Original subtitles

- [Narrator] Hidden in a misty forest,

experts suspect that Nazis carved

secret weapons facilities.

- There is a strange feeling inside.

- Even senior levels of government

didn't know everything that was going on.

- [Narrator] Over the course of the Third Reich,

the Nazis unleashed terrifying new weapons.

- Building things that no one else in the world

were even imagining.

- [Narrator] Developing hellish new technology

to release on the world

as the war progresses

and the tide turns against the Nazis.

- Hitler needs a new wave of super weapons.

- [Narrator] Years later,

experts attempt to wrestle truths from the project.

- The Nazis could have been doing anything underground

and no one in the world would know.

- [Narrator] Why are there strange phenomena

occurring here in modern day?

- Weird sounds, weird sights,

unusual cell service deep under a mountain

where you shouldn't get any cell service.

- [Narrator] And what is this strange ruin

hidden in the middle of a mystic forest?

[dramatic music]

There are many stories of Nazi super technology

and fantastical expeditions.

It's sometimes hard to tell fact from fiction.

- You realize that almost anything is possible.

- [Narrator] Rumors persist

of strange and fantastical weapons

and terrifying new science.

- The secret programs,

the weapons of vengeance as they're often referred to.

- [Narrator] One such location where these whispers linger

is here, the Wlodarz Complex in the Owl Mountains.

The Nazis are losing the war

as the Red Army takes control of the Eastern Front.

- They are essentially fighting now

a defensive war in the east against the Soviets.

- [Narrator] The Allies are mere months away

from gaining a foothold in Western Europe on D-Day.

- It's a race against time, so Hitler needs something.

- [Narrator] Deep in the sparsely populated Owl Mountains

a top secret project takes shape

with ominous goals that could turn the tides of the war.

- The Owl Mountains are very lush, very green.

There's dense forest that covers the entire area

with heavy undergrowth

and rivers that snake their way through.

I mean, it's almost mystical and magical in some senses.

It's not only the perfect hiding place,

but defensively it's also very strong.

- [Narrator] The mysteries of the forest

and the abandoned Nazi relics on the surface

give way to even more mystery underground.

A labyrinth of tunnels carved into the mountain.

- The Wlodarz Complex is the biggest one

among all other complexes,

but also the roughest one.

The construction of Wlodarz began on the year 1943.

Construction of such a facility in the middle of Europe

was quite crazy.

- It's said that if an atomic bomb

had exploded above these mountains

then nothing underground would have been touched.

Now I don't think the Nazis had atomic bombs in mind,

but it's very clear that they built here

because the rock formations, it's igneous rock,

is so hard.

- [Narrator] Over 70 million cubic feet of hard igneous rock

were blasted and hard-carved out of the mountain

to create these tunnels.

- We're talking about moving

tens of millions of tons of material out.

- [Narrator] With dwindling resources

and losing on multiple fronts,

why would the Nazis invest in this effort?

- Hitler realizes the complexion of the war

has turned against him.

He needs a game changer, he needs a wonder weapon,

he needs new scientific research,

so it forces the Nazis to go deep underground

to conduct whatever they're conducting,

and it's a race against time.

- There are advantages to hard rock tunneling.

When you excavate through the system

you don't necessarily have to re-support that tunnel.

The rock itself can hold itself out through arching action

so that this rock is stable under its own weight basically

and it can support anything that's above it

without you having to introduce concrete

or other shoring requirement into this tunnel.

- [Narrator] Even so,

the Nazis go to extreme lengths

to reinforce the tunnels with concrete.

Though only a fraction of the complex is finished,

documents show nearly 1.3 million cubic feet of concrete

was commissioned for the structures in the region,

and the majority of it for this complex.

- It's the equivalent of a cube that's 210 feet on site,

so essentially think about a giant skyscraper

21 stories high

that's entirely solid concrete.

So this is an immense amount of concrete

that went into this structure.

- [Narrator] Brought in from concentration camps

all over the Reich,

more than 13,000 slave laborers worked in the tunnels.

- After the explosion of the rocks

they had to remove all of those rocks outside.

- Between removing the rubble and debris from the explosion

and prior to putting in that reinforced concrete,

that zone at the front of the proceeding tunnel

is exceptionally dangerous.

- Because the tunnel could collapse at any moment,

so many people died doing this extremely hard work.

- How hard it would have been for those workers

to work in that environment

and then to put that on a scale

of how ginormous these structures are?

- Third Reich had almost till the end

unlimited human resources.

- [Narrator] 5,000 of the workers died from malnutrition,

disease and executions.

- Arms of the SS who managed the camps,

who were the ones who would have been in charge

of moving that labor around,

and they were ruthless enough

to drive their workers to a schedule

that was just frankly very inhumane.

- There is a strange feeling inside.

You can hear even those noises of explosion.

Smells inside, poisoning air because of the dust gases.

Terrible, terrible place.

So it's like a time capsule.

- [Narrator] This time capsule guards many secrets

and has researchers from all over the world

digging and exploring

to unearth what strange and futuristic projects

were set up here.

[birds chirping]

- I think there's something about these mountains.

The mist, the mystery,

and you hear about all these rumors

that just screams out the fact

that there's much more here to be found

than we've yet discovered.

I remember walking into the Wlodarz Complex.

The first thing that struck me was the MG 42

that's right in the guard post as you walk in.

It was designed as if it could literally cut anyone down.

You've got these great big cavernous halls 36 feet high.

Again, you're left with this sense of unfinished business.

This is only part of the project,

there's a lot more to come.

75 years ago,

slave laborers working in these conditions.

I've been to the complex three times,

and every time I've been struck

by the little human elements.

You see the boot marks in the concrete

and you think to yourself,

wow, they were in such a rush

that they were willing to walk over concrete

that hadn't yet set.

And you can see these sort of chisel marks on the wall,

little things like that.

This must be the start of a new tunnel shaft

because you can see that it's just come up against the rock.

So I'm thinking to myself it must have been interrupted

when they were trying to blow a hole through here.

And you think everything here was done really quickly.

They were really in a rush.

- At this stage in the war

and the position that the Nazis found themselves in

against the Soviets and the Allies,

for them to put this amount of effort,

these kind of resources into a secret project here,

there must have been something

incredibly important to their war effort going on.

- I'm guessing they used this to transport the rock

that was being blasted from down here.

Imagine the dynamite fumes, explosions.

There was something they were trying to do

that was very, very important.

You only have to look at how much concrete was involved

to know that this was one

of the most important engineer projects

that the Nazis were doing.

- [Narrator] The Nazis managed to do all this

in total secrecy,

even from other elements in the Third Reich.

- The secrecy of the state itself means

that a lot of people even in senior levels of government

didn't know everything that was going on all the time,

or knew parts of it or fragments of it.

- It would take a lot of planning

and strategic thought process

to figure out how do you keep that a secret.

- There were orders.

If anyone talked, it was a bullet to the head.

Dead men tell no tales.

And then part of the obsession with secrecy

was Hitler ordered the things go underground.

It's hard for civilians and neighbors

and villagers and prying eyes

to find out what the Nazis are up to

when everything is 150 feet underground.

- [Narrator] Even the choice of the location

was not by chance.

- Unlike some of the other occupied Eastern territories

which were seen as places to expand to and to settle in,

this region was really a heartland.

It had once been a fundamental part of the German Reich

and it was deemed to be basically

an integral part of Germany.

- [Narrator] At this point in the war,

the Allies have gained full control of the skies

and can attack German sites at will.

- The key targets that are identified

are almost entirely industrial

or related to the production of war materials.

We see the bombing of the Romanian oil fields

'cause this is a major source of German oil.

We see the destruction of ports

where U-boats are being made,

and also against Peenemunde to take out the science program

that was developing the V-2 rocket program.

- [Narrator] Desperate for solutions

to help them turn the tide back in their favor

and protect these critical war industries,

they took production of rockets

and advanced scientific experiments

and tried to put it underground,

both for protection and further development,

in places like Middleburg and the Wlodarz Complex.

- The sheer scale and size of the tunnels

seems to suggest an attempt to build

major production facilities underground

and would also explain why they were such deep tunnels.

- [Narrator] One alien-looking structure within the complex

has experts completely baffled.

- It inspires curiosity and awe

and also a little bit of fear,

like you immediately ask yourself,

what on earth went on here?

[dramatic music]

[eerie music]

- [Narrator] An alien-looking structure

hidden in the forest

above a secret underground complex

has researchers scratching their heads.

- Test site for some object

could vertically landing and taking off.

- [Narrator] Many theorize that future technologies

were being built here

as a last-ditch effort for the Nazis.

Could this structure be related to that effort?

- The secret programs, your wonder weapons.

- There's some reason behind it.

The Nazis were deliberate in everything they did.

This isn't a mistake.

[canons boom]

- [Narrator] In World War II,

Germany is the leader of science and technology.

The Enigma coding machine.

U-boats.

The V-1 and V-2 rockets.

And a piloted version of the V-1,

sort of a German kamikaze.

As well as the first jets.

With victory slipping through their fingers,

is it time for the new wave of terror technology?

- We know about the V-1, the V-2,

and other secret weapons.

The tides of war are changing

and Hitler needs a new wave of super weapons

if he's to have any chance of victory.

- And so it stands to reason

that some of these tunnels could have been designed

as places where they could continue to manufacture

even whole airplanes potentially.

I mean, the sheer scale and size of the tunnels.

For Hitler, the building of a weapon

that could change the course of the war

was something that he was much more likely to be keen on.

- [Narrator] Known locally as the Flytrap

and sometimes as Hitler's Stonehenge,

the amount of effort to make this was considerable.

- It looks to be about 60 feet across

and probably 25 or 30 feet tall.

- It's delicate in a way.

It's quite massive, there is a large massive concrete,

the proportions relative to human are quite big.

Building this system alone as it is,

as we can see it today,

it's a big undertaking,

it's not easy to build something like this.

You're building this mold up in the air

to fill it with wet concrete,

but then the wet concrete is quite heavy too

so you have to support those molds.

It was likely build from the ground up

in between each column to support that wet concrete.

The shape is not quite a circle,

it's likely the way that they built it.

It's hard to built a curve mold

for which you can pour concrete into,

so they approximated that circular shape.

- But the scale and size of it gives you pause

when you look at it and you think,

okay, so what are all the possibilities

for what this could be

and what are some of the theories?

- Virtually any great technological advancement

has at some point or another been used

for purposes of war,

and thus was the case for the helicopter.

The introduction of the helicopter changes everything.

It changes the very notion of flight.

It doesn't surprise one

that this came out of Nazi Germany

given the emphasis on pushing the envelope,

given the emphasis on making the impossible possible

and building things that no one else in the world

were even imagining.

And they were doing it.

- Nearby, at Schweidnitz, today Swidnica,

there were in fact real factory for the first helicopters,

Flettner factory for Kolibri helicopter,

a very small one.

And all those helicopters from Schweidnitz

had been tested in the area.

- Friedrich von Doblhoff is this scientist,

this engineer who has this idea of a rotating blade

that could lift off vertically.

He's working on this in the late 30s,

and by 1941 he has prototypes.

He invites senior Nazi leaders for this test run

of this helicopter.

The Nazi leaders were so intrigued by this technology.

Now remember, with Hitler and others

nothing is too fanciful,

nothing is undoable,

the impossible is the possible in their mindset.

He received a contract to develop helicopters.

- [Narrator] Is it possible

that the tunnels could have been used

for the helicopter's future development?

And was this strange alien structure a launching pad?

- Why design a tunnel that is 36 feet high

unless you're planning to have a vehicle go in there

that needs that clearance

or you're building something in there

that needs that clearance?

But that additional clearance is for something.

- In this type of tunnel system,

this is the kind of spot

that I'd want to do that development,

or at least want to store prototypes.

The last place I'd wanna store a prototype

to preserve the technology

is in the plant I built it in

because I know that the Allies

are trying to destroy my ability to create technology.

So why not take some of that,

stick it in a tunnel somewhere,

keep some scientists working at that spot,

but divide up where the technology is located

so that if something happens over here it's still preserved.

- When it comes to the Nazis,

a lot of the research they were doing would end up working.

- They did fly functionally a couple of prototypes,

both the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine, the German Navy,

for rescue operations

as well as for military applications.

- With everything else in the war going on,

it's still for me quite impressive

that the Nazis launch this helicopter program,

although I think only 24 in the end were ever created.

And it suggests that they were putting

a lot of effort into it.

- They cultivated a spirit in their scientists

of intellectual curiosity.

Now it was intellectual curiosity

toward some very nefarious ends.

- The Horten brothers start working on something called

a flying wing,

a jet-powered aircraft that never saw combat.

But after the war,

the Horten brothers and their technology

was seized by the Allies

and this would become the blueprint

for the stealth bomber.

Fortunately for history,

the Nazis were plagued by bureaucratic snafus,

they were contracting multiple different designs,

incompetent administration of the programs,

so the helicopters never came online,

but they formed the basis of the modern helicopter program.

Could this be some sort of helicopter landing pad?

I don't think so because it's in the woods.

With early prototypes of helicopters,

more trees around just means more things for it to hit.

- If the purpose of this entire complex

was all about secrecy,

then why would they build something on the surface

that was so visible,

so easy to spot,

so easy to target?

- This is a ring set on top of columns

at regular intervals,

and there isn't a diaphragm on the top of that

to give it that lateral stability.

We don't have any bracing between them.

It couldn't bear much load.

Without running the calculations on this structure,

my intuition just says it's not very strong.

- [Narrator] Perhaps then it's not for a helicopter

but rather to enclose something far more sinister.

[dramatic music]

An anomaly among the structures at the Wlodarz Complex

confuses experts.

- It's really almost something

truly out of a science fiction movie.

- A real point of intrigue about it for me

is that this seems to be totally unique

amongst Nazi structures.

- The very fact that it exists

and that nobody knows precisely what it is

is itself pretty concerning,

let alone any names that go attached to it.

- [Narrator] The structure gets its strange name

from a very ordinary item.

A glass container that lures flies to its base.

Mucholapka, flytrap in Polish.

- The flytrap kind of makes sense,

it kind of implies that flow in that direction,

that something's moving in or out

from between the pillars

and then up into the central portion.

- So some people have said

that it might be a missile rod site.

We know that the Nazis were creating wonder weapons.

- When you fire a rocket,

you need to have the thrust gases be directed away

from below the rocket so it doesn't feed back up

and surround the rocket.

- Like we might use on a shuttle launch,

we have arms that stabilize that ship

that's in its vertical position

before it can create enough thrust to lift off

and then those arms detach away,

but the structure provides some sort of lateral stability

while it's in its launching phase.

The structure could manage those forces

in the way that it's built.

- [Narrator] But the Flytrap's layout

seems to present a real problem.

- You've got this tall missile structure,

how do you get it into the center of this ring?

Because you're constrained by this diameter, right?

There's no gap, it's a closed perimeter.

So how do you get a vertical element in there?

Unless you somehow bring it in underneath one of the arches

and then winch it up.

- [Narrator] Not a practical launching pad for rockets.

Could its purpose be simply the structure itself?

- It does look very much,

at least from a superficial analysis,

it looks like a religious monument.

A kind of edifice to the grander of the state.

- Which some people have named Hitler's Stonehenge.

- That is the first thing that comes to mind,

is Stonehenge for me,

so it could very well be that perhaps

it was going to hold some sort of ceremonial

or ritualistic presence.

- Something occult perhaps.

But who's it for?

Why would you build it in the middle of a forest?

- [Narrator] The large presence of the SS troops here

might shed light on the reason.

- It's the SS,

Hitler's special troops

under the command of Heinrich Himmler,

who is supervising the work that's going on here.

- I think Himmler believed in the occult.

He seemed to have bought in hook, line, and sinker.

- They were heavily into symbology.

Powerful mythical symbols is all throughout the Nazi regime,

beginning with the choice of symbols for the swastika.

As part of this 1,000-year Reich,

they were trying to build monuments to their greatness.

- It's not like Wewelsburg where we see rooms

created for ceremony or rituals.

It's not like Castle Ksiaz

where we see underground storage and tunnels.

This is a bunker and then we have this strange structure.

- The Nazis, after all,

understood the politics of architecture

or the architecture of politics.

Much like during medieval times

when castles were built not only for defensive purposes

but simply for the awe and wow factor.

You know, with Hitler,

if you're going to get people to believe

that anything is possible

and you are the uber Mitch,

that your people are the aryan supermen,

the masters of the world

and all this wild stuff that they came up with,

you need something on a large scale architecturally

to make people believe this crazy myth

that you've concocted.

- [Narrator] Some experts are convinced

that the Nazis were so far ahead of their time

that we've only scratched the surface

of the future tech they were developing

in places like Wlodarz.

The current owner of the facility recalls a witness,

a concentration camp survivor

who worked in the tunnels and saw the Flytrap.

[Krzysztof speaking in foreign language]

- It's something else,

some kind of device that demand a lot of electricity,

a lot of energy,

to test something.

- Could you imagine this large thing glowing

or generating power?

That opens up all sorts of new ideas.

But it looks unfinished,

and therefore whatever they were going to add to this

must have been equally as spectacular.

- What makes this Flytrap structure even stranger

are the tunnels that pass directly beneath it.

[water flowing]

And were those tunnels intrinsically linked

to what the Flytrap was used for?

- [Narrator] These tunnels under the Flytrap

are more complete,

with lights and finished concrete.

And then there is all this water.

- I am drawn to the idea that it was

potentially some kind of a cooling tower.

- We have a lot of waste heat that we need to get rid off,

and to do that we normally pump water

over our piping or heat exchangers,

absorb that heat into the water,

and then by pumping and cascading that water

we evaporate off that heat as water vapor

and carry that heat away.

Generally, cooling towers are really tall

because we wanna have a long contact time

of the water droplets falling

and the air rising from the cooling tower

to allow the heat to dissipate.

- [Narrator] The main reason for a cooling tower like this

would be nuclear.

[eerie music]

A strange structure lies in a remote forest area

of the Owl Mountains.

- It's hard to imagine how much bigger

this structure could have been

if this was a starting point.

- [Narrator] Its purpose, unknown.

But some have a theory that this could be

one of the main clues to the Nazi rush

to develop a new terror.

To use in the most desperate hour.

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

but it's pro-science in the sense that

the Nazis want to use science

to further their political and military aims.

- In the madness of World War II,

your primary impulse is to destroy the enemy

any way you can.

[bombs booming]

- [Narrator] In 1938,

a German team led by chemist Otto Hahn

bombard uranium with neutrons and discover fission.

The atomic age has begun.

- So Hitler is becoming increasingly desperate.

He has ordered his scientists

and his engineers and his generals

to go all out for a new type of weapon.

The world knows the story of Albert Einstein

talking to colleagues and writing his famous letter

to Franklin Roosevelt,

worried that the Nazis were working on an atomic program.

He understood from contacts of his in Europe

that the Nazis were just stockpiling uranium.

With that enriched uranium

he worried about them pursuing an atomic project.

- We know the scientists went to Adolf Hitler

and presented plans to develop the German atomic capability.

Well, the Owl Mountains complex

would have been the ideal place

to develop the atomic program

without anyone else knowing about it,

and clearly secrecy in a project like that

would have been key.

- The site is somewhat inaccessible.

It's deep underground.

It was shrouded in secrecy and mystery.

The question, could it have been happening there?

It seems to match the profile for what the Nazis were using

for other types of secretive research like that.

Some atomic project was happening,

and it was probably in such a facility.

- A little bit like a gambler down to his last chips,

they're putting a lot of men,

a lot of material, a lot of money,

a lot of effort into these mountains,

which suggests that they had a card to play.

It suggests that they were doing something here

which they thought could potentially turn

the tide of the war.

- [Narrator] The Owl Mountains are known to contain uranium,

the key ingredient for an atom bomb or a nuclear reactor.

Is this why the Nazis are feverishly tunneling here?

- The tunnels could have been envisioned as a place

where you could successfully continue producing

war materials for the German war effort

away from Allied eyes

and away from the reach of the Allied bombers.

- [Narrator] But Krzysztof and others

take the atomic theory even further.

[Krzysztof speaking in foreign language]

- [Narrator] Are these underground structures and chambers

for secret labs meant to create Germany's atom bomb?

Could the tunnels carved out

of the hard igneous rock of the mountain

be used to disguise underground control tests?

[eerie music]

- There are those who believe that the Nazis

did actually manage to develop atomic weapons.

But in my mind, if they had,

there's no doubt Hitler would have used them.

So then the question becomes,

how close did they get?

- Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Just because we haven't found something

doesn't make it so or not so.

- We don't have a lot of knowledge

from the people who built it,

in part because it was concentration camp labor

and many of them were murdered.

And we don't have a lot of information

from the local German populations

because they were all fleeing the Red Army in 44-45

or they were expelled after the war.

- In the last few months of the war

certainly experiments like this were pretty useless,

much like the rocket program.

Yes, it's used and it makes its appearance,

but it's too late.

It's too late for the realities of the war,

so things like this become quickly abandoned

because you've gotta get 13 and 14-year-old boys and girls

into the streets to defend Berlin.

- [Narrator] Another theory that refuses to die

is that the SS were on the cusp of technology

we can't even fulfill today.

- It boggles the mind, something called the Nazi Bell.

A large bell-shaped device that would rotate,

that could be a time machine or an antigravity machine.

- Because of the secrecy of these mountains,

the Nazis could have been doing anything underground

and no one in the world would know.

You get chills up your spine.

- [Narrator] And indeed,

theories of super-tech projects refuse to die,

some of almost science fiction nature.

[laser whooshing]

Stories of fantastical science and technology

that the Nazis were developing

haunt locations like the mystery-shrouded tunnels

of Wlodarz and the nearby Flytrap.

Rumors of atomic weapons, next-generation rockets,

and flying machine never seen before.

- Some people have posed theories

that there could be secret weapons or technology

that remain hidden underground here.

Certainly stranger things have been discovered

under the Third Reich.

- [Narrator] Krzysztof describes

strange phenomena underground,

deep inside the complex,

ones that defy explanation.

[Krzysztof speaking in foreign language]

- Weird sounds, weird sights,

unusual cell service deep under a mountain

where you shouldn't get any cell service.

[Krzysztof speaking in foreign language]

- [Narrator] Krzysztof is convinced

of the reason for these electrical anomalies.

Old Nazi super technology buried underneath the tunnels.

[Krzysztof speaking in foreign language]

- [Narrator] One of the most fantastical theories

to explain the connections between the tunnels,

the Flytrap and surrounding structures

is a rumor that simply refuses to go away.

Die Glocke, or the Nazi Bell.

[Krzysztof speaking in foreign language]

- Die Glocke, or the Nazi Bell,

is this rumor that's lingered for decades

about this Nazi bell-shaped object

that's associated with antigravity or free energy

or some kind of pseudo-scientific concept.

- The Nazis were heavy into research,

so it's possible

that they wanted to test some theories

related to antigravity.

- Developing a container

in which gravity doesn't play a role,

we don't have that ability yet.

We're able to replicate it in free fall,

in a free-falling jet

to overcome it we're accelerating fast enough

that it feels like zero gravity,

but that's not the case.

So on Earth's surface,

building something antigravity seems really challenging.

- [Narrator] Is the Flytrap the support for Die Glocke?

- From what we know of gravity at this point,

I'm not sure that antigravity

is a theoretical possibility even today.

Of all the physical forces of nature,

we understand gravity probably the least.

- [Narrator] Legend is it was supervised by Hans Kammler

who oversaw the V-2 rocket program

and was associated at a senior level

with all the special projects.

- This was a testing area for some of the odder

or more experimental of a series of wonder weapons

or advanced technologies

that were under the hospices

of Hans Kammler's Office of Special Projects.

- [Narrator] Many of the top Nazi scientists

were captured after the war,

some by the US in Operation Paperclip.

Hans Kammler's fate is unknown.

[dramatic music] [water flowing]

Mysterious tunnels and technology hidden in a remote region

lead investigators to question the heavily-debated fate

of a major figure in the Nazi regime.

Head of Special Projects Hans Kammler.

- Hans Kammler is one of the single most intriguing

and most important Nazis,

yet he's one of the ones, ironically,

that we don't know a lot about.

He held a number of important positions.

He oversaw the V-2 rocket program

which Wernher von Braun had been involved in at one point.

He was given the gruesome task

of making Auschwitz even a more efficient death camp.

And of course to make Kammler even more intriguing is

we don't know what happened to him at the end of the war,

so he remains this absolutely intriguing Nazi

whose fingerprints were

on some of the most heinous crimes of the war

and on some of the most futuristic

and fantastical weapons research of the entire war.

- [Narrator] Could Hans Kammler or his team

have been developing futuristic weapons

here in the Wlodarz Complex?

- One speculation that an object that they were working on

that could have generated energy

looked a little bit like what science fiction writers

would have described as flying saucer,

but that was in fact not at all what its purpose was.

They were using different kinds of devices and structures

to try to work out how they could generate energy.

- Air supremacy was going to be part

of what determined the outcome of the war,

so maybe they were playing with some type of technology

that would look like a flying saucer

that had glowing propulsion systems.

I wouldn't be entirely surprised at all

if this Flytrap were associated with the development

of that kind of a device.

Where you wanted it to lift off the ground

you would need some type of structure

to initially support it,

allow the air to flow out from underneath it,

underneath the pillars.

- It's infuriating that we don't know

why this Flytrap is there.

I mean, no matter if you're a historian or not,

anyone, if you see this site,

you're scratching your head and you want answers.

- One of the challenges

of getting to the bottom of the mystery

is the fact that not only did the Nazis

treated it as a secret,

but then of course it falls into Soviet Russia hands

and they have no interest in transparency.

- [Narrator] May 1945.

The Red Army arrives in the region and the Nazis flee.

- Hitler issues his infamous orders to destroy,

to liquidate all evidence.

If they can't have it, then no one's going to have it.

- [Narrator] Taking whatever they can with them

and destroying as much as they can manage.

- The Soviets arrive and they do what they do best.

They take all of the machinery,

anything of any value,

and ship it right back to Russia.

- And they essentially strip East Germany for parts.

There was a concerted and sustained effort

to burn all available evidence

about what the tunnels were used for.

They would have had enough time I think

to get rid of quite a bit

before the Red Army actually arrived.

- The recordkeeping of the Reich

was in many respects quite methodical.

They did keep a lot of accurate records

about important things,

but not everything.

- The Nazis were obsessed with secrecy,

they were obsessed with keeping information to themselves

and not allowing people

who weren't directly involved in the project

from knowing anything about it.

- And then you have to marry that to the fact

that in its desperation in the dying days

Reich officers destroyed a lot of documents

in part to protect the secrets

and in part to protect themselves,

because their next plan was to blend in

to post-war German society

and to not be a Nazi.

And then of course you have to deal with [mumbles] of war,

bombing and artillery and soldiers

and the regular conduct of war destroying things,

the evidence from the war itself.

- If you admitted that you had worked on this project,

if you had been involved in it,

if you had intimate knowledge of it,

you may have been setting yourself

to be exposed as a war criminal.

- And that's what leads to the fact that so many secrets,

so many stories have been buried,

and so the mystery remains, perhaps forever.

- [Narrator] Yet to this day

Nazi conspiracy theories still hang on

like mist in these mountains.

- There are all sorts of conspiracy theories out there

that the Nazis went to the Moon.

The Nazis found UFOs and they were using alien technology.

The Nazis it was said even went to Antarctica

with big research teams

and dug out caves and were conducting alien research.

Now all this belongs to the realm of legend.

However, there are some facts behind it.

For example, in 1938,

the Nazis did mount an expedition to Antarctica.

The Nazis did have a program to actively pursue UFOs.

They were also looking for the lost city of Atlantis.

The Nazis were actually spanning the globe

to find biblical artifacts,

hoping that all that could imbue Hitler

with mythical powers.

A Nazi scientist named Oberth

was looking at the idea of a massive mirror,

a one-mile-wide mirror,

and he thought if they launched it into space

it could capture the sun's heat and rays

and be used for energy.

However, the Nazi military commander saw this

as kind of a death ray.

In fact, there was a blueprint for a mile-wide mirror

to be launched into space.

So separating fact from fiction

is a little more difficult than it usually is.

- The question becomes, how close did they get?

And what happened to all the research and technology

that they did develop?

Was it stolen by the Allies?

Or perhaps it was amongst the spoils

that the Soviets got their hands on?

- The world will remain fascinated

by this futuristic fantastical research,

some of which was utterly implausible.

On the other hand,

what's alarming is a lot of this technology

was very close to being operationalized during the war.

And if that something was an atomic program,

that's a nightmare to even think about.

[dramatic music]