Original subtitles

Tom ward (narrates): A symbol of the American dream

left to rust in the Amazon jungle...

Is this some kind of movie set?

What the heck is this doing here?

Concrete monoliths scattered across a forest in Europe.

Who needed to build something so well protected?

A fortified corridor of death stretching for miles across Germany.

To keep their country existing,

they had to turn the entire country into a prison.

And a bold gravity-defying contraption.

Think engineers come from all round the world

to see this mobile sluice gate in action.

Once they were some of the most advanced structures

and facilities on the planet,

at the cutting edge of design and construction.

Today, they stand abandoned, contaminated, and sometimes deadly.

But who built them and how?

And why were they abandoned?

(Theme music)

On the edge of the Amazon rainforest,

down the tapajos river in Brazil, is a utopian dream frozen in time.

2.5 million acres of this hilly and rocky land

was once its own sovereign state run by a foreign corporation.

Imagine rowing down a Brazilian river

and you come to this site

and you see these abandoned buildings.

And all of a sudden you come across a purely American fire hydrant.

You would be quite surprised to see

Cape Cod cottages, swimming pools

existing in the middle of the Brazilian jungle.

It would be quite a stark contrast.

Looming over these houses is an iconic water tower

that rises 164 feet and dominates the landscape.

Is this some kind of movie set?

It would really play with your head because you'd be wondering,

"what the heck is this doing here?"

Who built this replica American midwestern town

in the middle of the Amazon basin?

And why was it then deserted?

The roots of this town can be traced back

to the technological revolution at the dawn of the 20th century.

The global expansion of the motor industry

was hampered by the British monopoly on rubber.

Nowhere was this felt more than in america.

Henry Ford, the father of the affordable motorcar,

had a vision for his empire, to make it self-sufficient.

The key lay in obtaining enough rubber at a decent price

to sustain and grow his automobile company.

Henry Ford is the consummate businessman.

He's producing cars,

cars require tires, and rubber is expensive.

So, he has this idea,

"I'm not gonna pay high prices for rubber.

"I'm gonna cut out the middle man "and create my own rubber factory

'cause, after all, it grows on trees in the Brazilian rainforest."

He looked to a location 3,000 miles away

from the car plants of Michigan,

amongst the rubber trees of the Brazilian jungle.

This is Henry Ford's American dream,

a home away from home, fordlandia.

Everyone knew that Henry Ford thought big.

That was his reputation.

So, when he sets out to build a factory, no-one is surprised

when he actually says,

"no, I'm gonna build an entire town."

The purpose of building the town there

would be to create a rubber tree plantation

in which a large concentration of rubber trees could be cultivated

and farmed as a cheap source of rubber for tires.

In 1928, Ford began his ambitious plan

to build the largest rubber plantation in the world.

This would, he hoped, meet the growing demand

for his automobiles,

such as the recently released and highly popular, model a.

Fordlandia was actually quite large for its location.

Housed over 2,000 people, had a dance hall, a hospital.

Almost as if you took an American city

and plopped it down in the middle of the Brazilian jungle.

It was quite a vision.

Raimundo de souza Lisboa lives here in fordlandia

and is familiar with the mechanical beating heart

around which the town used to evolve.

Almost the size of Yorkshire, this sprawling plantation

and town boasted many of the benefits

enjoyed by Ford's workers back in america.

But this outpost of American engineering

would have to take root in the middle of the rainforest,

where American values and work ethics

were alien to the local population.

While Ford never visited, he tried to recreate

the middle america of his youth in this jungle city

that bore his name.

Ford did more than build a city,

he created an independent state geared towards rubber extraction.

So, the extraction of latex from rubber trees

is very interesting.

Over the course of the day,

the latex will rise up into the tree.

So, the workers would have to go out early in the morning

when the latex was very low, tap the tree, and extract it.

The liquid latex was then mixed with diluted acid

which coagulated to form rubber slabs

that were pressed through rollers to remove excess water.

Today, the traces are all but gone, but once these factories

were setup to process

thousands of tonnes of rubber a year.

The achievement that Henry Ford reached

with the Brazilian government

would be that fordlandia was almost a sovereign state

within a sovereign state,

that no intervention would occur and they would have

a almost carte blanche to run the town as he saw fit.

This might be a classic case study

in cultural insensitivity.

Henry Ford looks and sees what is working in america,

"and I'm gonna superimpose that in Brazil."

Exporting mainstream america to the Brazilian jungle

was easier said than done.

They were not allowed to drink alcohol.

They were expected to garden, attend regular square dances,

eat specific food.

Completely alien to the people that were living in fordlandia.

And guess what? Doesn't turn out so well.

Trouble was brewing deep in the Amazon rainforest.

Equipped with all American mod cons,

this should have been a working man's paradise.

Yet Ford's dream quickly became a repressive nightmare

for the town's residents,

and it reached boiling point in 1930.

There is complete mutiny.

They go out and they cut the telegraph wires.

They chase the managers and the cook into the jungle.

The Brazilian army has to come in and sort things out.

They had simply had enough.

So, these strict guidelines ultimately backfired

because the people of fordlandia just refused to live

in such a fashion that was so strict and draconian.

It was not just fordlandia's town

that was doomed to destruction, the plantation fared little better.

Ford knew automobiles, but he was no biologist.

His team in the Amazon

consisted of top Ford factory trained men

but lacked rubber specialists.

His bid to industrialise

the biological world ended in catastrophe.

Unknowingly, the seeds of fordlandia's failure

were sown right from the start.

Henry Ford failed in his attempt

to manufacture an alternative rubber source.

They planted the trees side by side.

That's not how you do it.

They're prone to disease and there's a domino effect,

when they're too close together, they all die.

The whole thing just wasn't very well thought out.

Already teetering on the edge,

Ford's high hopes for fordlandia finally came crashing down

when synthetic rubber flooded the market.

For all of his $20 million investment,

virtually no rubber was produced.

Fordlandia ultimately failed

not only due to the lifestyle restrictions

but also economic reasons.

Synthetic rubber came about such that the economic advantage

of growing your own rubber trees, that advantage no longer existed.

In 1945, fordlandia was sold back

to the Brazilian government for just a little over $200,000.

Its sawmill, hospital, houses, and streets were abandoned.

For 60 years, it lay eerily derelict,

a ghost town of enormous proportions.

But today, fordlandia has been partially reclaimed

by the local population as a readymade place to live.

American culture has been exported

to the entire world, but that was done by choice.

People chose little bits of it because it was intriguing to them.

But we have forgotten the era when we attempted to superimpose

what we thought was best on other cultures.

We did do that.

And fordlandia might be the best example

of that cultural insensitivity.

And I don't think we should forget that.

Over 5,000 miles away in rural Germany

lies the remnants of a truly extensive structure.

Surrounding the town of hotensleben

are strips of ploughed earth, knotted metal,

and crumbling concrete.

Was a very unique and specialised construction.

9 feet high fortified concrete walls,

topped with barbed wire enclosed swathes of open land,

all watched over by menacing towers.

What was the purpose of these intimidating constructions?

And why are they still here?

Their purpose can be traced back to the demise of the third reich.

With Nazi Germany's defeat in 1945,

the country was divided amongst the conquering powers.

Democratic western Germany ruled by the allies,

and communist eastern Germany by the Soviet union.

But the borders were open with no walls.

The Soviets sought to protect their border

and their ideology in the shadow of their great western rivals.

At first, the west Germans did not recognise

the existence of east Germany and would openly defy the border

in terms of provocative visits as well as things

that would do to intentionally irritate the east Germans.

With the cold war in full swing, the openness of the border

dramatically changed on may 26, 1952.

To protect the eastern zone,

the Soviets built a true manifestation

of the iron curtain,

the inner German border defence,

one of the deadliest borders in history.

When Winston Churchill said,

"an iron curtain has descended across Europe,"

this is what he was talking about.

32 times longer than the Berlin wall,

it ran for 866 miles,

cutting through a huge chunk of the country.

The scale of the border defence was enormous.

It went from the baltic all the way south

to the centre of Germany.

Some places kilometres wide with stretches of land

that were completely devoid of trees

to prevent people from gaining any cover.

Man (on radio): It is from somewhere behind this steel barrier

that attack would come,

should the communists employ armed force

to press their dream of world domination.

Yet far from acting as a launching point for an attack

on the west, this wall served a very different purpose.

This is nothing to do with a military defence line,

whatever the east German government said.

This was totally orientated, as the Berlin wall,

against their own people.

The communist regime dictated every aspect of life

in the German Democratic republic.

Despite its name,

it was neither Democratic nor a republic.

With no free elections, no division of powers,

and no freedom of movement, it functioned as a dictatorship,

enforced by a repressive secret police, the stasi.

With more than 100,000 employees and a vast network of informants,

they spied on the population and crushed opponents,

often covertly disrupting their personal lives.

Floods of people desperately try to escape to the Democratic west.

A mass exodus, however,

would be disastrous for the east German economy.

East Germany was a pretty vicious place.

To keep their country going, existing,

they had to essentially turn the entire country into a prison.

Man (on radio): This is where the free world ends

and the communist dominion begins,

for this is the frontier of freedom.

To try and prevent escapees,

the Soviets started construction in 1952

of what they called the anti-imperialist wall.

The construction of the border defences

came in phases.

Early on, it was very small and modest.

But then as tensions grew between the east and west,

significant effort was put into making the border defences

larger and more fearsome.

Dr Susan baumgartl and her family lived in east Germany

behind this very wall.

The fortification consisted of two fences.

One to the western side was called enemy watts

and was a metal grid fence.

Next to this outer fence was an anti-vehicle barrier.

And in front of this was a 6m ploughed strip

to see footprints of refugees.

Citizens fleeing across the border

were treated as criminals and if caught were heavily fined

and imprisoned for up to three years.

Yet it proved an ineffective deterrent.

People continued to attempt this dangerous crossing.

So, the defences became ever more elaborate and brutal.

In addition to a wall, you had watch towers,

command posts, electronic sensors.

They cleared brush, trees, villages, everything

so that they had a clear line of sight

and sadly a clear line of fire.

More than a symbol of an oppressive regime,

for the many who wanted to escape, it was a murderous reality.

Now, a manicured stretch of land,

it is hard to imagine this was once a death strip.

And it was indiscriminate, running through farms,

coalmines, towns, and even houses,

nothing was allowed to stand in its way.

So, similar to the Berlin wall that split Berlin basically in half.

The defence border split communities along the border,

in some ways completely destroying homes

and the economic activity was completely destroyed as well.

By 1961, east Germans,

country of 17 million people,

they're leaving east Germany at the rate of a million a year.

Over time, the border developed from a protected frontier

into an elaborate fortification system.

Combined with the newly built Berlin wall,

the number of people escaping to the Democratic west

was slashed to almost 2,500 per year.

So, as the border defences were increased in size,

the buffer zone between the border itself

and almost like a no man's land was increased.

More guard towers were added, mine fields were introduced.

Tremendous amount of resources were put into creating effectively

an iron curtain in between east and west Germany.

Through the 1970s and into the '80s,

it reached its peak with 30 guards patrolling each 3.5 mile stretch.

This is the inner metal grid fence facing the east.

It has, on the inside,

the thin layers of wire that were electrified.

People were trying to climb over the fence,

they would touch these wires and then an alarm would go off.

60,000 anti-personnel mines were developed specifically

to deter border crossings.

Yet 48 people still attempted this perilous crossing

and were killed or injured by these mines alone.

Over its life, hundreds of people were killed

trying to cross over from east Germany

to west Germany.

They were shot, stepped on landmines,

attacked by guard dogs.

But it wasn't just civilians who tried to flee.

Even the east German border guards sometimes deserted their posts

in the hope of making it to west Germany.

Soon, escape attempts were no longer necessary.

A series of revolutions across the Soviet union's satellite states

in 1989 caused a chain reaction.

It culminated in the demise of this iron curtain.

Immortalised by the fall of the Berlin wall

on 9 November, 1989.

With unification,

the stasi's extensive surveillance files

held on millions of east Germans were laid bare for all to see.

With every citizen able to inspect their personal file.

The beginning of the end of the Soviet empire.

Within two years, east and west Germany were reunited.

In many ways coming full circle

and ending what world war ii had produced.

Everybody remembers the images of the Berlin wall coming down.

The inner defences, it wasn't quite so dramatic.

With the reunification of Germany,

many of the defences in this border zone

just fell into disuse and many were dismantled,

trying to encourage economic activity

between east and west Germany.

Much of the inner German border defence was dismantled,

creating millions of tonnes of debris,

45 years to the day after it was opened,

the wall was officially abandoned.

Today, this section is a memorial to its dark past

as well as a unique nature reserve.

Once a notorious death strip,

it is now home to a wealth of diverse habitats and species.

The preservation of the border defence structure

is with the barbed wire and the towers

I think are helpful reminders for future people

about what the history

of east and west German relations were like.

Today, it doesn't necessarily look all that impressive

or all that scary.

It's just a strip of greenery

with a little road running through it.

But you have to remember that when it was active,

it was a death zone for anyone who tried to escape.

Over 500 miles away in east Poland

is a secret forest complex.

Hidden under the canopy, camouflaged amongst the pine trees,

mammoth structures sprawl across an area

covering 1,500 square miles.

You're in the middle of a Polish forest

and you're hiking along,

the last thing you expect to find is a concrete jungle.

What's this doing here?

These just suddenly appear from amidst the trees.

Who needed to build something so well protected?

These immense windowless giants grow in size to 43 feet high

and 69 feet wide, with few hints to their true purpose.

The walls are so thick

it's as though they'd been built to withstand,

you know, some sort of an apocalypse, but what?

Why built this foreboding complex in the middle of thick forest?

And why has it been abandoned to nature?

The answer lies in the early years of world war ii.

By October 1940, Hitler's expanded third reich

had swallowed up much of Western Europe.

However, having failed to gain air superiority

over the royal air force,

the Nazi invasion of Great Britain was postponed.

And in June 1941, Hitler turned his attentions east,

with operation barbarossa,

the Nazi invasion of the Soviet union.

As the Nazis embarked on the largest military operation

in history, crossing vast tracts of land,

Hitler needed fully functioning bases of operations

near the eastern frontlines.

He looked to the mamerki forest.

Hitler knows that he was going to be fighting

modern industrial warfare.

And when his people create command and control facilities,

they make the most

technologically enabled facilities

that you see anywhere in the second world war.

The largest and most impressive of these fortified command centres

was this, mauerwald, German army headquarters.

From here, the army's high command

controlled the war on the eastern front.

It was a fully functional military town,

and it had to be defended.

So, it had barbed wire, a mine field, a post for gunners.

What they build in the forest of Poland

is a mirror image of Berlin.

Hitler himself has got his own bunker and staff facilities.

And that ensures that when Hitler is away from Berlin,

running the war,

Hitler is still able to retain his tight grip

on power over the Nazi empire.

Just 13 miles from Hitler's bunker,

nicknamed the wolf's lair,

top secret construction of mauerwald was underway

in the fall of 1940.

To prepare the site, military engineers drained marshland

and cut down swathes of trees in this mosquito-infested forest.

In case the enemy should discover the facility,

they spread the bunkers out over a vast area.

It was to reduce the risk.

If you had an attack of paratroopers or a bomb,

it could have decimated the entire thing at once.

So, they spread them out to reduce that chance.

This military city sprawled across the mamerki forest.

Made up of three sections, codenamed Fritz,

brigitt-Anna and quelle,

they were dedicated to operations, logistics,

and communications.

It was all very orderly and laid out

as if it were some kind of, you know, bureaucratic operation

and not a central hub of brutal warfare.

Items of most importance were housed inside

reinforced concrete bunkers,

while staff and personnel were billeting

in more temporary accommodation made of brick or wood.

Born and raised in the local area, bartek plebanczyk manages the site.

So, you have to imagine that all the area

was full of the wooded houses

and were camouflaged by the plastic trees

which were put around these wooden houses

or on the top of this roof of this bunker.

Real thought went into the camouflage of this complex.

There were artificial trees for different months of the year,

coinciding with the changing seasons.

The bunkers were extremely well fortified.

But what was really unique about these monolithic structures

were the rooms themselves were very tiny.

It's as though they anticipated some sort of military cataclysm

and they were built to withstand it.

The walls of these bunkers are 7m thick.

And on the top of my head, you have 7m of concrete.

This bunker is getting smaller inside.

The rooms are really small,

but the comfort is not the key area here.

The most important thing is to be protected from the bombing.

So, it gave you 100% chances to survive.

To reduce the chance of allied aerial bombardment,

the engineers added seagrass to the concrete mix,

which accelerates the growth of moss,

providing the bunkers with a natural and fast camouflage.

And it had another unexpected benefit.

Seagrass is able to incorporate

into the outer surfaces of the buildings

in order to stop the concrete chipping.

In the summer of 1941, 40 generals and 1,500 officers

and personnel moved into mauerwald

and engaged in their top secret work both day and night,

managing the ever expanding German army.

German traditions of command and control mean

that the general goes off in a car or a tank and commands in the field,

but then he's backed up by a chief of staff

and a huge number of staff officers

who stay back in a headquarters in radio contact

and run the army while the general runs the battle.

To keep up morale deep in this Polish forest,

Hitler insisted that this concrete fortress

be made a home away from home.

One thing that's striking is just how big it was,

200 buildings, bunkers, air-raid shelters.

But also a lot of things you would associate with a small resort city.

They had a movie theatre.

They had a casino close to the front lines

on the eastern front.

Hidden in this remote location,

well away from key towns and transport routes,

it was imperative this complex be fully independent.

As a military headquarters, it had to be self-sufficient.

So, they had their own power plant, they had their own heating plant,

they had their own supply of water.

They could live, they could survive cut off from their supplies

for a long period of time.

Over the course of three years, Hitler spent a staggering 800 days

in the concrete bunkers of his eastern front headquarters

and wolf's lair.

When Hitler made his intent clear

in the briefing rooms of the wolfsschanze,

the senior officers would then get into their cars,

drive over to mauerwald, and they would put it into practice.

Nazi army personnel were successfully concealed

within this complex for three long years.

Through bitter Polish winters and scorching summers,

yet it wasn't enough to prevent the failure

of Hitler's misguided venture in the east.

No matter how good the German officers are

who worked in the mauerwald,

they could not fulfil

the twisted unrealistic ambitions of Hitler.

By the Autumn of 1944, Nazi Germany was fighting

losing battles on two fronts.

The vengeful red army was hot on the heels

of the retreating axis forces.

In January 1945, Hitler's staff had no option

but to flee the complex.

The Germans had no choice but to retreat and quickly.

So, mauerwald was just left intact, a ghost town.

Hitler's retreating army had only 48 hours

to escape Stalin's forces,

leaving no time to sabotage their concrete city.

Unlike the nearby wolf's lair,

mauerwald was left to the forest fully intact.

Today, these concrete monoliths, just a short trip

from the hugely popular tourist attraction

of the wolf's lair, are virtually forgotten.

Yet they survive as the most complete example

of Hitler's forest command centres.

What we see today is just the scale of the ambition

of the Nazis to dominate Europe and the time they were willing

to put into building infrastructure

and everything else they needed to extend their military reach

is impressive and horrifying at the same time.

Across Europe in south west France,

lying in the region of montech, is a mystifying construction.

Cutting through this deceptively flat land

is a 20-foot wide concrete channel.

Over 400 foot long, it's partially filled with water.

Yet clearly not a canal lock, its purpose is initially baffling.

Engineers come from all around the world

to see this because there's something quite,

I don't know, maybe hypnotic, mesmerising about it.

The gradient of this slope is just 3%,

but it's full length of 443m gives a total incline of 43 feet.

It sort of defies logical explanation,

but yet they built it.

The channel is flanked by two unusual eight wheeled vehicles.

They are connected by a metal frame and large panel

weighing 200 tonnes and suspended over the water.

This might be a terribly impractical design,

but it's also kind of inspiring.

It's so Heath Robinson.

We're all used to seeing water cascading down under gravity,

whereas suddenly, we're using a very simple mechanism

to get water uphill.

What is this strange contraction?

And why is it here intact, yet abandoned?

1600s, trade between the mediterranean

and the Atlantic still relied on a treacherous month-long passage

around the coast of Spain.

As far back as the Roman emperor Augustus,

leaders dreamt of linking the two seas.

Finally, the 1660s saw the birth of the two seas canal

that would eventually cut through France

with 270 miles of canal to increase and speed up commercial traffic.

Yet, at montech, the canal had a flight of five locks,

and this caused congestion and frustrating delays.

The canal lock, the ability to take a boat and raise it

or lower it so it can travel by water

up and over hills is one of the greatest advances

in technological history.

The problem is each one needs to be filled or emptied

as you go through the process, and it's time consuming.

Christian moretto of the French waterways network

is in charge of canals across this region.

Three centuries after the two seas canal project began,

French engineer professor Jean aubert

produced this revolutionary contraption.

The pente d'eau or water slope.

The French water slope

was an absolutely revolutionary alternative

to the traditional way of using locks.

They brought the boat into this section

at the bottom of the slope, enclosed,

basically, a very large puddle of water around the boat,

and then moved the puddle up the slope

with powerful locomotives.

In a way it's absolutely crazy, but it's also kind of brilliant.

Built in 1974, this pioneering water lift

could carry fully loaded barges to its peak at 43 feet.

The principle of the water slope is actually very simple.

If you were trying to bail water out of your sink, for example,

you would just use your hand and basically push the water out,

and what you're doing is you're raising

the level of the water at some depth,

and then it kind of goes over the side.

With the water slope, you're starting from a level plane

and you're going up an inclined slope.

So, the principle is the same, you use a mechanism

to shunt the water up and create a body of water

that's deep enough for a boat

or a barge to actually float through.

To push 53,000 cubic feet of water up a slope

along with a loaded barge takes masses of power.

What I love about the pente d'eau is that

you can see exactly how it works.

It's all there in front of you.

It's a channel that a barge will come into

and a gate shuts behind it.

Once this barrier shut behind the barge,

it created a water tight seal, trapping a wedge of water.

The barge would then float on this wedge

or puddle of water as it was pushed along the now enclosed channel.

And then powered by two great locomotives

on either side of that canal, they slowly roll forward on tracks,

bringing the gate with it.

And as that gate pushes up along the canal,

it pushes water with it.

The engine units travelled at one 1.5 miles per hour,

using a pushing effect of 63 tonnes,

equivalent to a whopping 127,000 pound foot of torque.

But how do you control this much raw power?

Moving over 1,000 feet on a concrete monorail,

these enormous wheels took 6 minutes to complete the journey.

Two locomotives on either side of this trench

start dragging this dam up the hillside,

until you get to the top, then you open the gates there

and the boat sails happily on its merry way.

Thousands of boats, weighing up to 250 tonnes apiece

passed along the water slope in a puddle

of 1,500 cubic metres of water.

I mean I love this thing.

I love the simplicity of the engineering behind it.

But it's 1970s technology.

These two whopping great big diesel engines

slowly pushing canal boats uphill.

It just isn't 21st century technology.

Between the locomotives, the construction of the slope,

the water seal to prevent the water

that's carrying the boat from just running away.

All of these things put together

make the reproduction of this extremely difficult.

For 35 years, the water slope served the two seas canal,

lifting over 10,000 boats

and travelling a distance of nearly 2,500 miles.

In 2009, however, engine failure sealed its fate.

The only contraption of its kind in the world,

it was deemed too expensive to reproduce the parts

needed to keep this unique machine running.

Not every cool engineering idea really turns out

to work in the real world.

I think the water slope is an example of that.

Really, it was out of its time.

So, had it come at the time when canals were really

the life vein of the industrial world

that we lived in, perhaps we would have

seen hundreds of examples.

A lack of demand and repair costs

mounting up to almost 4 million pounds ensure

that the water slope remains motionless and abandoned.

Today, it continues to draw visiting engineers

from all over the world,

engineers fascinated by this bold creation.

Even if it wasn't a particularly successful invention,

I think engineers need to be reminded every so often

that they need to break out of, you know, the tunnel vision

of this how things have been done for a long time

and actually create something really extraordinary.

Now abandoned,

they were once on the cutting edge of human engineering.

Within these decaying structures are the echoes of history.

They speak of war and terror

but also of exploration and human endeavour.

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