Original subtitles

- [Narrator] 1936.

On a remote peninsula in northern Germany,

a top-secret project of astounding scale

is being built by the Nazis.

- Why are the Germans building

such an immense industrial complex

just off the Baltic coast?

- There are hundreds of buildings.

This is a whole city.

- My brain can't even fathom the budget.

- [Narrator] Here, earth-shattering technology

will be created.

- There's a lot of innovation happening.

- No project was too big.

Nothing was undoable.

- [Narrator] Thousands of scientists and engineers

working under strict security measures.

- The Nazis were obsessed with secrecy.

- Anyone caught passing information

would have been condemned to death.

- You have to start thinking,

"There's something else going on here."

[ominous music]

- [Narrator] Temperamental and dangerous machines

are being built in the shadows.

- You're talking about a whole new level of terror.

- If something went wrong here, you'd level the place.

- [Narrator] All for one sinister purpose.

- What was it that was being done there

that was so important to destroy?

[suspenseful orchestral music]

- [Narrator] February 17th, 1945.

The top-secret Peenemunde Army Research Center in Germany

is abandoned by the Nazis.

- They evacuated this facility.

It was hundreds of structures,

and they moved that underground quickly in a war.

- [Narrator] With Allied forces closing in on all sides,

things are looking grim for the Third Reich.

- It became obvious that Nazi Germany was going to lose.

The Red Army is rushing in from the east.

The Allies get a toehold in D-Day

and are coming in from the west.

The writing was on the wall.

- [Narrator] The site personnel, equipment, and research

is transported deeper into Nazi territory,

away from the Allies' reach.

Whatever can't be taken is to be burned.

- What secret are they trying to hide here?

- [Narrator] Today, Peenemunde is home

to the ruins of a once-sprawling industrial complex.

But in the 1930s, it is simply a small fishing village

on the Usedom on the Baltic coast of Germany.

- Peenemunde, named for the river Peene

that flows into the Baltic,

used to be a quaint seaside town.

It was a popular tourist spot

renowned for their fish sandwiches

and a favorite retreat for Prussian royalty of old.

- It was an isolated area, but it wasn't so far

that it didn't have good rail connections

to major centers in other parts of Germany.

So, you could get there by train from Berlin

and you could get supplies in and out.

- But in 1936, it serves another purpose.

The Nazis have much more evil ideas

for this formerly quaint fishing village.

- [Narrator] On April 2nd, 1936,

three years into Adolf Hitler's rule,

the Aviation Ministry pays 750,000 Reichsmarks,

around $5.5 million US dollars today,

for the entire northern peninsula of the island,

and the massive construction project begins.

- Projects being built in remote areas

present their own challenges.

You've gotta build roads in to even get there.

- Geotechnical engineers need to come in

and assess the ground, and that will determine

how they're going to build the structure on top.

- The soil there was wet, it was mucky, it was a swamp.

They had a lot of work to do

to even bring it up to a feasible construction site.

Why not build it somewhere else

with better soil conditions, with better access?

There's something about building so remotely

that was important to them.

- [Narrator] A power station, pumping station,

heating plant, and massive housing complexes are set up.

Shops, schools, and restaurants are built

to serve a sizable population.

- Being here in Peenemunde,

you can understand this effort necessary.

They built 700 buildings around here,

buildings up to four times bigger than the power station.

- My brain can't even fathom the budget,

probably in the billions to start.

And then, by the end, probably double that,

because especially on a project of this scale,

you're always over-budget.

- You've got multistory factories, basically,

with heavy equipment in it.

There's tons of different materials

coming together to build this facility.

You need a lot of concrete

to build these very robust structures.

You need cranes, you need mechanical equipment

to put these elements in place.

That takes money and manpower.

- When I look at these structures,

it looks almost as if they were just over-engineered,

just overkill on concrete, overkill on the quality

and the strength of all of these structures.

Why would you need to over-engineer everything so much?

- [Narrator] Rail lines are built throughout the site.

Over the next few years,

the lines are expanded to cover 65 miles.

- That's a huge task in and of itself

to be able to create that appropriate structural rail bed

to support the kind of loads and traffic

that those areas were going to see,

and they needed 65 miles of it.

- So, for the Nazis to have built what they built,

they would've had to have brought everything,

and I mean everything, in.

This was remote.

There was nothing there.

So, who was it for?

- [Narrator] By 1938, the industrial complex

covers 10 square miles.

- Peenemunde was a city.

It would be the equivalent of a massive university today

filled with research sites and laboratories.

- [Narrator] The site is split in two,

with the army occupying Peenemunde East

and the Luftwaffe in Peenemunde West.

At the start, Peenemunde is home to 80 researchers.

Many bring their families.

- It's a kind of idyllic community setting

where the elite scientists and their families lived.

There were beaches, you could go to the club,

you could go to the cinema.

It's an entire world cut off in a way

from the rest of Germany.

- When you see this complex on the map,

you can see just how isolated it is.

And so, then it makes sense

that if the Nazis did want to build something

that they wanted to keep away from prying eyes,

this was the perfect spot.

- [Narrator] The site is still under construction in 1939

when, having spent years rearming the Reich

and stoking German nationalism, Hitler invades Poland.

- And that becomes the proverbial line in the sand.

And so, at that point, France and Britain

are both committed to the specter of war,

and that's what technically starts World War II.

- [Narrator] With the war underway,

Peenemunde's isolation is a strategic advantage.

- This was one of the biggest

and best-kept secrets of the Third Reich.

And at the beginning of the war,

it must've seemed that this facility was completely safe

because no Allied bomber had a hope of getting close.

- The distance that a typical airplane could fly back then

was not what it is today,

so it woulda been impossible for the British

to leave from an airfield in England and hit Peenemunde.

- [Narrator] Nevertheless, the Germans implement

strict security measures

and build a massive system of coastal defenses.

- When you look at this place,

you soon realize this is a purely military complex.

- [Narrator] Of the 700 buildings

that once existed on this site,

only one remains standing today.

- When you first arrive at this location,

I mean, your attention is immediately drawn

by this huge building.

It looks like it's some kind of giant factory

that at some point musta been very efficient

at producing whatever product was being made there.

- Concrete structures can last very long,

but this one is in really good shape.

What was the strength of that concrete?

Oh my goodness!

- [Narrator] This sturdy building

reveals itself to be a power station

capable of producing 30 megawatts of energy.

- This, in real-world dollars of today,

is a multibillion-dollar project

and it's on the same type of scale

as what we would consider now

the largest nuclear power plants in the world.

- You have to start thinking,

"What was it that was going on here

"that needed that much power?"

- 33 megawatts of power

is not something that you order off a shelf,

and they were only halfway there.

They were hoping to double that.

- When you step inside and you're confronted

with these cavernous turbine holds

and the scale of the boilers, everything's super-sized here.

There are these huge banks of controls,

and it's very different from modern-day control rooms

which are all on computer screens.

Here, you've got physical gauges

and valves and levers and lights.

- This really is one of the first examples

of a megawatt-size power plant.

- The supply of coal required to run this plant

and deliver that power is huge.

Never-ending barges dumping this coal on land

and just building mountains of it for them to consume.

They needed this fuel source constantly.

- You'd have huge amounts of coal

brought in on barges up the river,

where it'd then be taken into the facility

on a conveyor belt.

Now, that coal was then burned in giant boilers,

producing steam at high pressure,

which is then channeled to turn turbines,

generating your electricity.

- These are some of the largest steam turbines being made

and the largest generators attached to those turbines

that have ever been built as well.

- [Narrator] Generating power on that scale

comes with risks.

- Steam contains an immense amount of energy,

and when it's released, it's extremely destructive.

And we really want to produce

as much pressure in that steam as possible.

We start to try and have bigger and bigger steam pipes,

higher and higher flows

and, at the same time, higher and higher pressures.

And the problem with that

is that the stresses in those pipes

go up very significantly.

Once you have that steam pressure,

there's so much energy density, it's almost like a bomb.

- You can understand that a facility of this scale

is gonna require a lot of power, but over 30 megawatts!

That's not all that much these days.

But back then, that was a phenomenal amount of power.

What do they need it for?

What's going on here?

- Why are the Germans building

such an immense industrial complex

just off the Baltic coast?

- [Narrator] Whatever the Nazis are doing here,

it needs massive amounts of power,

and a large amount of it is directed

to this ominous structure.

In 1936, the Nazis begin construction

on Peenemunde Army Research Center in Germany.

- This isn't just one factory.

This is an immense industrial complex.

It's truly a city.

- [Narrator] The 10-square-mile site

holds a massive 30-megawatt power station.

- Why; what are they doing?

There's a lot of questions

around what this facility is meant for.

- [Narrator] One clue as to why the Nazis

needed so much power might be found in this abandoned ruin.

- 22 megawatts of that 30-megawatt production capacity

is consumed by the production of liquid oxygen.

- In the oxygen plant,

we're using the first refrigeration systems,

some of the first massive-scale systems

to cool things down to super-cool temperatures.

- The process of producing liquid oxygen

requires temperatures as low as -300 degrees Fahrenheit.

I can only imagine the innovative thinking

that had to be around the research table

when they were talking about,

"How are we going to get -300 degrees Fahrenheit

"and then sustain it in order to produce all of this?"

- [Narrator] Production of liquid oxygen

is not only energy-intensive, it's extremely dangerous.

- It's pressurized.

There is potential for explosion.

Oxygen doesn't wanna remain in its liquid form.

It wants to change states.

It wants to be gas.

And whenever that happens, there's energy that's expelled.

If something went wrong here, you'd level the place.

You need to consider containment;

basically, bomb shelters to protect people

and scientists working in these facilities.

- [Narrator] The plant manufactures

over 28,000 pounds of liquid oxygen every day.

- What on Earth could you possible need

28,000 pounds of liquid oxygen for every single day?

[explosion booming]

- [Narrator] By 1941, the Nazis are embroiled

in a two-front war.

The engineers at Peenemunde

believe they can use that liquid oxygen

to give Germany the upper hand.

- As the war goes on, it's increasingly clear

that everything the Germans have got to bear so far

isn't gonna win the war.

- Maybe the Nazis had superior tanks,

but they could be hit from the skies.

Maybe Nazi Germany had built

impressive eastern and west walls,

but the Allied bombers could fly right over them.

- Hitler must've known that unless he brought

revolutionary new technology to the table,

the war musta been lost.

- [Narrator] Still feeling the sting

of the loss of World War I,

the Nazis apply the lessons learned from their defeat.

- The army in World War I

had placed a lot of emphasis on technology.

It had shock troops.

They had huge guns in World War I,

Big Bertha and long-range guns

that were aimed at places like Paris.

They learned the lesson that science and technology

went hand-in-hand with the military.

- [Narrator] With conventional battle strategies failing,

the Nazis redirect their resources

to the growing science of rocketry.

- Rockets have theoretically been with us

for thousands of years.

Ancient Chinese societies had them.

And rockets weren't covered by the Versailles Treaty

because that technology really didn't exist very much.

- In order to power this revolutionary technology,

you need liquid oxygen.

It's volatile fuel, it's highly complex to make,

and it requires an immense amount of production facilities.

- [Narrator] The 28,000 pounds of liquid oxygen

created daily at Peenemunde will fuel these new weapons.

But developing this new technology

requires a new way of thinking.

- Almost every military is always preparing

for the last war, not the next war.

The generals and admirals were trained decades before

in an antiquated form of combat

and military strategies and tactics.

Along comes Wernher von Braun.

- Wernher von Braun was a true academic,

and he was very ambitious and had big dreams

about what humans might achieve

if they're able to go into outer space.

By the age of 30, he's running the vast majority

of the technical programs at Peenemunde.

- Von Braun could almost be the epitome of the mad scientist

because he's thinking of things

that virtually no one has ever thought about.

He suggests that he can change the complexion of warfare

by developing rockets and missiles

that can travel hundreds of miles.

- Hitler wasn't really interested

in the beginning of the war,

but they showed him films and showed him,

"This is how we can beat England."

From 1942, Hitler says, "Oh yes,

"this will be the weapon to win this war."

- [Narrator] Von Braun oversees the development

of many technologies at Peenemunde,

including advances in television systems

and the world's first electric analog computer.

- You've got some really brilliant

German engineers and scientists,

people who were really pushing the envelope

in terms of new technologies.

- [Narrator] But this innovation is in support of one goal:

the creation of new rocket-powered weapons for Adolf Hitler.

- There's a very pro-science mentality in Germany,

but it's pro-science in the sense that there's a commitment

to shifting scientific priorities to Nazi priorities.

- A lot of scientists and engineers

were swayed by the desire to push the boundaries.

They obviously joined the Nazi Party

and became part of the evil machine that was the Nazis.

- So, it's almost like the scientists

are making a pact with the devil.

They're coming together, getting state support,

the kind of support they wouldn't get anywhere else,

but it's all gonna go towards one aim:

death and destruction.

- [Narrator] By 1942, the workforce has greatly expanded.

Peenemunde East alone has 5,000 workers,

including engineers, technicians,

scientists, and support staff.

- With so many people, you're planning something big.

- [Narrator] Every effort is made

to disguise the cutting-edge technology

being developed at Peenemunde,

starting with a device known as Flak Target Apparatus 76.

- The Nazis knew that the Allies were watching,

so they went to the effort to disguise that

and convince everybody outside

that this was just another anti-aircraft system.

- The British took the attitude

that no piece of information is too small.

So, the idea of creating entirely fictional stories

about what these sites were up to

was designed to stop the British

from getting their hands on the genuine information

through their vast network of informants.

- [Narrator] Flak Target Apparatus 76

is in reality the codename of a terrifying new device

that the Nazis believe will change the course of the war:

Vengeance Weapon 1.

- The V-1 is a flying bomb using rocket technology.

It's pretty rudimentary stuff,

although it's highly capable for its time.

- It has a kind of prearranged telemetry

by virtue of how you shoot it.

They travel largely silently

until they reach that arc where they whistle down.

- It's capable of delivering

almost a ton of explosive firepower

from a huge distance away.

If the Germans can get hundreds

or even thousands of these to hit the Allies,

as Hitler had intended,

the war's gonna take a very different direction.

- The V-1 wreaked havoc on Britain.

The new rocket technology made it faster

than any conventional prop airplane, 400 miles an hour.

And the advanced fuel system allowed it to travel

from the European continent across the English Channel,

raining down destruction on the population below.

- The V-1 flying bombs were revolutionary

and they caused terror, but only for a short period of time

because the Allies would quickly work out

that they can shoot them down

or just disturb them from their trajectory.

- [Narrator] In addition, the V-1 has a limited range

and unreliable accuracy.

- They didn't have laser-

and radar-guided systems at the time.

It's like throwing a rock from a trebuchet or a catapult

toward your enemy's castle, and where it lands, who knows?

- But their principal intent was to demonstrate

the capacity of the German state and what's coming next.

And of course, the Germans had lots of other plans.

- [Narrator] As the war rages on,

the site at Peenemunde is growing

to include strange facilities in the woods

at the very edge of the peninsula.

- You have this very large space with clear visibility.

- So, what is going on here?

- [Narrator] World War II.

Engineers at Peenemunde Army Research Center in Germany

have created the V-1 flying bomb,

the first of Hitler's vengeance weapons.

- Huge numbers of V-1 rockets

were launched against Allied targets

and thousands of people were ultimately killed.

- [Narrator] The V-1 terrorizes Britain.

But with limited speed, range, and accuracy,

it is not enough to achieve Hitler's goals.

- The answer for the Nazis was the V-2,

the world's first long-range ballistic missile.

[missile roaring] Much larger, much faster.

These things could fly over 3,000 miles an hour.

They could travel 200 miles and boasted a one-ton warhead.

- [Narrator] At Peenemunde,

in the woods at the very edge of the peninsula

is the testing site for Hitler's newest wonder-weapon.

- The location of Peenemunde

makes it an ideal testing site for these rockets.

There's very few people around outside of the complex

who are gonna be able to see what's going on.

You have this very large space with clear visibility.

- Imagine being a fisherman

who lived and worked along the coastline of Peenemunde.

And all of a sudden, you look up and you see rockets

launching into the sky.

It musta been a frightening experience

for the locals that lived along the coast.

- The V-2 is a completely new technology,

and with that comes a completely new level of terror.

- The V-1 rocket, the buzz bomb, everybody hears it coming.

With the V-2, when we launch it up into space

and that rocket starts falling back to Earth,

it's actually breaking the speed of sound on its free-fall.

By the time the rocket hits the ground,

you still haven't heard it.

- Imagine if you're Adolf Hitler

and across the table from you,

German generals are explaining

that they should be able to hit the British Isles

and the Allies with this revolutionary supersonic technology

and they won't have any kinda defense.

The tantalizing idea that he can strike without mercy

musta been quite exciting for him.

- [Narrator] Scientists work around the clock

to perfect the V-2 rocket.

Great advances are made to its engines,

fuel mixture, range, and payload.

- One of the things about developing

advanced new technologies

is you start developing the sub-technologies

to enable that larger technology.

So, a rocket; yeah, that's a great technology.

But all the little pieces and all the little technologies

that go into it are equally important

to make that rocket work.

- What's the logical next step for this rocket?

Well, they built it so it was capable

of going at supersonic speeds.

The next thing woulda been accuracy.

[fireworks fizzing]

- Fireworks that we see all the time are chemical rockets.

They have no guidance system.

All we can do is shoot them up in the air and they explode.

We actually have to take a system

and put it into this rocket

and have it take the rocket to where it needs to go.

- [Narrator] To solve this problem,

Peenemunde engineers construct

the world's first electronic analog computer.

- At that point in time, we were just starting out

with the process of having machines produce their own logic.

So, the German engineers are developing a new technology

where a system of circuits can start to make decisions:

how to actuate flaps, how much thrust I need at this point,

how I can change my trajectory to get to where I need to be.

Basically, the V-2 is the self-driving car

of the 1930s and 1940s.

If Wernher von Braun, a scientist involved in this project,

had been even better at being able to guide this technology,

well, it's not impossible to imagine

that when the Allied fleet had sailed across the channel

to launch the invasion of Normandy,

the Germans could've rained down a hail of rocket technology

that the Allies would've had no chance of stopping.

- [Narrator] In addition to the rockets themselves,

other technologies are developed

to help the researchers do their jobs.

- So, in the 1930s, we saw the advent

of the first cathode ray tube.

So, these are TVs, essentially.

A closed-circuit TV system is basically we have a camera,

in this case at our launch site,

and then we transmit the signal from that camera

to a remote cathode ray tube,

essentially a TV, at a remote location.

And these are some of the first times

that we're taking remote live images

from one location and projecting them in another place.

- For the Nazis, this is trial and error.

And the ability to be able to watch these rockets

as they land over immense distances is really important

'cause that's the only way they're gonna be able

to learn what works and what doesn't.

- Prior to these type of systems being developed

in the 1930s,

the only way to see what was happening somewhere else

was to take a movie, run back,

develop the film, and then project it.

That's not gonna happen in any short period of time.

[rocket roaring]

- [Narrator] The Allies getting their hands on a film

of the V-2 in action would be a devastating blow

to the Nazis' plans.

- They always considered competition

between Germany and the US.

They thought, "We and the Americans

"are the biggest innovative nations,"

so they idea was, "We have to be first

"and we have to realize it completely secretly."

- [Narrator] With a staff of thousands,

security measures at Peenemunde are strict.

- There's all kinds of rules and regulations

about what you can and cannot do.

It's already an isolated community.

The bridges are guarded.

You have to have special passes.

- Well, the Nazis were obsessed with secrecy

on all sorts of different levels.

This was a regime generally run by German intelligence,

and the spearhead of that, of course,

is the Schutzstaffel, or the SS.

- And the SS installs spies on the inside

to listen in on conversations

and to report on what people were saying.

- [Narrator] Amid this atmosphere of fear and paranoia,

plans are made to begin manufacturing the V-2 at Peenemunde.

- When Hitler became interested in this rocket project,

he said, "Okay, yeah, that will be the weapon."

And he said, "Okay, we have to hit England

"by 5,000 missiles at one time."

And then one time he said,

"We'll launch 50,000 missiles to England per year."

One time he said 100,000.

And everybody says, "Yes,

"that's the way how we'll win this war."

- For the Allies, the ability to stop

this revolutionary technology

would've been first on the list.

- [Narrator] Can Peenemunde's isolation

and strict security measures hold off the Allies

long enough to make thousands of rockets?

[ominous music]

Engineers at Peenemunde Army Research Center in Germany

are hard at work perfecting

Hitler's newest vengeance weapon, the V-2.

- A British Lancaster heavy bomber

can deliver six tons of high explosive.

The V-2 rocket can deliver one ton.

So, in order for the Germans

to be able to win the war with this technology,

they need to produce as many rockets as possible.

- [Narrator] Hitler's ambitious goal

of 100,000 launches per year

means Peenemunde needs to expand its workforce.

In 1943, 3,000 slave-laborers

and 1,300 concentration camp workers

are brought in to work in the factories.

The slaves are mostly from Belgium,

France, and the Netherlands, and are building weapons

that will be used against their own people.

Peenemunde is gearing up for mass production of the V-2,

but Hitler's plans are soon hampered by reality.

- One of the problems with the weapon systems

being developed in Peenemunde was the fuel.

- Each rocket needed four tons of liquid oxygen to launch.

That's a lot.

- [Narrator] Even with Peenemunde's output

of 28,000 pounds of liquid oxygen per day,

it won't be enough.

- There was a engineer here,

the group leader of the engine section,

and he started to calculate,

"How much fuel would we need to launch all those rockets?"

And he came to the result, "We won't be able to launch

"more than 5,000, maybe 6,000 missiles per year."

- [Narrator] But the Nazis have a more pressing problem.

Despite their obsession with secrecy,

word gets out that something big is going on at Peenemunde.

- Intelligence about the facility

made its way to the Allies,

intel that would ultimately seal the facility's fate.

- [Narrator] The Allies initiate Operation Crossbow,

a plan to systematically destroy

all of the V-weapon development sites throughout the Reich,

starting with Peenemunde.

- The only way the Allies could stop these missiles

was to hit the source where they were manufactured,

and did they ever.

At great personal risk to themselves,

two Polish laborers at Peenemunde

smuggled out maps and reports

which made their way to the British.

The British acted.

Known as Operation Hydra, on the night of August 17th, 1943,

several hundred aircraft struck the massive facility.

It was the largest bombing campaign of the entire war

against a single target.

They suffered considerable damage to Peenemunde,

including the death

of some of their most important scientists.

- [Narrator] In the raid, the Allies mainly target

the labs, offices, and living quarters.

With a rocket program so advanced,

is it strange that the bombing raid

did not focus on the manufacturing capabilities?

- There's something to be said for targeting the brain trust

rather than targeting the buildings,

because the hope was that in doing so,

you would effectively make it impossible

for the other scientists to keep going.

If you can take out the scientists,

you essentially kneecap the entire program.

- It's actually really difficult

to replace scientists and engineers

because they all have a very specific field of expertise.

The engineer who really understands

the liquid oxygen manufacturing process,

it becomes very difficult

to rebuild that process as a whole somewhere else.

While you might be able to continue

some of the manufacturing,

you're still gonna take a lot more time

relearning some of that information.

- Much of the residence complex is taken out by the bombers,

and it's quite psychologically damaging

to the group who work there because before that,

they had felt largely untouched by the war.

So, all of a sudden, they're realizing

that they are just as vulnerable

as every other part of Germany

to the Allied bombing campaign.

- Tragically, of course, they also kill

a lot of innocent workers who were there, right?

The slave-laborers and some civilians,

but it's a legitimate military target.

They cause damage,

and certainly that damage slowed down production,

but it didn't stop production.

- [Narrator] While the Nazis will continue to use Peenemunde

as a test site for the V-2,

development and production of this wonder-weapon

is moved elsewhere.

- It's followed up by several more bombings

by the Americans.

So, it is the indication to the group at Peenemunde

that essentially they've been found out,

that now they know that the Allies are on to them

and that they can expect more bombings to follow.

- And it's precisely after that

that the facilities are moved to Mittelwerk

with the province of Thuringia, and there it's reshaped,

largely in underground facilities utilizing, again,

slave labor from the Dora concentration camp.

So, the program continues,

and it's actually after the bombings

that the V-1 and V-2 are successfully launched.

So, the idea that Hydra destroyed it is a bit misleading.

It set it back a few months

and did manage to kill some top officials, but not enough.

- [Narrator] The researchers and scientists

remaining at Peenemunde shift focus to new projects.

- Right up until the very end of the Second World War,

the scientists at Peenemunde are working round-the-clock

to develop new and even better technology

to turn the tide of the battle.

- It makes you think that the V-1

and the V-2 was just the start.

What further terror is on its way?

[pensive orchestral music]

- [Narrator] 1943.

The Allies have attacked the Nazis'

most important secret research center,

delaying the development and production

of Hitler's new wonder-weapons, the V-1 and V-2.

- The intent in the bombing

wasn't necessarily to destroy the facility.

It was to kill scientists.

That's the valuable resource there.

- [Narrator] While the remaining researchers

relocated and retool,

Nazi leaders discover another way to use these weapons.

- Because they're fighting a two-front war,

they're stretched very, very thin in terms of manpower.

So, the hope is the rocket program

would intimidate the British

into trying to come to some sort of agreement with Hitler

which would allow him to only have to fight a war

against the Soviet Union.

- It was also designed to cause terror and to cause panic,

because, of course, now people think,

"Well, the Nazis have this secret weapon,

"and therefore we've already lost this war," right?

It produces a demoralizing effect.

- I remember my grandmother telling me

about the sheer chaos in London

of having these V-2 rockets come over

that no one knew about.

Panic and fear, they're the things that can change a war.

So, Goebbels's propaganda starts to emphasize

that these Wunderwaffe, these wonder-weapons,

will change the course of the war.

It gives the average German civilian and soldier

the hope that if they carry on fighting,

their scientists might be able to rescue them.

- This belief in new technology as salvation

was more or less invented by the Peenemundes themself.

They kind of sold their weapons

to the political decision-makers

and they took this ideology of technology

and used it for propaganda purposes.

- The Allies are pounding German cities,

so the Nazis decide to call this V-2 rocket technology

a vengeance weapon.

It's gonna strike revenge back into the hearts of the Allies

and teach them a lesson for what they're doing

to the German cities.

- [Narrator] With V-2 development moved elsewhere,

the Peenemunde researchers concentrate

on development of new wonder-weapons,

like the V-3 long-range cannon

and the Wasserfall and anti-aircraft version of the V-2.

- Right up until the very end of the Second World War,

the scientists at Peenemunde are working round-the-clock

to develop new and even better technology

to turn the tide of the battle.

- Who knows what other science, what other weapons,

what other rockets were developed at these sites?

- [Narrator] In February 1945, with the Allies closing in,

the last V-2 test rocket is launched at Peenemunde.

- Fortunately for history,

Germany could not sustain the costs

of building thousands and thousands of these rockets.

- They were only producing one rocket every 90 minutes.

With that kind of rate of production,

there was no chance for the V-2 rocket to be a game-changer,

and that's the story of Peenemunde.

What would've happened if they launched that facility

a couple of years earlier?

If they'd been a couple of years

further down the line at Peenemunde,

they could've changed the entire course of the war.

- [Narrator] Over the next month,

the remaining staff, around 4,000 people,

relocate to the alternate sites,

destroying anything they can't take with them.

- Today, as an engineer,

if I wanna move from one place to the other,

I just take my laptop.

All of my files are digital; they're stored on a network.

In this era, though, everything was on paper.

That scientific process was documented

through hundreds and hundreds of pieces of paper,

drawings, schematics, everything,

and they had to physically move that

from one place to another as quickly as possible.

- The starting point of the history of Peenemunde

is the decision, "What can we take with us

"and what are we going to destroy?"

- It has fueled a lot of conspiracy theories.

I think that it woulda been very difficult

for these scientists to burn some of their research

because they were very proud of it.

They were proud of the potential that the rockets had

for creating a new space frontier.

And so, some of them would have willingly

handed that material over to the Americans,

even though they were supposed to

have destroyed it as they left.

- So, they not just made their own propaganda during war,

but they also started to write their own history

because they decided what should get into the archives

and what not.

And we as historians have to ask, "What don't they tell?"

- [Narrator] On May 5th, when the Soviet army rolls in,

they find this vast facility over 75% destroyed,

with all of the research facilities

and rocket test stands in ruins.

But Peenemunde's story doesn't end here.

- The reality of war is that it really pushes forward

technologies that may not have developed at the same speed

if we'd been in normal civilian times.

- There were literally trainloads of documents

carried away from Peenemunde,

so where did all of this end up and what did it contain?

[pensive orchestral music]

- [Narrator] Throughout World War II,

Peenemunde is the Nazis' foremost research facility.

But when the Soviet army captures the site in 1945,

they find it abandoned and partially destroyed.

- So, the Russians are curious as to what's gone on there

and, of course, like they always do,

try to find as much as they possibly can

to try to improve their own scientific

and technological programs.

But, really, their principal interest is to get to Berlin.

- [Narrator] Peenemunde is bombed four times

throughout 1943 and '44, destroying 75% of its structures.

But today, other than the power plant,

nearly all other buildings are in complete ruins.

If this isn't the result of Allied bombing,

what is the cause?

- The structures that are left standing

is just a small piece of what this facility was.

- There's a lot of metal.

There's a lot of abandoned stuff.

There's a lot of stuff that's broken.

- The destruction creating a ruined landscape,

this was the result of the blasting of Peenemunde

after the war by the Soviet army.

- [Narrator] Under the terms of post-World War II Europe,

the Soviets must destroy the facilities at Peenemunde.

But is it possible that this was just a cover

to avoid anyone else getting their hands

on advanced Nazi tech?

- The Nazis were at the forefront of science and technology,

and their research was mission-critical

to the Allies and the Soviets.

- The Second World War happens,

and Russia goes from being a primarily peasant community

to being an industrial world power

in a very short period of time.

So, the Russians really reaped a huge amount of technology

from Germany during the postwar era.

- [Narrator] At the end of World War II,

Europe is divided by the Iron Curtain.

Whatever technology taken by the Soviets from Peenemunde

becomes shrouded in secrecy.

- There's a lot of speculation; some conspiracy, some not.

But after the war, the US and the Soviets

immediately rolled out

their own new advanced weapons systems based on the V-1.

The US military reverse-engineered the V-1

from debris they'd managed to gather

from an exploded device in Belgium.

And only months later, they brought out the JB-2 Loon,

which was almost identical to the V-1.

What other technology was captured from the Germans

that we don't know about?

- [Narrator] It would seem impossible

for this advanced level of technology

to spring up so quickly,

unless you had your hands on the tech and scientists

and were keeping it secret.

- Peenemunde was not only

a state-of-the-art weapons facility

that was critical to the Nazis' success in the war,

but it would end up impacting

the future of weapons of mass destruction

and even space travel.

- The Germans have taken

immense steps forward in technology.

That technology doesn't exist anywhere else in the world

in the 1930s and the 1940s.

The Americans and the Russians want to reap the benefits

of that intellectual investment, manpower investment

to further technology in their own countries.

- Most of the scientists,

they wanted to give themselves up to the Americans

and not to the Soviets.

Germany had engaged in such a ruthless

and brutal war of annihilation against the Soviet Union.

There was a sense that they would be shown

very little mercy under Soviet rule.

- As World War II was ending,

President Truman authorized a top-secret program

to not only find Nazi research and documents,

but to snatch and grab top Nazi scientists.

- The Americans find a special category

in which to place these scientists.

Some of their records are whitewashed.

- Known as Operation Paperclip,

the mission ultimately brought

about 1,600 Nazi scientists to the United States,

including Wernher von Braun.

- And now he's working with the Americans

to build the same kinds of weapons

he was working on in Nazi Germany,

only this time, of course,

they're potentially being used against the Soviet Union.

- Can we directly link Peenemunde

with the Americans developing rocket technology

and putting a man on the moon?

Well, we know one thing for sure:

The Germans' desperate desire to win the Second World War

by developing these new technologies

pushed these scientists further and faster

than they ever could have done in normal civilian times.

- The V-2 rockets literally leave the Earth's atmosphere

and are on the edge of space

during their parabolic flight to London.

It's a lot of baby steps in really quick succession

so that we can have that major leap at the end of the day.

- The Soviets also got several hundred

of engineers and scientists

who worked for them after the war.

They took them with them to the Soviet Union

and started their own rocket project also

with German experience like the US did.

- [Narrator] What has happened

to all of the lost documents of Peenemunde

and what tech or research

is locked away in a Russian archive?

- At this facility, there's a lot of innovation happening.

You've got hundreds of people working on these projects

and documenting their findings, but they had to relocate

and choose what they took with them.

But you can imagine the brainpower behind all this.

There's a lot more to this story that we may never know.

- It's inevitable that there were technologies developed

that we don't know about.

Some of the equipment was novel and new,

and some of those engineers and scientists

probably weren't given the opportunities

to recreate that technology,

and it probably took years and even generations

to recover from that loss.

And I'm sure there's a lotta technologies

that just got lost.

[suspenseful orchestral music]