Original subtitles

- [Narrator] March 1945, the Nazis are mounting

a last-ditch counterattack to take back the town of Luban

from the Soviets.

- This was the last effective German offensive action

of the entire conflict.

- [Narrator] The Germans succeed

in wresting control of the town from the Red Army.

But the timing is strange.

- The Soviet Red Army is rolling towards Berlin.

This is the end game of the war.

- [Narrator] Within two months, Hitler will be dead,

and the war in Europe ended.

Germany's evil dream of a thousand-year Reich is over.

- But here's this one last attempt

to try to convince the German people that it's all good

and we got it under control.

- [Narrator] Stranger still is the area

so desperately fought over.

- Nobody knows what's going on there.

I don't think there was any strategic purpose to it.

- Why was this place so important to the Nazis?

[dramatic music]

- [Narrator] In early March of 1945,

during the final months of World War II,

a determined division of German soldiers

are heading into the town of Luban in Lower Silesia.

Assisted by two Panzer divisions,

they intend to take it back from the Soviets,

who had captured it a few weeks earlier.

But this desperate attack seems pointless,

as the Nazis are forced to confront

an increasingly inevitable defeat.

- At this stage of the war,

the ring is closing on Hitler and the Nazis.

From the west,

the Allies have established their bridgeheads in France

and Allied ground troops are moving towards Germany,

while Allied bombers continue to pound Germany from the sky.

- [Narrator] From the east,

the 11-million-man-strong Red Army

has been rolling across Europe,

retaking the territory conquered by the Germans

earlier in the war.

- The Soviets just built this massive war machine.

The entire German armies were vanishing and coming out

as mincemeat out of the Red Army machine.

- [Narrator] By 1945, the Soviets have retaken Belarus

and Western Ukraine,

and are working their way across Poland

and into German territory.

- It was just flattening the Nazis.

Marshal Zhukov have had very clear directions from Stalin.

"Don't stop 'till Berlin."

All the urban centers which were on the path to Berlin

would be taken by the Red Army.

- [Narrator] Luban is on that path.

But General Ferdinand Schorner has spent a month

building up German forces in the area,

in anticipation of the Soviets' arrival.

- Schorner was ideologically committed up until the very end

and was willing to use all of his authority

to keep as many soldiers in action as he could,

even though each day of fighting

was only prolonging the inevitable.

- [Narrator] The Silesian region,

in what is modern day Poland,

was fully German during World War II

and viewed as the doorstep to Berlin.

- In 1945, Luban was Lauban which was a German town.

German forces are essentially trying to buy time

for populations to move westward

and get out of the way of the Red Army.

- [Narrator] But in the face of the pincer move

on the Fuhrer from east and west, it's a mystery

why the Nazis would put their dwindling resources

into this region.

Why not mount a larger, stronger defense around Berlin?

A structure a few kilometers south of Luban

may provide some clues.

- One of the reasons

Luban might have been so important to the Nazis

were the industrial facilities based here.

- There is this constant need on both the Axis

and the Allied side to outsmart each other

in terms of better weaponry, better armaments,

better war production,

bigger and better and deadlier ways to kill people.

- They were in effect trying to avoid

the specter of World War I

which was a war of attrition.

You and me in trenches fighting each other

until one of us bleeds to death.

So the German military strategy from the get-go

was to hit hard and fast

and use technology as the cutting edge of that.

- [Narrator] This cutting edge

took shape in Hitler's infatuation

with advanced wonder weapons.

- He no longer has hope in his generals.

Goöring and Luftwaffe had failed him.

His dream of super weapons

are the one thing that keeps him going.

- I think there's a sort of fetishization of technology,

one simply loses count

of all of the different weapons projects

and experimental programs that are underway

with the idea that one could invent

their way out of this strategic cul-de-sac

that the Germans find themselves in.

- If you consider what the United States

had to do with the Manhattan Project,

and how that miraculously ended the war in the Pacific,

Hitler's dream is not all that crazy,

if only it was based on some kind of working science

and they had the resources for it.

- [Narrator] Though German scientists

are at the forefront of research and technology,

the Reich's advantage falls short.

- The Germans were pretty capable when it came to research,

but they had some challenges

in converting the early scientific stages

of these projects into a product

that somebody can actually employ on a battlefield.

- The journey from prototype

to an actually used weapons system

is a long, drawn out process

the Germans tried to accelerate at that time,

but not always successfully.

- This pressure to innovate

led to a type of conscription

of the scientific and engineering elite

to work on the war effort.

That hadn't happened before.

Now they're being hustled away to secret sites

to work on projects and not speak about it,

and not go back to their families for a while.

- [Narrator] But the research labs and factories

that enabled this innovation

were under constant threat from the Allies.

- During the Second World War,

the Americans and British had undertaken a concerted effort

to bomb German war industry.

And in response to those bombing raids,

the Nazis had moved

their production facilities further east.

- Once you get as far east as Silesia,

that's pushing the outer ranges of the bombers

as well as any escort fighters

that might be accompanying them during daytime operations.

- [Narrator] In the Luban region,

hulking structures guard the secrets

of some of the Nazis' last desperate plans.

- As they moved east,

they took over existing facilities

in these countries that they had already seized,

textile factories, and he had manufacturing factories,

and they would actually retool that factory

for their own war production.

- [Narrator] This enormous prison-like building,

in nearby Lesna, once held a manufacturing facility

that produced components

for some of the most advanced weapons

of the Second World War.

These are the remains, of just one of the buildings,

of the Walter-Werke factory.

- The output from the Walter-Werke factory

was so important to the Nazis,

they went to great lengths

to keep it hidden from the Allies.

It was covered over by a masking net,

making it very difficult to spot from the air.

Any roads also leading to the factory

were incredibly heavily guarded,

making it very difficult for unwanted guests

to get in on land.

- [Narrator] Even stranger, in the hills nearby,

a network of tunnels and caverns

have been carved into the hard rock.

Most of these are left unfinished

with bits of machinery left to rust in the dark.

- And absolutely, that would suggest

that there was some pretty top secret

technologically cutting edge stuff going on there.

- [Narrator] The Walter-Werke Company is founded in 1934

by pioneering engineer, Hellmuth Walter.

Walter first comes to the attention

of the Kriegsmarine in 1937,

when he shows them plans

for a new submarine propulsion system

using hydrogen peroxide.

- His first prototype came about in 1940,

and it remarkably was able to double the speed

of existing submarines,

but it relied on a very volatile mix

of chemicals to achieve this.

- This is a problem which perhaps is faced

all over the world by engineers.

There are certain demands which are made in wartime

and demand for speed, efficiency and so forth.

The kind of submarine propulsion systems

he was working with,

these take time to develop and to perfect

and to bring into production,

and they are often taking great risks

because time was something which the Nazis didn't have.

- Although this propulsion system

was too volatile for naval systems,

it was more easily adapted to rocketry.

- [Narrator] The Walter-Werke Company produces components

for two of the Nazi's most well-known wonder weapons:

The V1 missile and the V2 rocket.

- Basically, they're flying bombs.

They were unmanned.

They are designed to go up

and launched from sites in Europe.

- [Narrator] While The Walter-Werke Company

doesn't make the V1 itself,

they are responsible for getting it in the air.

- The V1 had to be fired from a fixed launching point

and required a very long rail,

almost like a roller coaster rail

upon which the missile was launched.

- [Narrator] This is called the Walter Catapult,

and its engine is powered

by the same hydrogen peroxide steam technology

used in Walter's submarine engine,

giving the V1 a rocket-powered boost.

- They would reach particular altitudes.

They would burn out their fuel systems

and the moment that fuel system exhausted,

they would come crashing down

full of explosives on enemy targets.

- And people would hear the sound of these V1s

coming into the city and they weren't worried

while they were buzzing overhead.

It was when they stopped buzzing,

because that's when they knew it would drop

and that they would explode.

- [Narrator] Nearly 30,000 V1s are made

and 10,000 are fired at England.

Over 2,000 of them reach London,

killing more than 6,000 people

and injuring nearly 20,000.

Hellmuth Walter's ground-breaking technology

is also applied in the Nazis' next,

and most terrifying, wonder weapon.

- The V1 was followed

a little bit later in the war by the V2.

It was the first guided ballistic missile.

It could be fired from mobile launching sites

and was a more advanced weapon,

but one that actually played a smaller part in the war.

- [Narrator] Walter's hydrogen peroxide steam technology

is used to power a turbine

that pushes rocket fuel and liquid oxygen

into the V2's engine.

The V2 travels at supersonic speeds,

and impacts without warning,

making defense against it nearly impossible.

They are manufactured from September 1944.

And more than 3,000 are launched towards London,

Antwerp, and Liege,

resulting in the deaths of approximately 9,000 people.

- The Germans put an awful lot of time,

money and effort into that.

And they did it with all of what's left

of the German resources.

They did it with slave labor.

They did it with a conviction

that they were going to perfect the technology

and be able to turn the tide of war.

And of course, all of that is ridiculous

that because they weren't even close.

- [Narrator] Hitler imagines thousands

of these terrifying weapons

raining down on the British.

An objective that is now out of reach

for the hard-pressed Nazi war machine.

With the Allies bombing ever further

into German-occupied territory,

could the massive efforts here in the lower Silesian region

be a final attempt to win the war?

In March of 1945,

the German army is preparing to take back

the seemingly unimportant town of Luban from the Soviets.

Factories in the region around this town

are hard at work supplying the Nazi war machine

including the Walter-Werke factory,

which produces engine components

for Hitler's wonder weapons, the V1 and V2.

- We've got this factory is owned by this prominent engineer

who is trying to push the envelope of our technology

who likely has a mandate from Hitler

to innovate, to create weapons of destruction.

- Was that the reason that the Nazis

defended the area so vigorously?

Chances are pretty good for sure.

- The so-called miracle weapons are supposed

to help reverse the course of the war at the 11th hour.

But that's not how the Second World War

was really fought, was it?

I mean this is a war fought by mass armies,

who are most effective when they have simple

but reliable technology available in large quantities.

By 1944 and '45, the Germans have neither.

The army actually fighting on the ground

seem to becoming in many respects more and more primitive

rather than more sophisticated in the equipment

that they're actually able to use to good effect.

- [Narrator] But there is one piece of innovative tech

being worked on right in Luban

that is of vital importance to the troops in action.

- One of the major areas of technological competition

in the Second World War was in the realm of radar.

- Radar works quite simply by sending radar waves

out into your surroundings,

which will then bounce off any solid objects

which you can then detect.

So in a way, it gives you eyes

where your eyes physically can't see,

whether that's because it's too far away

or whether it's in inclement weather.

- It really changes the nature of the battlefield.

Remember that it was only 20 or 25 years earlier

during the First World War,

when about your only option for detecting the presence

of oncoming enemy aircraft from a long range

was to have a giant cone-shaped device

mounted on a truck

that had like a stethoscope attached to it

that you put up to your ear

to try to capture sound coming away from a distance.

And we're moving from this now to in the Battle of Britain,

where the RAF Chain Home defense system

can detect German aircraft

even as they're taking off from their own airfields.

- It swings the Battle of Britain

for the Allies dramatically because you see them coming,

and it becomes now essential.

- [Narrator] One of the key enterprises in radar development

was the GEMA company, founded in 1934,

by physicist and scientific director

at the Kriegsmarine, Rudolf Kuhnhold.

In the years leading up to World War II,

GEMA innovates the most advanced radar systems in the world,

outperforming those used in both Britain and the US.

As the war rages,

GEMA leads the charge in radar development.

- Anyone who would have more sophisticated radar

would have an edge.

And even though the Germans

were late to the party, as it were,

they were working on radar

which would have far outstripped what the Allies had.

- [Narrator] Radar gives the Luftwaffe

the ability to navigate even with poor visibility,

allowing pilots to increase their time in the air

to carry out raids.

Kriegsmarine U-boats

not only support their own radar capabilities,

but these deadly ships are also fitted

with radar detection systems

to give them an edge when they're surfacing

as they become visible and vulnerable to the Allies.

The radar development at GEMA in Luban

is vitally important to the German war effort

and the Soviets are on their way.

- The kind of work that was being done there

was not something the Germans

were going to surrender to the Soviets without a fight.

- [Narrator] World War II constant Allied bombardment

forces the Nazis to move weapons production further east.

But while this does, at least temporarily,

put them out of Allied reach,

it also places them right in the path

of another great danger: the oncoming Red Army.

Following operation Barbarossa in June 1941,

the Soviets are overwhelmed by the Nazis,

losing vast expanses of territory.

But they manage to turn the tide

in the deadliest battle of the War:

the five-month long Battle of Stalingrad

in late 1942 and early 1943.

Despite heavy casualties of over one million men,

and the city that bears their leader's name

reduced to rubble, the Red Army hands the Nazis

their first significant defeat of the war

and gives people worldwide hope

for Hitler's inevitable downfall.

The victory invigorates the Red Army.

And with Joseph Stalin's massive war machine

of tanks and weapons behind them,

the 11-million-man force

is ruthlessly working its way across Europe to Germany.

- Nazi propaganda is absolutely frightening

everybody in Germany with good cause,

because certainly the Russians are showing no quarter

man, woman or child in Germany

considering what the Germans did with Russia.

- For years, the Nazi state

had been hammering home to Europeans

not just Germans that national socialism

was the last bastion

that could protect European civilization

from sort of the Bolshevik menace,

so the Eastern Front has to hold fast at all costs.

- [Narrator] To help safeguard

German resources from the Soviets,

the City of Breslau has been converted into a fortress.

If the Luban area is supplying defensive weapons to Breslau,

it would be vitally important

to safely transport them where needed.

- They needed to maintain their roads, their railways,

the whole transportation system,

they all had to be in good condition

to keep the war machine moving.

- [Narrator] Luban represents a key location

in the regional railway network.

- This was a distribution point

which was whitelisted for the Nazis to retain.

If they had lost this distribution point,

they would lose access to the rail network,

which allowed good and commodities,

including weapons, to circulate

and actually be put into use.

- [Narrator] Across the Reich,

industry is being turned to the manufacture

of advanced super weapons

including engine components being made

at the Walter-Werke factory in the Luban area.

But these are not the only important innovations

being made by this company.

- A lot of the work carried out at the Walter-Werke factory

included the development of existing weaponry.

So for example, there was the Type XVII U-boat,

which was a smaller, faster version of what had come before.

- [Narrator] The Type XVII uses an updated version

of Walter's record-breaking submarine engine.

It comes into service in 1944 but only 16 are built,

none of which saw combat.

Though the tide is turning in the Allies' favour,

the Nazis aren't through

creating new nightmarish technology.

And the factories in this area are key to success.

- Among the other innovations of the Walter-Werke factory

was the Henschel 293,

which was an unmanned underwater bomb,

which would actually be dropped

from an aircraft into the water,

but could only work when it was still within radio range

of the aircraft,

making it vulnerable and ineffective

because it revealed where the attacking aircraft was.

The Walter-Werke factory also developed the Enzian missile,

which was a radio-controlled drone,

but never entered into service during the war.

- [Narrator] After the war,

as the Allies sweep through Nazi factories,

taking what they want

for their own research and development,

they find evidence

of one of Walter-Werke's most innovative creations

in an unusual location.

A few kilometers east of Walter's Lesna factory

stands the 13th century Czocha Castle.

- The strange piece of equipment shows up in an old castle,

why would you put it there?

You think a castle is historical.

It's a space of appreciation.

It's not a high tech lab.

It's not a fabrication plant.

It's not a warehouse.

- [Narrator] Through the centuries,

this enormous building was home to Silesian princes

and other noble families.

So how did this strange object end up there?

Perhaps the artifact itself can provide some clues.

The object is a metal component

belonging to one of the most advanced

German military apparatus ever created.

- The Messerschmitt 163

was the only rocket-powered fighter plane

ever to have been manufactured

that could reach speeds

of over 620 miles an hour,

which would have been a massive advantage

over Allied aircraft at the time.

- [Narrator] These record speeds are thanks largely

to Walter's hydrogen peroxide-based engines,

whose success in testing had caught the attention

of the Messerschmitt company.

- The goal of such a fast aircraft

was to engage oncoming bomber forces.

The idea was that the Messerschmitt 163 Komet

would use its speed to fly higher

than oncoming bomber formations,

drop down on top of those bombers,

and deploy a warhead that would destroy

these Allied bomber forces.

And in fact, the aircraft was so fast and so capable,

it was expected to be able to make multiple attacks

against multiple bomber formations in one sortie.

- There was no way for the Allies

to bring any countermeasures against this fighter

when it was already in the air.

The only way that this fighter could be countered

was when it was taking off or landing

or when it was parked somewhere.

- [Narrator] Components of this incredible machine

are being made at Walter's Lesna factories.

Could the piece of the Komet found at Czocha Castle

mean it too was being used in the creation

of these wonder weapons?

There has been much speculation

about Czocha's role in World War II.

Some stories say that the castle

was a site for weapons research.

Others say it housed a secret intelligence center,

tasked with decrypting Soviet communications.

And there are even rumors that Wernher von Braun,

the engineer behind the V2,

had visited Czocha Castle during the war.

The advanced nature of the Me 163

makes it essential to keep its existence quiet.

Could this simply be a case

of hiding something very important in plain sight?

- A castle is a bit of camouflage in a way,

someone could say "Oh, that's a castle.

There's probably nothing exciting happening in there."

- [Narrator] Work on developing the propulsion technology

continues right until the last possible moment,

with Hellmuth Walter receiving the Knight's Cross

for his service in 1945,

shortly before his capture by the British.

But the Me 163 arrived too late

to be of any real help to the Nazis.

- This is another example

of one of these advanced technologies

that was just starting to come online

towards the end of the war.

While the Messerschmitt 163 did enter into service,

it flew very few missions,

and so it's impossible to really calculate

the effect something like this would have had

had the war continued or if it had been designed earlier.

- [Narrator] Regardless of its late arrival,

the Nazis were exceptionally proud of the Me 163 Komet

and the potential it had for wide-scale destruction.

If the Komet came too late to fulfill Hitler's plans,

why would the Nazis order troops to recapture the region?

At the time of the Battle of Luban,

the Red Army is all but knocking on Berlin's door,

where the Fuhrer is cornered.

Perhaps something else is brewing.

1945, the Soviet Red Army

is plowing through Poland and into Germany,

taking over Nazi-occupied territory quickly and efficiently.

In January, the Soviets make major advances

capturing Warsaw, Krakow, and Poznan.

The Lower Silesian offensive in February sees further gains.

- Of course, they're headed to Berlin.

They're just cutting through Silesia on the way.

There's actually a race of different Soviet commanders

who are trying to be the first to Berlin.

- [Narrator] On February 17th,

as they approach the town of Luban,

Soviet soldiers are struggling.

Weeks of fighting have left the men exhausted.

But the Soviets far outnumber the Nazis

in terms of soldiers and artillery

and they capture the North Eastern part of Luban

including its vital railway line.

They believe all will be well.

- You start off with the mindset that "We're successful,

we're successful, this is easy, this is easy," you know?

And it's repeating and it's repeating.

And then all of a sudden, something gums up the gears.

- What these tired, hard fighting Soviet forces don't know

is that the Germans have actually been building up forces

in this region with the express purpose

of launching a counter offensive

of pushing back against the Soviet attackers.

- [Narrator] General Schorner has been amassing

a sizable force, and in early March,

he's about to launch a series of counterattacks

to take back the region,

starting with Luban.

But why? What is so important in Luban?

- [Narrator] Could it have anything to do with the rumors

about another technology being tinkered with at GEMA?

One that suggests something far more sinister

than radar development.

- There were rumors at that time in Luban

that the Nazis perhaps for doing experiments

with the electromagnetic field.

And at one point, all the cars in the town stopped working.

- Electromagnetic pulse, or EMP,

is actually the real weapon in the post-war world.

It's conceivable that enemies

could release an electromagnetic pulse

that would disable or irreparably damage

all kinds of electrical components,

not just military components,

but civil infrastructure as well.

- [Narrator] Could the Nazis have been working

on secret electromagnetic weapons still unknown to us?

- When it comes to the Nazis,

nothing surprises me.

They were so bizarre in so many ways,

not just hateful and horrible and violent,

but also entertains innumerable possibilities.

- [Narrator] The Nazis were known to be experimenting

with a range of wonder weapons and outlandish sci-fi ideas;

like the sun gun, which would harness the power of the sun

to fry whole countries like ants under a magnifying glass.

- So when you have these moments,

Luban and other places

where people say strange things have gone on,

our devices aren't working properly,

there's weird atmospheric conditions,

you probably go, "Yeah, it's true," right?

- [Narrator] The Nazis are desperate at this stage.

Hitler refuses to surrender

despite great loses of men, equipment, and territory,

his is an evil, uncompromising regime.

And as the war progresses,

so does his madness and obsession

with striking back with absolute destruction.

Could the factories frantically at work in the region

be a reason for the German counter-offensive?

The Nazis are well known for building vast networks

of underground complexes throughout the Reich.

And the Luban area is no exception.

An extensive tunnel system has been built into the hills

around the towns and factories of the region.

But there is little information about their purpose.

- There's all sorts of speculation

as to what they might have been.

- [Narrator] With so much high-stakes research

being carried out at facilities like the GEMA radar plant,

the Nazis consider their protection a top priority.

Could the mysterious underground tunnels

have been the beginning of a subterranean factory?

- We have real-world examples

where the Germans are moving

production facilities underground.

And use of these underground facilities

is doubly frightening

because not only do you have these cases

where slave labor is employed

to manufacture and assemble the weapons,

but slave labor can also be employed

to construct the facilities

underground in which the weapons are being built.

And if one wants to work people to death,

this is a pretty straightforward way of doing it, isn't it?

Achieving two objectives at once.

- [Narrator] But stories circulating after the war

suggest that the tunnels could have been used

for a more secretive purpose.

Luban and its surrounding area is an industrial center,

manufacturing weapons for the Nazi war effort.

And buried in the hills around these factories

is a vast network of tunnels.

Many think they are simply underground extensions

of above-ground production facilities.

But there are rumors of another story.

400 kilometers from Luban in the City of Krakow,

a den of top Nazi brass is established

not long after the invasion of Poland.

Here, the dreaded Gestapo will make their headquarters.

- The Gestapo was broadly speaking a secret police force.

It was the job of the Gestapo

to keep their finger on the pulse

of the local populations

and in conjunction with a constellation

of other security services

under the larger umbrella of the SS

to undermine resistance networks

and other activities which could be seen

as acting against the interests

of the National Socialist occupation.

- [Narrator] It is here

in what is now known as Silesian House,

that the Nazis held and tortured

countless prisoners and party members

in their constant hunt for traitors.

- They could have surveillance activities

against anyone in the general population

and wouldn't necessarily matter who they were,

or what they were doing or what their walk of life was.

- [Narrator] It is thought that the Gestapo

collected a great deal of sensitive information

during these interrogations

and cataloged it in their own archives.

- The Nazi security apparatus

is a huge informational bureaucracies.

The Nazis had this card index system.

This was essentially a mechanical analog

database management system.

So the Gestapo records of Krakow,

you're talking about like housing

a national security computer database.

- [Narrator] Some suggest that the secret tunnel system

in the Luban area may have been an ultra-secure vault

meant to house highly classified documents.

- That the Gestapo had stuff to hide is not surprising.

One has to think that there's some tension over here

between the need to preserve those records

and also to keep them out of the public eye.

- [Narrator] As it becomes clear

the Nazis are losing the war,

the Gestapo abandons their Krakow headquarters,

and allegedly dispose of their sensitive archives

by burning them.

At least that's the official version of events.

According to the post-war testimony

of SS-Obersturmfuhrer Kurt Heinemeyer,

a Gestapo officer operating in Poland

from 1940 to 1945,

a sizable portion of the archive

was not destroyed as previously thought.

Instead, it was transported to the lower Silesian town,

then known as Rothwasser, Germany

18 kilometers from Luban.

Could these tunnels have been intended as temporary storage

for a longer-term project to resurrect the Third Reich?

Or should we be skeptical about the dubious source

that passed on this information?

- In the immediate post-war period,

the Allies relied heavily on information

gained in the interrogation of prisoners of war

at all levels of command.

Clearly, in many of these instances,

the individuals either had their own Axis to grind

against some of their peers or counterparts,

or they had an interest in exculpating themselves

as far as any criminal activities

in which they may have been personally involved.

- [Narrator] It would be in Heinemeyer's interest

to portray himself as having valuable information.

But this is only one factor

in deciding this information's authenticity.

- What we don't have here are strong other options.

You know, it's not clear that there was an extension

with materials with men working.

We don't have ventilation shafts

and everything else that would have happened

if it was a bunker to protect people against bombing raids.

So when that individual comes forward and says,

"Hey, these tunnels, I think they were used

because we're moving records into them."

Without other plausible things,

we'll just fall back into whichever option

that we do have available to us is likely it

even if it should fall below a line of plausibility itself.

- [Narrator] As World War II is coming to a close,

Germany's battle strategy

has turned from conquest to survival.

Desperation is in the air.

In October 1944, the Volkssturm is created.

- We have increasingly older men in their 50s and 60s,

even older perhaps in some cases,

and children, teenage boys, very young teenagers

who are being pressed into service.

- [Narrator] The boys in the Volkssturm

were members of the Hitler Youth.

All Germans from age 10 to 18 were required to join.

They trained boys to be future soldiers

and girls to be wives and mothers.

- The Nazi war machine included much propaganda.

They needed to have buy in,

by all their citizens, especially the Nazi youth,

they needed them to believe in their fuhrer

that what he was doing was for their best interests.

- [Narrator] No longer just a propaganda tool,

the Hitler Youth is now part of a ragtag fighting force:

a last-ditch effort to throw something, anything,

at the oncoming Red Army.

- So as an adult soldier in the army,

if you see a kid doing,

well, then obviously you should be able to do better.

But it's also providing message for the other people

that you don't have to be a trained soldier

to help us fight.

And so it would be inspiring to the general population.

- And these are more senseless sacrifices being made

in this death cult which sees not just the collapse

of the Nazi regime and its hierarchy

but as many ordinary Germans as possible.

- [Narrator] But despite their looming defeat,

the German military is preparing to put up a fight at Luban.

- The last thing Soviet to expect,

which is to have any kind of problems

rounding up what's left to the German armed forces,

but that's exactly what they get.

- [Narrator] In February of 1945,

Soviet forces take the town of Luban

as part of the Lower Silesian offensive.

But only three weeks later,

they will face a new fight for this conquered territory.

- The German forces

who were deployed in that area were actually able

to mount a fairly powerful counterattack.

- General Schorner has been building up these Nazi forces

and he launches a two-pronged attack.

- [Narrator] On March 1st,

the 17th Panzer Division and Fuhrer Grenadiers

move across the north of Luban.

The 8th Panzer Division

comes in from the south to meet them,

effectively trapping the Soviets.

And allowing the 6th Volksgrenadiers to take the town back.

The Soviet commanders attempt to evacuate the town,

and many soldiers do manage to get away.

But by March 4th, the encirclement has tightened.

- In an example of the gruesome

and extremely fierce fighting at this stage of the war,

no Soviet soldier survives the encirclement.

The Germans take no prisoners.

- [Narrator] The battle for Luban

is part of a larger offensive strategy

to take back Lower Silesia for the Nazis,

and to stop the Soviets' advance toward Berlin.

Schorner has some success on March 11th

recapturing the City of Striegau.

Working his way east,

he is organizing an ambitious offensive at Breslau,

besieged by the Soviets for nearly a month.

But the Soviets have regrouped

and the attack does not proceed.

However, after his success at Luban,

General Schorner is promoted to Field Marshal

on April 5th, 1945.

And after Hitler's death on April 30th,

Schorner is made commander of the entire German army,

as ordered in Hitler's will.

- This counter attack,

it was the last locally effective German offensive action

of the entire conflict.

So it is, I guess, sort of important

to bookmark in that sense.

Even though in a larger strategic context,

it wasn't going to reverse any sort of outcomes

in the grand scheme of things.

- [Narrator] But the victory at Luban

did have one important effect.

- This battle becomes a touch point.

It's an important victory by the Germans

to take on the Red Army

and squash the Allied invasion

of that one small town.

And it became part

of the propaganda at that time,

even at the late stage of the war.

- There's also an advantage externally

to keep that positive propaganda,

"We're still strong, we're still determined,

we'll still there."

By having this propaganda,

you're waging that war

in the minds of the people across the table.

- I'm sure in the war diaries, it's written up,

we held the vital industrial facilities here

rather than, you know, we sacrifice two divisions

to make a propaganda show for the rest of the Germans

not to hang out white sheets

outside their windows and surrender.

That's not going to be in the war diary.

- One of the famous photographs shows the right minister

for culture and enlightenment, Joseph Goebbels,

involved in an award ceremony

where iron crosses are being presented to German soldiers.

And one of the soldiers is Willi Huebner

who I think was 15 or 16 years old at the time.

- That is a big propaganda value for the Germans.

That's incredibly important

because most Germans are painfully aware

that they've lost this war already,

and are waiting for the end.

But here's this one last attempt

to try to convince the German people that, you know,

"It's all good, and we got it under control."

And ultimately, it doesn't make a difference.

Like let's be honest, at the end of the day,

no matter what they were defending or why or how,

they still lost the damn war.

- [Narrator] In the aftermath of the war,

the Potsdam Agreement gives most of lower Silesia to Poland.

And Lauban is renamed to Luban.

All Germans remaining in the town are expelled,

and Luban is repopulated with Polish citizens.

On April 30th, 1945,

Hitler commits suicide by gunshot

in his besieged bunker.

Abandoned by many of his followers,

save the most fevered Nazis,

and leaving a wake of death and destruction

across much of the world,

and an evil legacy of the Holocaust.

As his own country is destroyed and burning,

the final days of the Third Reich

are marked with the roundup of war criminals

and utter defeat of the Nazis,

and a rush to restore some sense of order

and peace to Europe.

Allies are already measuring each other up

for the next conflict: The Cold War

- Patton famously said, you know,

"Once we finish with the Germans,

let's just keep going.

Let's go all the way to Moscow, take them all out."

And the capture of industrial facilities, scientists,

all those things by the Russians

is something that is troubling Western intelligence.

- [Narrator] Lines are drawn on maps to create new borders,

and the world is beginning to come to grips

with the horrors of the last 12 years

since the Nazis rose to power.

Lost in all of this

is a mysterious story of the desperate rush

to defend a small patch of countryside,

hiding a collection of buildings and tunnels.

As the research continues,

the ruins of these structures

slowly reveal their secrets.

[suspenseful dramatic music]