Original subtitles

- [Narrator] In a remote area in Western Poland,

the skeletal remains of hundreds of strange structures

tell a story of a massive clandestine project

undertaken by the Nazis.

- Hitler was testing the world's response.

Could he push the envelope?

- [Narrator] Revolutionary top secret research is being done

to secure a Nazi victory, but danger lurks within.

- Any sort of spark could set these things off to explode

in a catastrophic manner.

- [Narrator] This is Hitler's secret asset.

- This site was crucial to the Nazi warfare.

Why wasn't it leveled to the ground?

[suspenseful music]

[doors locking]

[soft music]

- [Narrator] The bones of old structures

in the remote region of Politz, Poland

remain largely unexcavated.

Left abandoned at the end of World War II,

nature has gained the upper hand over the decaying relics

left behind by the Nazis.

- Walking around today, it's a little bit creepy

because this site is now abandoned

and the undergrowth has grown around it.

To see these weird structures poking up out into the sky,

It's like something out of a sci-fi film.

- It looks like post-apocalyptical.

You see those concrete structures completely ruined

but absolutely huge.

- When you start to think about

what it would have looked like when it was functioning,

this massive industrial complex,

almost like an industrial city,

you immediately ask yourself, what on Earth went on here?

- [Narrator] Researchers examining the relics

come across a few signature Nazi concrete structures,

scattered amid the other unknown buildings.

- It feels to me that this is definitely some kind

of military installation, but exactly what was going on here

isn't obvious at all at first glance.

- [Narrator] Whatever its purpose,

Hitler clearly wants to keep it top secret.

- If I'm deciding where to put these facilities

and putting them in as remote of a location as I can,

hiding them as best I can

and really taking a lot of steps to prevent sabotage.

- [Narrator] Watchtowers are constructed

to warn of imminent enemy attack,

and anti-aircraft provides defense.

- When you see the level of security,

the level of secrecy and the amount of military presence,

you know something was going on here

that was crucial to the Nazi regime.

- [Narrator] This land is now part of Poland,

but at the time of the site's construction in 1937,

the Politz area is in German territory.

- Why was this site built here?

It's very remote, but it's also on a river.

- [Narrator] One of the longest

and most important rivers in the region,

the Oder River has historically offered

critical alternatives to land routes

and rail lines in the area.

- There's always a benefit

to build any kind of structure like this on a river.

That allows for the transport of goods,

and that also allows you to have a water supply

not only for the people who work there,

but for the kind of work that you're doing.

Also, this is a fairly industrial part of Germany,

so it was accessible relatively easily

by rail from Berlin and elsewhere.

- [Narrator] In the midst of an industrial boom in Germany,

construction begins on the site in 1937

and continues over six years.

- Projects of this size require a lot of planning,

but they also require a lot of availability

of the materials that are needed.

You need concrete, you need aggregates,

you need water, you need power.

You need a lot of people.

That's challenging during a time when there's a lot of other

concrete-hungry structures being built.

- [Narrator] These other structures include

massive defensive sites like Festung and Pointe du Hoc,

as well as the colossal Atlantic Wall.

- It would take an immense amount of coordination

and communication to make sure that all of these sites

that need all of these resources are getting them.

- [Narrator] The 3,700 acre site

holds a number of buildings, including a power station,

a freight station and several bunkers.

- For me, the most fascinating part of this facility

is the sprawling nature of it.

There are a lot of buildings in this parcel of land.

- You've got this massive variety

of different shapes and sizes and designs

of concrete structures dotted all around this site,

and some of them are absolutely enormous

and others are a much smaller and are very curious.

- [Narrator] The structures are connected

by a series of canals and elevated platforms.

The skeleton of this elevated platform

is the only surviving example of the seven

that existed during the war.

- They're interconnected and they're working together.

You know there's likely something important happening there.

- [Narrator] The majority of the buildings

decaying in the forest reveal themselves to be non-military.

They appear to be mostly factories

and other industrial structures.

- You've got these huge towers

and these giant concrete cylinders

that seem like they were there to store something.

The question is what?

It's possible that this could be some kind of civilian site,

but then why the presence

of the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe?

- In normal situations, there's a difference

between a military site and an industrial site

or commercial site.

But with Nazi Germany, there is no difference.

Everything serves the larger military purposes.

Everything was nationalized for the Nazi war machine.

- [Narrator] A clue to the purpose of this site

might lie in its owner, IG Farben.

- IG Farben is the largest chemical company in Germany

throughout the 1930s and into the war.

It has many subsidiaries that account

for a great part of the German economy in a lot of ways.

It's certainly its manufacturing base,

it employs a lot of people

and it had a very significant influence

on the Nazi German government, and vice versa.

- Now this was a company

involved in lots of different projects with the Nazis,

and one of those things was fuel.

- This facility has the look of a conventional oil refinery,

lots of pipes, lots of big towers, et cetera.

- [Narrator] The ground is laced with tunnels

and secret passageways leading to huge concrete cylinders,

some as large as 80 feet in diameter.

Researchers find rotting remains of what would fit

the description of fuel tanks.

- I'm still in the dark

as to why they'd be so heavily protected

and why you'd have this element of secrecy

with tunnels leading to and from them.

- [Narrator] This location looks like it could simply be

a highly advanced oil refinery

to fuel Germany's bustling, modern society.

- In 1930s, 1940s, you needed to have oil.

That was the energy source

that not only drove your vehicles,

but kept the economy moving.

- [Narrator] After suffering from the loss of World War I

and the Depression, by the late 1930s,

Germany is experiencing an economic revival.

Factories are being built,

Public Works projects are happening,

and automobiles are becoming more common.

But even more critically,

under the gaze of Public Works,

Hitler has been secretly remilitarizing the Reich.

- The Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I

requires that Germany demilitarize, de-industrialize

and pay war reparations.

This puts Nazi Germany on its knees

in terms of a sense of pride, as well as economically.

Hitler comes to power in 1933 and immediately

begins violating the Treaty of Versailles,

immediately begins rearming and militarizing

the entire country to the point where by 1939

when World War II starts,

the country is already in a full militaristic mode.

Fuel was one of the key ingredients

to the larger Nazi empire

and Hitler's continental vision of conquests.

- But here's the problem.

Germany has no oil deposits.

- [Narrator] Hitler's plans might be stopped in their tracks

by the Reich's dependence on fuel imports.

- Germany was importing up to two thirds of their oil

prior to the war.

Knowing that they were likely to get into a war,

they needed to find a creative way to make sure

that that supply was guaranteed.

- No matter what we're building,

we're limited by something.

We're limited by our budget

or we're limited by the available materials that we have,

and in this case, the limitation is there's no fuel,

so let's do research to find a way to substitute that fuel.

- [Narrator] And the solution may be forming in Politz.

Boatloads of raw materials are arriving, but it's not oil.

- The Germans may not have a lot of oil,

but they do have another fuel source in abundance, coal.

- [Narrator] But the demands of Hitler's military

go way beyond the old technology that coal could power.

- Coal is a hydrocarbon, just like oil and natural gas,

except it's in a solid form.

It has lots of energy in it, but it's not particularly

utilizable by aircraft or vehicles.

- That is where we see IG Farben come in and they say okay,

we think we can use coal to make fuel,

and we have a pretty good plan for that.

- [Narrator] German scientists

have been trying to turn coal to gas for decades.

Documents show that breakthroughs by Friedrich Bergius

in the 1920s are the basis for IG Farben's secret work,

but the site has been stripped of its contents,

leaving researchers with few clues to the actual process.

- It's only the skeletons that exist,

so it's very difficult

to put the pieces of this puzzle together,

but Germany is at the forefront

of science and technology at the time,

and the Nazis are gonna take full advantage of that fact.

- [Narrator] What is the secret technology

that is fueling Hitler's ambitions

and puzzling the watching allies?

The Politz Hydroworks in Western Poland

is now abandoned and overgrown,

disguising its original purpose.

- People here, they are discovering the new facilities,

which were hidden by nature,

and they are trying to put it on the map

to see how huge it was.

- The location was really linked to the access

to coal reserves.

The complex was designed to use coal,

which Germany had an abundance of,

and turn it into usable liquid fuel.

- There's a couple of processes

for converting coal into fuels.

One of those processes is coal hydrogenation.

You're gonna get a lot of heavy oil,

and heavy oil isn't really good.

You can put it into a steam boiler and burn it,

but beyond that, you can't use it in a diesel engine.

You certainly can't use it in an aircraft,

so it's of limited use.

- [Narrator] IG Farben is trying to improve this process

to create the types of fuel needed

to power the German war machine,

and they've built Hydroworks for that purpose.

With no site plans to go on,

modern researchers must examine the skeletons

of the site's abandoned buildings

to determine what part each plays in the process.

- Sometimes buildings have certain characteristics

that you can tell have a particular intent behind them,

things like factories and industrial buildings.

We want strong, robust structures

with fairly large, open spaces for pieces of equipment.

We want a fairly regular grid

so that we can support heavy equipment.

We want lots of columns and beams

to be a very beefy structure,

and we want it to be able to be enclosed from the elements.

- One of the problems with all of these processes,

they generate a lot of heat.

So you're gonna have to build open, hollow structures

that kind of look like office buildings

so that we have enough air flow for heat dissipation

and so we're not concentrating the fuel

to the level that we could get an explosion,

but then still trying to disguise it

as something other than an industrial process.

- We know their end goal was to create synthetic fuel.

Walking through these buildings and looking at them,

it's hard to tell exactly what they were for.

It really is a skeleton.

- [Narrator] This oddly shaped ruin

is mostly hidden by the forest.

It resembles a smokestack,

but as there are no buildings nearby,

researchers are initially unable to determine its purpose.

What little documentation researchers do have

shows that a few buildings on the site use smokestacks.

Most notably, a power plant on the other side of the site

once had two 390 foot stacks.

Only one section is visible today, but during the war,

this structure covered 210,000 square feet,

the largest building on the site.

- The nice thing about oil is we can just pump it into tanks

and pump it into our system.

With coal, there's a lot of ancillary equipment

outside of the chemical process itself.

There's gonna be lots of conveyors and hoppers

moving that coal into the process.

- [Narrator] Coal from the Silesia region

is brought to the site by rail or boat,

then transported by conveyor belt

to be used in the power plant.

- All of this equipment needs power to function,

so you're gonna build your own power plant

for dedicated service to this,

because you can't have that power go out.

- [Narrator] This coal-fired plant

generates 80 megawatts of power,

but this is not enough to satisfy Hydroworks' needs.

Another 20 megawatts must be provided from outside sources,

so in 1942, construction of a second power plant begins

but is never completed.

But the lone smoke stack in the forest

cannot be from this plant.

Documents are discovered

showing that this building's two smokestacks

have both been destroyed, one bombed by the allies in 1945

and the other destroyed in the late 70s.

After some further investigation,

the mystery stack is discovered to be from the shale

and desulfurization plant on the west side of the site.

While IG Farben is working on creating fuel for the Reich,

German military leaders are burning it up.

When World War II begins in 1939,

the invasion of Poland alone consumes 64%

of German oil reserves.

- Germany is critically dependent on its ally Romania.

They produce 30% of Germany's oil capacity,

but you're still left with this idea

of where are we gonna get more than that?

- [Narrator] Early in the war,

Germany is still getting oil from its future enemies.

- It's only five or six companies and countries

that control the vast majority of the world's oil supply.

Between the Americans and the Soviet Unions,

you're looking at most of it,

so the Americans supplied quite a lot of Germany's oil.

At the beginning of the war, America is neutral.

It's technically allowed to do this,

but this is obviously more problematic as it becomes clear

that they're going to have to go into the war

on Britain side.

- There are neutrality acts,

but businesses find ways to circumvent those laws.

- [Narrator] One of the most challenging connections

between the US and Nazi Germany

includes the company Standard Oil.

Standard continues to supply Germany with oil

by using intermediaries and indirect routes.

- Business is business.

That's what a hardened capitalist would say.

- [Narrator] Some German leaders

are trying to solve the fuel shortage problem in other ways.

- Industry was charged with trying to come up with ways

to make Germany more fuel efficient across the board.

- So rails, number one efficient,

best way to move bulk goods.

The second best way is via highways.

- Like the Autobahn.

Now they were efficient because they'd shorten the distances

between major cities,

they'd allow for better fuel efficiency

of the vehicles traveling along them

because of the quality of the roadways.

- The smoother the road, the more efficient it is.

There's less friction

because they have less distresses in them.

- And they connected the whole country through this network

of what were the very first super highways.

This was integral to the Nazi plans.

- The Autobahn is not only for commercial purposes,

but it also helps militarily.

One of the challenges historically

is how do you mobilize your army from point A to point B?

And if you have a dirt road and it rains,

that road is washed out.

If it's the middle of winter and it's frozen,

that road is impassable.

How does the Polish army resupply and move thousands of men

to the front to stop this Nazi blitzkrieg in 1939?

The answer is they don't,

because they don't have the road system.

- [Narrator] Despite the progress made

with the construction of the Autobahn,

Germany still faces dwindling oil supplies

as the war continues.

Nazi scientists racing to find the solution

make a promising discovery.

- When there's a breakthrough technology,

it changes the way we do almost everything.

- [Narrator] But will this new technology

lead them down a path fraught with danger?

At Politz Hydroworks,

researchers are trying to develop a process

to increase Germany's fuel supply,

and with Germany at war, the need is greater than ever.

- How would they get the fuel to power up their war machine

when they're so heavily dependent on coal?

- It would be really advantageous

for the Germans to come up with a methodology

to convert their vast coal resources

into a liquid fuel source that could be used in automobiles,

aircraft, tanks, et cetera.

- Germany is forced to import its oil

via tankers arriving by sea, but here's the problem.

When the second world war breaks out,

the allies put in a blockade to stop those tankers arriving.

Now Hitler really has a challenge on his hands.

- [Narrator] The naval blockade is announced

the day after war is declared and is not only blocking fuel,

but food and other materials Hitler needs

to feed the war machine and German citizens.

Germany engages with a terrifying destroyer

of U-boat operations, and the Battle of the Atlantic rages.

- The big convoys that were crossing the Atlantic,

the U-boats targeted them

in the hopes that they could put a dent in Britain's ability

to get the raw materials that it needed to fight the war.

- Britain is critically dependent upon its empire,

its men, its equipment, its food, its clothing,

its everything you could possibly imagine.

- [Narrator] Germany needs to win this war fast,

and the solution is a new form of battle, blitzkrieg.

- Blitzkrieg was like nothing

the world had ever seen before.

It literally tore up the playbook of battle

as everybody understood it,

which was based on static defense

and not very rapid movement of troops in any one time.

- This type of warfare was all about moving

a huge volume of troops and weaponry

in a coordinated fashion, and at pace.

We're talking planes, trucks, tanks.

- This strategy was in part designed to address the problem

of Germany's limited resources,

and obviously if you can win the war quickly

then you won't have a problem.

It's when the war becomes drawn out,

then you're in the problem.

- The irony of this is that because the Germans

were moving so far forward so fast,

it burns literally thousands and thousands of tons of fuel.

- [Narrator] A key element

to this new style of warfare is tanks.

While tanks were used in World War I,

Nazi tanks are a new terror on the battlefield.

- There were many battles where it would take somewhere

from three to five American Sherman tanks

to neutralize one Nazi tank,

so that was Nazi Germany's big asset.

These tanks were massive.

They had guns on them the size of a telephone pole,

several inches thick of armor,

and while that might have made it impervious

to allied tank assaults, it meant that they got

not miles to the gallon, but gallons to the mile.

- Take a Panzer II tank.

It's got a capacity of about 45 gallons of fuel

that it can take on board, and depending on terrain,

that would get it maybe 80 miles.

But this was blitzkrieg, moving en mass,

so now we're talking maybe 2,000 of these tanks.

That's around 100,000 gallons of fuel

to move less than 100 miles.

- We had to move not only the tanks and men forward,

but they were followed by trucks

and all the logistical necessities of resupply,

warm weather clothing, ammunition, and fuel, fuel, fuel.

- [Narrator] Nazi tanks roll across Western Europe,

invading Norway, Belgium and France.

By the middle of 1940, the German Reich stretches

from the Atlantic coast to Eastern Poland.

In addition to land vehicles,

over 1,000 U-boats lurk in enemy waters

throughout the course of the war.

U-boats have a limited range and must be refueled

by special U-boats called milk cows,

making them priority targets for allied attack.

The refueling process often takes hours,

putting both boats at risk.

- Think of the logistics for these U-boats

that are literally around the world.

I mean, they're operating off the coast of the Americas.

They're operating off the coast of Africa.

They're operating throughout the Mediterranean.

They're in the Baltic.

How do you put fuel everywhere?

- [Narrator] A breakthrough is desperately needed,

and at Hydroworks, it's a race against time

to make the fuel from Germany's abundant coal supply

efficient and fast,

and the first step takes place in the coal mill.

Coal from the conveyor belt

is dropped through openings at the top of the building

into silos, then funneled onto another belt

that transports it to the crusher.

- You originally start with rocks,

and you need to crush those down into smaller rocks,

and that can happen through crushers

or some sort of grinding, and as you progress through this,

you're ending up with smaller and smaller particles

and you eventually get into milling,

which is like a very large rock tumbler.

Inside of this mill, which is a spinning barrel,

you might have large cannonballs, essentially,

of metal or long rods of steel.

The particles get introduced to these small pieces of rock

with a liquid of some form which creates a slurry,

a mixture of solids and liquids,

and then this whole thing starts to tumble around

to grind and smash all of those particles even smaller

so that you end up with granular pieces,

like maybe the size of a sugar grain.

- [Narrator] At 114 feet, this building is currently

the tallest object of the Hydroworks ruins.

It was once thought to be a distillation tower,

but researchers now believe it's another coal mill.

Just as progress is being made

and increasing the Reich's fuel supply,

the Battle of Britain begins in July of 1940

with a focus on air warfare.

- When we get on to air warfare,

we're talking about fuel consumption

on a whole new level.

In World War I, we saw the very beginnings of planes,

but they were very lightweight

and their capabilities were fairly limited.

But now the Nazis had plans to unleash hell in the skies

with their high-performance fighter jets

and long range, big, heavy bombers.

For example, the Messerschmitt 109 fighter

would use up to 100 gallons of fuel

to give it a range of just 400 miles,

and the Luftwaffe had over 30,000 of these planes.

I mean, the amount of fuel consumed is unfathomable.

- The Battle of Britain was an enormous drain on the Nazis.

Not only did they lose a lot of pilots and a lot of planes

and they failed to bomb Britain into submission,

but they spent so much fuel, so much resources,

so much money on that failure that truly the Nazi air force,

the Luftwaffe, never fully recovers after the failures

in the Battle of Britain.

- There's countless stories of Nazi military commanders

begging for fuel, stealing fuel,

doing anything they can get for fuel.

- There are times when the Luftwaffe

can't even get up in the air

because they don't have fuel for the planes,

which leaves the skies wide open for the allies.

- [Narrator] Germany is about to open up a second front

by attacking the Soviet Union,

and at Hydroworks, a breakthrough technology

might just be Hitler's answer.

IG Farben scientists have improved

the coal hydrogenation method

to make more than just heavy fuel.

Powder coal created in the mill is dried with hot gases

before it moves on to the next stage in the process.

- The powders, they're mixed with heavy oil

that's been recycled from the end of this process.

Now that mixture then goes through a series

of chemical processes

that both add and extract different elements,

and it's all done at high pressure and at high temperature.

- [Narrator] This technological breakthrough

is a game changer for Nazi Germany.

- And the output from this process

is a mixture of different fuels,

so you've got very heavy oils,

which are those recycled back into the start of the process.

You've got middle oils, gases and synthetic gasoline,

and it's that fuel that the Nazis used

to power their tanks, their ships,

their planes, their submarines.

- [Narrator] The synthetic fuel solves the Nazi problem

until Hitler opens a new front.

- Destroying the Soviet Union was fundamental to his agenda,

but it came with enormous risks.

- [Narrator] What is the secret the Nazis are guarding

so carefully at facilities like this one?

By mid 1940, the Nazis' sweep across Western Europe

has depleted their oil reserves

and cut off their supply of imports.

- Every time that you send out large squadrons of bombers

destined for the UK, you're burning fuel that you need,

just exacerbating that critical dependency.

- [Narrator] But researchers at the top secret

Politz Hydroworks in what is now Poland

have created a method to turn coal into liquid fuel

to alleviate the shortage.

Production begins in 1940, and over the next few years,

this facility produces 15%

of Germany's synthetic fuel supply, 557,000 tons.

Researchers excavating the site find occasional

unexplained oil leaks on the ground.

- Nobody know what is the source of this oil.

Maybe pipes.

Down here there is still here some heated storage,

underground storage, where there's some oil still inside.

- [Narrator] Before it's transported across the Reich,

the processed fuel is stored in dozens of huge

concrete reinforced tanks located throughout the site.

This group of 16 tanks holds what is called middle oil,

used to make diesel fuel and gas oil.

21 smaller tanks nearby hold light oil,

which can be used to make gasoline and jet fuel.

- This is a volatile liquid.

There is potential danger for fires,

for bombing, for explosions.

You have to be very careful working around these materials.

If there is vapor or anything that could be ignitable,

any sort of spark could set these things off to explode

in a catastrophic manner.

- [Narrator] Air shafts and underground tunnels

run between the tanks to provide ventilation

and may be used as conduits to help protect fuel pipes.

12 coal hydrogenation plants

were built throughout the Reich,

along with nine plants using another method,

the Fischer-Tropsch process.

In total, they produced over 5 million tons of fuel

per year, providing for 57% of German consumption.

- The Germans were able to turn this idea

of creating synthetic fuel into reality,

and they 10-X the production of it

in the space of four years, producing 10 times more fuel.

It's really quite remarkable.

- [Narrator] The Nazis make extreme efforts

to protect this site in both secrecy and defenses

in the event of its discovery by the allies.

Meanwhile, Hitler knows Germany will need to find

the rest of his military's fuel elsewhere.

The Nazis are able to acquire a small amount of fuel

from their invasion of Norway,

but Hitler has his sight set on a greater source,

and in early 1941 sends General Erwin Rommel

to North Africa to help Italy capture

British-owned oil fields in the region.

- The campaign in North Africa

is a really important campaign in the war.

Churchill was very intent on sending armies to North Africa

to protect the oil fields in and around Iraq

and keep them out of German hands.

- Rommel was making serious grounds in Africa,

but his 1,000 mile supply chain is causing him big problems.

His strategy is to push through to Cairo

and capture the oil reserves of Africa.

If he can get there, it could change the war.

- [Narrator] Already stretched thin in the west,

in 1941 the Nazis add a new front to the war.

- Arguably the turning point of the entire war

was Hitler's foolish invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941,

Operation Barbarossa,

a landmass the size of the Soviet Union,

and Hitler thinks he can seize it.

- Quite a few people in his high command said not now.

You could maybe do it later,

but let's get rid of the British first.

Hitler widely disregards it.

He disregarded most military advice.

For all of us now, thank goodness he did,

because it's what ultimately dooms Nazi Germany.

- The Soviets are essentially sitting on

the largest oil reserve in the world in and around Baku,

so the hope is that if the Germans can take over

enough land in the east, that they will capture

enough of that oil

that they will never have oil problems again,

but they actually make their own problem worse

by invading the Soviet Union.

The sheer distances that are being covered

dramatically exacerbated their problems in fuel consumption

and also cut them off from a country that had in fact

been a supplier of their oil up until that point.

- [Narrator] German synthetic sites

are providing 57% of the Reich's fuel,

but they must increase their level of production

to meet the country's needs.

With Germany fighting on multiple fronts

and stretched across continents,

Hydroworks is a critical target for the allies,

but that's not the site's only problem.

- We don't even need the allies to bomb us.

Our building's gonna blow up on its own.

- [Narrator] How can the researchers at Hydroworks

protect themselves from the dangers within?

During World War II at Politz Hydroworks

in what is now Poland, thousands of tons of synthetic fuel

are being pumped out to power the Nazi war machine.

- If this facility and others like it are lost,

it's going to have a big impact on their war effort,

so they're gonna do everything they can to disguise it,

everything they can do to protect it,

to make sure it's not easily bombed

or identified by the allies.

- [Narrator] But allied bombs

are not the only danger for Hydroworks.

- This process is very energy intensive,

so we need to provide heat to break down

those hydrocarbon molecules, we need to provide pressure,

and we need to also have a source of hydrogen,

so we have to have some chemical reaction

that's giving us hydrogen as well,

and hydrogen gas is quite dangerous, very explosive.

- [Narrator] To understand the sheer power

of the devastation that could be unleashed,

one simply needs to look at the East Ohio gas explosion

in Cleveland in 1944.

A vapor leak from a seam in the side of a storage tank

mixed with sewage and air in a catch basin.

It ignited, creating a massive explosion.

130 people were killed,

and one square mile of the area was flattened.

Debris was scattered for miles,

including a manhole cover found several miles away.

The facility at Hydroworks is much bigger.

The Nazis also have to stay secure

from multiple espionage attempts.

- The allies can't only rely on

the possibility of reconnaissance photographs

to map some of these sites.

They're very dependent on people on the inside

giving away the game.

You have quite a number of members

of the Polish Underground risking their lives daily

to pass information to the allies.

- [Narrator] Polish intelligence begins to infiltrate

Politz Hydroworks soon after they discover

the Peenemunde rocket site nearby.

Polish workers and railway men

supply intelligence to the allies.

One of these spies even manages to infiltrate the facility

using the false identity of an organization tote officer.

- The Nazis had this fixation on security and secrecy,

but they were ultimately quite vulnerable.

- [Narrator] To address concerns about security,

the site contained several large bunkers,

as well as a number of small one-person shelters.

Fences and guards surround critical areas

to discourage spying and sabotage.

The site's watchtower is five stories high

with five foot thick walls, three foot thick floors

and an 11 foot thick pyramid-shaped bomb-proof roof.

Besides machine gun positions at the top,

guards are also able to throw grenades from the openings.

From this tower, guards had a good view

of the nearby oil storage tanks

and could coordinate firefighting efforts

in the event of a fire.

The tower is never completed,

but it's believed that a nearby embankment

is meant to be extended to surround the towers

so that only the combat positions on the top floor

will be exposed.

Is the high security an indication

that something other than fuel is being developed here?

- The Nazis were obsessed with secrecy.

The big security fences,

extensive network of secretive tunnels across the site.

This site is important to the Nazis,

and they were prepared to defend it at all costs.

- [Narrator] Despite the Nazi's efforts to hide it,

Hydroworks is discovered by the allies in late 1940.

- One of the first things the allies did

in terms of their bombing campaign

was they targeted fuels facilities.

- [Narrator] The site is bombed three times,

but the raids are inaccurate and largely ineffective.

- The precision of these bombers wasn't very good.

If there were a lot of defenses

and a lot of German fighters came out to fight them,

often they would just drop their loads

and try to get out of there as quickly as they could.

- [Narrator] Lacking the vital intelligence required

for more precise bombing,

the allies divert their resources to more viable targets.

- We have a limited number of bombers.

We have a limited number of bombs.

We have an almost infinite number of targets

stretched across the entire continent.

- The bombing priorities went to precisely military targets

that were immediately threatening you,

because you're sending off boys to their deaths

and losing equipment in the process.

- A lot of these planes had a limited range,

so the deeper you went into German territory,

the more precarious it was for the planes

to make it back safely.

- [Narrator] But in the spring of 1944,

Hydroworks becomes a target again.

- Polish railroad workers spotted in 1940

a huge amount of cisterns,

and they established some observation points.

They could collect data by graphing areas,

some compressor rooms, power station.

- [Narrator] The spy who previously infiltrates Hydroworks

is able to make a detailed map of the infrastructure

in a scale of one to 25,000.

This is smuggled to Britain to be used as a guide

for potential air raids.

Armed with Polish intelligence,

the allies plan their return to Hydroworks

in preparation for the June 6th invasion of Normandy,

better known as D-Day.

- The D-Day invasions would mark the beginning of the end

with the allies gaining a toe hole in Europe.

- [Narrator] With D-Day imminent,

they conduct a large-scale bombing campaign,

targeting Nazi petroleum and lubricant facilities

in hopes of reducing Germany's ability

to fend off the allied onslaught.

- If you look at reconnaissance photos,

you can see that there's thick plumes of smoke

leaking from the site after the bombing.

The allies must have been absolutely delighted.

They'd hit something that was important, and it was burning.

- [Narrator] But the remains today tell a confusing story.

It's not as destroyed as one would expect.

- This site was crucial to the Nazi warfare,

so why wasn't it completely destroyed?

Why wasn't it leveled to the ground?

- [Narrator] A critical synthetic fuel site

is targeted for allied bombing as D-Day looms,

but years later, as investigators try to put

the pieces of the puzzle together,

it's clear the site isn't destroyed as intended.

- If you see the aerial photographs from that time,

you will see many holes from the bombs all around the area

and very few inside the targets.

- One wonders why it was spared

more of the aggressive bombing that we now in retrospect

say it should have gone through.

- [Narrator] Perhaps post-war events

can shed some light on this question.

In 1945, the allies seize IG Farben holdings

with the intention of splitting the conglomerate up,

and documents reveal that allied commander

General Eisenhower wants Hydroworks and similar facilities

to be destroyed, but these plans are eventually abandoned.

- There are voices in the United States.

Certainly executives on Standard Oil and other companies

were encouraging them to go easier on IG Farben

and some of the German manufacturers of war,

in part to substantiate German economic recovery post-war,

and also with this idea of potentially building an ally

against the Soviet Union.

- [Narrator] This move is the latest

in a series of shady dealings

between these companies during the war.

- In 1927, Standard Oil and IG Farben

had come up with an agreement that IG Farben

would share information

about the production of synthetic oils

and the US would not pursue the study

of synthetic rubber making.

There was a lot of concern in the US

that in making this kind of a deal, it may have impeded

American ability to use rubber in their own war efforts.

- Throughout history, there's always been

a difficult relationship between business

and human conflict, but it is quite chilling to think

that there were American companies that had dealings

with businesses working with the Nazis.

The question is, was the American government aware

of these shady dealings between IG Farben and Standard Oil?

- The American government knew more

than we often like to admit.

Throughout the 30s, Hitler was testing the world's response.

Could he push the envelope?

How much further could he go

without an aggressive response from the world?

Even as Hitler turned the heat up,

it was still business as usual.

- IG Farben benefited enormously financially

from its relationship with the Nazis.

The ways in which it was embedded

in the worst crimes of the Nazi regime

are intricate and deep and multifaceted,

but very few executives

faced any kind of reckoning after the war.

- [Narrator] It is possible that companies like Standard Oil

had their eyes on the scientific secrets of this facility

and others like it, but in the aftermath of the war,

Poland is annexed by the Soviets

and those secrets are hidden behind the iron curtain

for decades.

- When Germany invaded Russia,

Stalin made this crazy order

to move one of his production facilities back to the east,

probably saved Russia.

And now as the Russian units move forward,

they're able to do exactly the same thing.

They strip the entire production facility

and take it all back.

- [Narrator] Many of the details of these events

are buried in lost or hidden documents,

but there are hopes that more will be declassified.

- The Nazis were meticulous to the point of being obsessed

with documenting virtually everything.

They filmed, they wrote it down.

However, there are gaps in our information.

- Soviet seized a huge amount of Third Reich documents.

Maybe half of them are still in Moscow,

they are still secret,

and the access to them is highly limited.

- [Narrator] The Russians also bring

hundreds of Nazi scientists back to the Soviet Union,

and the Americans do the same.

- We needed to grab the paperwork, the scientists

and the technology and bring it back to the United States.

Is that a reason why the facility was not fully destroyed?

Possibly part of it.

- Protecting architects of war like IG Farben

or the rocket scientists, they saw purpose to it

that would now serve their interests moving forward

in a very tumultuous and uncertain world.

- [Narrator] Nazi technology makes a major contribution

to the cold war and scientific advancement on both sides.

- The United States and the west

was able to make great leaps forward in rocket technology.

The advent of helicopters, jet engines,

as well as synthetic fuel.

- [Narrator] In oil-rich America,

the process is used to create higher quality fuel from oil,

but it's considered impractical to use on coal.

- The raw product used to produce this much fuel,

that's a staggering amount.

Three parts coal, you get one part fuel.

That's not a great ratio.

- It's not a good business.

For the war proposes it was great,

but at a peace time it would be crazy.

- It's alarming to think of what might have happened

if Germany had made advances on synthetic fuels

at the beginning of the war.

If they would have had then a virtually unlimited supply

of new technologies and oil,

it could have been a game changer in the war.

[ominous music]