local eyewitnesses were correct

and there were German soldiers secretly on the island,

what happened to them?

- Just down the road, there's a very small cemetery

just for the local fishing village, but according to Pedro,

there are crosses there with German names on them.

But the cemeteries moved,

suddenly the German crosses disappear.

- [Translator] And the astonishing part is

that in the cemetery of Cofete,

which used to be the graveyard for locals

and maybe a few people that drowned here,

but it was actually a graveyard for the locals.

People from all over the island were buried there.

But suspiciously enough, it had graves

with German names here in Cofete.

Who were those people who were buried there?

Who were those Germans?

There are a lot of people interested

in removing every German name to cover what happened here

and a lot might have happened here.

- Why would those local villagers lie?

What possible incentive could they have to make up a story?

- If we can't find supporting evidence,

the eyewitness accounts of the people

that were there are things that simply cannot be discounted.

- [Narrator] Villa Winter looks out

over the rough Atlantic Ocean toward Las Palmas,

the Canary Island port offered

by General Franco for Nazi use.

U-boats trawled the waters here in packs,

watching and targeting Allied merchant ships.

- When U-boats come in to dock

or when they want to meet a ship, they don't use radio.

They use lights, so this tower in this particular position

would've been the exact right building to create

in order to signal to U-boats

that they were close to their intended destination.

- [Translator] With the tower, you can notice

that the windows are made for defense,

and upstairs, you have a surveillance post

with a 360-degree view.

- And nobody would know that this tower was functioning

as a lighthouse for U-boats,

because of course there's no one for miles

living around other than fishermen.

- From the outside when you see the tower,

if this is a villa, you might think, oh,

that'd be a lovely place to go

and watch the sunset from up there.

And when you actually get up there

and you see just how small the windows are,

you see a little bit how clinical the whole place looks.

- The layout of the house is strange.

You can't access the tower from the main floor.

You have to go up to the second floor.

- It's the perfect position to look out

onto the bay in front of you,

but the windows are constructed in such a way

that it's very difficult to see who's inside.

This isn't for letting in the wonderful views from outside.

It makes you think this is much more

about selective viewing in a covert way.

We're talking about observation.

It's almost medieval the way

they're cut into the structure itself.

- [Narrator] Disguising structures to go unnoticed

by an enemy is not an unusual tactic

and it was quite common during the war.

- If you were driving past,

you probably wouldn't give it a second glance.

- You definitely wouldn't think German base

when you see the Villa Winter.

- [Narrator] But things get even stranger from the air.

At a specific angle only, looking down,

you can make out the faint traces of an old airstrip,

identical to the official one Winter built

further south on the island.

- Now ask yourself the question,

why would you need an airstrip in front of a domestic house

or a mansion or a granary?

- [Narrator] By sea and air, German military vessels

tracked enemy and merchant ships,

transmitting their coordinates to the U-boats for attack.

Could Villa Winter's fortified tower

have been another location

from which the Nazis monitored the horizon?

- One of the extraordinary things about U-boats

is how they're able to communicate

over incredibly long distances with German bases.

- [Rob] When they're underwater, they can send

and receive low-frequency radio waves

and when they're above water,

they can send and receive high-frequency radio waves.

- [Narrator] A strange component in this mysterious tower

is the large fuse box at its top.

- It's very hard not to notice this giant fuse box

up on the wall there.

Now, this is not the kind of thing you'd expect to find

in a luxury residential villa on the beach

within its lovely surroundings.

- I'm no electrical engineer,

but houses of this scale do not have fuse boxes

that are as tall as me.

If you've got a big fuse box like that,

you're using it for something.

- Come to think of it, high-power radio communications,

the likes that U-boats might have been using to communicate,

needs this kind of power.

- [Narrator] Was Villa Winter using up power

with sophisticated communication equipment

or was Gustav Winter merely ensuring

his remote home had ample voltage for personal use?

- You have Villa Winter with this incredible amount

of power generation potential

and then you have U-boats that need to communicate

using long-distance high-power radio technology.

You put the two together, it certainly raises questions.

- So is this evidence that links Winter

to U-boat operations?

- When you really consider that and then all the efforts

that appear to be happening to cover this up,

what's the motive, why, why cover it up?

- [Narrator] Beyond the mysterious power box,

what's to be said of the Villa's many windowless rooms?

Were they built to keep the world out or Nazi secrets in?

A mysterious fortress stands sentinel on a remote beach

in the Canary Islands as Allied merchant ships

and their convoys fall prey to Hitler's hunting U-boats.

Though Spain has declared itself neutral,

Franco allows German ships to resupply in the Canaries,

but rumors swirl around this strange place.

Talk of a secret Nazi base persists.

- There's a letter that exists that gives us evidence

that the German military knew

that Winter was supplying fuel to German U-boats.

But we also know that the waters around Villa Winter

were too dangerous for U-boats to approach.

- Many experts have claimed that it wouldn't be possible

for U-boats to operate in the vicinity of this villa

because the shoals in the water there

are just too treacherous.

- It's craggy, it's messy, there's shoals,

there's violent waves.

It seems very difficult to think

that a U-boat could navigate anywhere close

to land to be able to resupply.

- So that raises a question,

how would U-boats operate in that vicinity?

- [Narrator] Pedro is convinced there is a way

and that the answers lie beneath the mansion bunker.

- [Translator] They could've built it closer to the beach

or the town but they chose this place

because beneath the house, there is a natural cave.

It has been proven that there was a volcanic cavern

filled with water.

What the Germans did was take advantage

of the volcanic cavern in order to build a submarine base.

- Now there are volcanic tunnel ways underneath the island.

On the surface, if you make your way around the coastline,

you can see volcanic tunnels and vents exist

and passageways there that, in theory,

would be big enough for a U-boat to navigate through.

- That would provide ideal hiding places

for a U-boat or any other type of secret.

- [Rob] German engineering companies

and the German war machine, they dug tunnels all the time.

It was the bread and butter of military construction.

- Relatedly, we know that the Nazis excavated some

of the most unimaginable, remarkable tunnels

through hard stone across Europe.

- Is it too far-fetched to believe

that German U-boats were actually navigating

in volcanic tunnels that actually lead

into the island itself?

I mean, the Nazis have pulled off bigger

and more ambitious projects,

but there's something that doesn't feel right about that.

- Submarines don't back up well.

Submarines don't turn around well.

The risk of damaging a sub by bumping up against something

in a volcanic cave.

- These things don't necessarily turn on a dime.

They need room to maneuver and move.

- Pedro has an interesting theory.

It seems rather unusual and wild

but we have certainly heard more unusual

and far more wild facts that came out of Nazi Germany.

- [Brooke] It seems out of a movie, but it's possible.

- [Narrator] If Gustav Winter did build his fortress

over top of a volcanic vent,

could U-boats navigate right under the villa

only to surface in tunnels underneath?

Are these walled-in areas what remains

of secret Nazi tunnels?

- [Narrator] My research shows that submarines might be able

to navigate the caves and could even stay below the house

in the natural cave.

The pool that the house had

in the garden wasn't really a pool.

It was meant to hide the entrance beneath the house

that connects to a path leading down to a volcanic cavern.

- [Narrator] Over the years, Pedro has attempted

to excavate and investigate further,

but he claims he's been stopped

by local authorities and other shady characters.

- [Translator] Some politicians have told me

that I shouldn't excavate what's below the bunker

because I would get a fine for destroying historic property

and I wouldn't be able to pay it in a lifetime.

I felt threatened and I know that my life is in danger.

That is why I decided to insure my life.

- There are eyewitnesses reporting

that they saw German soldiers at the villa

and reporting that they saw U-boats in the vicinity of it.

- And the question that really pops to my mind again

is why would locals lie about something like this?

What would their incentive be?

- [Robert] The Spanish government and the Spanish people

are in a very precarious situation.

- There must have been some potential tie

that Spain or someone else thought could be made

between this building and its inhabitants

and Hitler and the Germans that would cause them

to want them to separate themselves completely from it.

- [Translator] And of course that would mean

to recognize that Spain wasn't neutral.

- [Narrator] Allied reconnaissance planes watched

as German ships refueled in Spanish ports.

If Winter was running a Nazi base,

why go to the trouble of building a fortress

over a volcanic vent to do something

that was done in broad daylight close by?

That is, unless there was something else going on,

something darker.

A mysterious house on a remote Spanish island

hides many secrets in its walls and even underground.

Whispers of a secret Nazi base refuse to dissipate.

As the tides of the war turned against Germany,

the need for a plan B became a reality.

- Towards the end of the war

when things are not looking great for the Nazi regime,

senior generals, I'm sure,

were starting to get quite nervous,

looking for a way to escape war tribunals.

- Hitler's vision for a Thousand-Year Reich is collapsing

and soldiers from the lowliest private

to the highest general are starting

to ask themselves the question, how long can this go on for?

- [Narrator] Although the fight was nowhere near over,

the German High Command began to worry.

What might a defeat mean for Germany, Hitler, and them?

- The Nazi regime has committed horrendous atrocities

throughout the course of Europe

and the senior officers in charge of that must have known

that if they survived the war, they would be responsible.

- Even loyal Nazis in Germany toward the end knew

that they needed to abandon a sinking ship.

- And we know for a fact that a lot of them did escape

to Spanish territories and out to South America.

Germany's running out of safe harbors.

Having remote hideaways to be able to escape to, regroup,

and then move on would have been absolutely essential

to these fugitives from international law.

- Somewhere to hide away on the Canary Islands

would be a perfect place.

- [Narrator] Could Villa Winter have been planned

as a safe house or a ratline to somewhere like Argentina

where hundreds of Nazis fled post-war?

Did Gustav Winter use his connections in Argentina

to plan an escape route for Nazi criminals?

- When the war was over, there was the famous ratline,

the famous escape routes

that many German high-ranking generals

and officials were to use to leave Germany.

- It's not impossible to imagine

that Villa Winter is the ideal stop on this ratline

to South America for these escaping war criminals.

- The villa itself is so remote, it's a great place to hide.

The bunker hidden away completely out of sight

in that villa, it's perfect.

- [Narrator] There are many strange things

about these rooms.

They're windowless so no one outside would be able

to see if someone was staying here.

They're bare bones with smooth floors,

easy to clean, easy to turn over for a new occupant,

and they each have their own bathroom,

almost like a hotel or hospital room.

- [Translator] My grandfather told me

that they finished the bunker around 1938, early 1939,

and I have proof that it worked perfectly during 1941.

- The more you walk around Villa Winter,

the more questions you start asking yourself

and the most chillier you feel.

- [Translator] Here we have a strong wall.

[stick bangs]

But if we knock this one,

[stick bangs and echos]

the sound is different.

And look here, we have a door that was covered.

Also, if you take a look, the windows are designed

to receive light from the outside

but the inside of the room not be seen.

- It's so remote, no one's ever gonna see

that you were there and you have a great vista

and place of observation to see anyone

who might be approaching.

- Now, none of this makes sense

if this is an agricultural site

and it makes even less sense when you look at the fact

that it's so isolated unless you have other plans.

- Also down in the basement,

there's a room that you walk into

that has a very sterile feel to it,

something medical, maybe.

It's a creepy room.

- [Translator] When we were kids,

my grandfather would always tell us things.

He would talk to us about the bunker,

but my grandfather never spoke to us about a kitchen.

He only spoke about a laboratory.

- A glaringly odd feature is the entrance

to an oven built into the wall there.

- [Translator] The ovens that were used

in kitchens back then weren't this way.

They were more round on the top and they were smaller.

To me, this is not a normal oven for a house

even though it might look like that.

It is not normal.

We have opened and used them with fire

and the heat is, like, 700 degrees.

As you can see, in a kitchen,

200 degrees is more than enough.

At most, 300 degrees.

But this one goes up to 700 degrees.

- What on earth would you need those temperatures for?

- Now you can burn and dispose of all sorts of things.

You could superheat any kind of metal you want.

There's lots of things you can do with them

but none of them are in sync

with what this villa is supposed to be.

- Why would something like this be in a non-military house?

It just doesn't appear to make sense.

- [Narrator] But the disturbing oven isn't the only thing

in this sterile room that raises questions.

- [Translator] Back then, a kitchen would have a hole here

for firewood, and here would be the iron stove.

That's how a kitchen would be back then.

If we take a look to this table,

to me, looks like an autopsy table.

A close friend of mine, Jose Carlos, came here.

He's a doctor and when he saw the table, said,

"Pedro, it clearly is an autopsy table."

When you carry out autopsies,

there is a lot of blood everywhere

and this thing over here is a drain for the blood.

This type of drain would only be found in labs,

surgery rooms, and animal slaughterhouses.

It wasn't in our grandmothers' and mothers' customs

to have white tiles in the kitchen.

The kitchens were decorated with colorful tiles,

many flowers and colors.

White tiles are for labs and surgery rooms.

- What possible reason would you need a room like that for?

- This does not look like a kitchen I've seen in a house.

It is stark, it is cold, it is not a place for gathering

or joy or food preparations.

It feels terribly clinical.

- It could be possible that this basement

with this surgical table and the oven and the sinks

and the drains in the floor could have conceivably been used

as an area to do plastic surgery

where their faces could have been altered

in order to facilitate them moving on

to a new life in South America.

- I question these words even as they come out of my mouth

because it seems too far-fetched.

This seems like too big a conspiracy,

but all the evidence and everything

that you see in this weird room,

could that have been used for maybe plastic surgery

to disguise some of the higher ranks within the Nazi regime

so that they could much more easily escape

and go undetected for the rest of their lives?

- [Narrator] After the war, many Nazis escaped

to Spain and South America,

desperately hiding their tracks and identities.

- Is it crazy that they could've used this kind of facility,

which looks so medical, to do that?

- [Narrator] But Pedro has another darker theory.

- [Translator] What draws my attention are the rooms located

to the right of the tower.

They are rooms with small entrances.

We used to think they could be the upper side

of an older barn, but it was really odd to us

that a barn had an electric system

with switches and light bulbs.

- To get up there, you had to kinda crawl up this slope

through these child-shaped holes

that really served no purpose whatsoever

and definitely don't look like the kind of things

used for grain storage.

- You build a door to suit

who is going to be using that door.

When you look at a door that size, it's kid-sized.

It's a child-sized door.

Typically, you wouldn't have rooms on an upper floor

that are on the exterior of a building without a window.

- A lot of homes would have an attic

where you store things and there's not enough room

to live up there, stand up and walk around.

Why build storage in an attic

when you have a massive underground bunker,

you have cavernous tunnels, you have a huge basement.

- [Translator] We used to play inside.

We would play inside the rooms, and to me,

those were bedrooms for kids

because we were the only ones capable of fitting in there.

What I found extremely odd is that it also had a bathroom.

A bathroom for a barn?

- Attics are always creepy.

Even the attic at Villa Winter leaves us with questions.

- And given what we've found in the basement,

it begs a question as to was there a connection

between these very small rooms

and what looks like an operating table in the basement.

- We do know that the Germans conducted

horrific experiments on children.

Now, if you look at Villa Winter, if you wanted to, say,

conduct secret experiments on children, say plastic surgery,

anything you want, you can do that there

because there's nobody watching.

If the Nazis did want to conduct human experiments in secret

then Villa Winter would've been the perfect place.

You wouldn't have been able

to hear a scream for miles around.

- [Narrator] Was Fuerteventura a stepping stone

to Argentina?

Were Nazis going under the knife

in Villa Winter to disguise their identities?

If so, one can only wonder who has stayed

in the windowless rooms of this strange house.

As the tides of the war turned

and it became clear that Germany would be defeated,

Nazis planned their escape from the Allied liberators.

Though Spain has remained neutral throughout the war

and eventually barred Germany from its ports,

Spain became a waypoint for Germans escaping

to friendly South American countries.

By 1946, there were 7,000 Germans living in Spain.

Were the Canary Islands also a waypoint

for Nazi elite escaping the country?

- When you explore the outside of this house,

you find accesses to tunnels running parallel

to the existing bunker structure in the basement.

- And you look inside and there's this tunnel

or bunker and it's running parallel with the other tunnel

but it's not going anywhere, why?

- [Translator] This tunnel we have found here is the one

that connects to the room with the hidden door.

[stick thuds and echos]

It's ahead in this tunnel and then you go five more meters

and after 15 meters from here,

you will find a concrete wall.

- Why would you have bunkers and tunnels hidden in a home?

- [Translator] We believe this was an exit tunnel

and it was blocked.

If you look closely, there is a kind of an arch.

I believe that this is a bad design and it is not normal

because if Gustav Winter was an engineer,

then all of this that we can see here

under the bedroom of the house is all a cover.

We believe that there could have been another bunker.

There could be another floor under all of this.

This still has to be analyzed.

- [Narrator] For Villa Winter to have been a safe house,

it would've needed an escape route,

a way to get Nazi brass out of Spain

and down to South America or other destinations.

- We know that Winter officially built an airstrip

further south along the island from the villa.

- But if you look at an aerial shot of the property,

you can see what looks like a rudimentary airstrip

just literally down by the villa itself.

- And islanders have claimed that they've seen

for themselves at least one plane that's come and gone

from the beach close to the villa.

- Why would you need an airstrip

in front of a domestic house or a mansion or a granary?

- [Narrator] Winter later claimed he built the airstrip

to make the villa more accessible.

He said his wife had a difficult pregnancy

and they needed to be able to reach a hospital.

- It seems a little extreme

that a villa like this would have its own airstrip.

- [Narrator] There were few traces left

of the villa's wartime occupants,

just a fortress-like structure,

strange empty rooms, a road, and a desolate beach.

After Hitler was defeated,

the Atlantic waters returned to relative calm.

Gustav Winter lived out his days on the Canary Islands,

dying in Las Palmas at the age of 86.

- So who was Gustav Winter?

We may never get to the bottom of that question.

- The stories surrounding this are so wrapped up

in the mists of time now.

It seems too straightforward for me

that Winter was a successful engineer

who wanted to build a villa for his own personal purposes.

- We know that Franco shut down post-war investigations.

We know that Franco shut down efforts

to get to the bottom of things because of his complicity

during World War II with the Nazis.

- But in 1947, a U.S. government document was issued

stating that Winter was a German agent responsible

for communicating with U-boats using the technology

in that villa and resupplying them as well.

So the mystery deepens.

- This is a mystery that we would hope to solve

and I'm sure Pedro and his family would like to solve.

- [Translator] I owe this investigation to my grandfather.

A lot of people disappeared in this area

and I owe this story to them.

I won't stop until I solve it.

- I'm not sure we'll ever get to the bottom

of exactly what went down here.

[dramatic music]