Original subtitles

A country torn in two by opposing ideological and political systems.

When Winston Churchill said, "an iron curtain

"has descended across Europe," this is what he was talking about.

A shocking place of interrogation and torture.

They made sure that you never met another prisoner.

Felt completely isolated from the rest of the world.

A complex built to protect a brutal dictator.

As you delve deeper into the island, you realise there's a

vast network of tunnels that point to something really quite major.

A facility that covered up a regime's darkest secrets.

Why would you create this and then, why would you hide it?

I find that really creepy.

And a forbidden place in a capital city.

Whoever was here obviously left in a mad rush, which begs

the question, what forced them into such a sudden evacuation?

This is a glimpse behind the Berlin wall.

Some are engineering marvels now abandoned.

Others are ruins shrouded in mystery

but within each of these decaying structures are the echoes of history.

While some are associated with dark times,

they are all reminders of human ingenuity and endeavour.

Each haunting shell is now ready to be unmasked

to tell its own unique story.

In 1989, the Soviet empire collapsed

and the fall of the Berlin wall reunified Germany

- something most thought they would never see.

When the iron curtain lifted, all over the communist world,

extraordinary abandoned relics of communist rule were discovered.

The silent prisons, spy headquarters, administration blocks

and all the rest, at last, gave the free world

the harrowing glimpse at life as it was for ordinary east German people.

In the lichtenberg district of Berlin, the capital city of Germany,

an opposing grey wall lines an otherwise typical street.

We don't really think about

what horrors might have happened behind the walls right beside us.

It looks ominous and, you know intuitively

that you wouldn't want to be on the other side of that wall.

You can't go by without asking yourself,

what did people have to do

to get locked up in a horrible place like that?

Inside, long corridors are lined with bars and thick, grey doors.

They made sure that you never met another prisoner.

They felt completely isolated from the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, just a few miles away is an innocuous-looking tower block.

These hallways and offices they seem almost deliberately bland,

faceless, anonymous.

It could be the offices of a third-rate office supplies company.

It's banal. It's cold. It's dull.

But take a look inside. The interiors of the offices

look like they've come straight from the set of a spy movie.

You do see a lot of equipment, old-fashioned equipment,

and various electronic devices.

This isn't just an office where people do something productive.

This is an office where people pry and spy and look into things that

perhaps ought to be left alone.

But how are these two buildings connected?

What were they for and who was based here?

Even today, this place still makes many German people shudder.

Among them is former inmate Peter keup.

In 1981, when he was aged just 22, Peter was arrested, bundled into one

of these vans and locked in a cell the size of a cupboard,

with no idea of where he was going or what fate awaited him.

After they closed the door, then it was completely dark in there.

It was just horrible.

That was probably this moment in my life I was scared the most.

After four hours of being locked up, Peter was taken to a stark building.

So, what was his crime?

And who betrayed him to the east German authorities?

We hear a lot about the Berlin wall

and, of course, that was significant,

but the entire border between east Germany

and its neighbours was heavily fortified.

Peter was trying to escape east Germany by crossing the border

into neighbouring czechoslovakia.

It was hard to get from any part of east Germany

into west Germany or czechoslovakia or anywhere that might make it

easier to get to the west.

East Germany had been turned into one giant prison

and the reasons for that go back to its very birth.

At the potsdam conference in August 1945,

it was agreed Nazi Germany would be divided

into four separate occupied zones.

The eastern zone came under Soviet control.

The communist regime of east Germany discovered very early on

that Moscow, their Soviet overlords, would not tolerate

anything other than unthinking obedience to Moscow's rule.

But they're going to exceed the Soviet union

in their devotion to communism.

They're going to exceed Stalin in their work

to create a new socialist man.

And to do so, you have to control every aspect of people's life.

That is the job of the stasi.

This is the stasi central remand prison.

Peter was one of the many picked up by the stasi,

which was attempting to control a population of 18 million people

and prevent escapes to the west.

The state security services comprised

a force of over a quarter of a million people,

and this was essentially the political police,

to enforce informity to the communist regime in east Germany.

This is a state that is utterly repressive.

Once they were imprisoned, inmates were kept in total isolation.

My mother was the only person who knew that I wanted to escape.

I always thought, "does she know that I'm still alive?"

Preventing contact with anyone, including family, was just one

of the stasi interrogation techniques.

The stasi would isolate people with no other human contact,

Rob them of an understanding of day

and night, when their meals were going to come

and, most important, Rob them of sleep.

The man pulling the stasi strings was erich mielke.

He was the head of the stasi.

He was a very bland,

very unremarkable government bureaucrat

who ruled over one of the most frightening

and intrusive secret polices ever known in the world.

Just a few minutes away from the prison

was mielke's seat of power.

It was the nerve centre of the stasi state.

So, this is the office of the east German minister of state security,

the heart of the system.

The heart of evil, from my point of view.

The stasi headquarters was, in a way, the most important building

in east Germany.

It was entirely focused on controlling the population,

gathering as much information about the most intimate details

of people's lives.

Construction here was completed in 1961

and the stasi now had a powerful base for a surveillance state,

the scale of which had never been seen before.

They needed to know what was happening in your apartment,

in your house, in your factory,

in your school, and they had spies in all those places.

At home or at work, the state was always watching.

2-3% of the population is actually paid to inform on their neighbours,

their classmates, their work colleagues.

To inform the state security as to what people are thinking.

And they kept vast files.

Everything that you want to know

about 18 million people is kept in the stasi headquarters.

However, by the late 1980s, things were changing

and resistance was growing.

Among the stasi officers trying desperately to maintain order

was none other than the future Russian president, Vladimir putin.

Very often, the kgb would use the stasi,

in some cases to influence the west, to carry out espionage operations,

but they're also supervising and keeping close contact

on the stasi's activities against any dissidents in east Germany.

In dresden, the head of the kgb branch office is Vladimir putin,

who's a career kgb officer.

For putin and the stasi organisation,

the writing was on the wall and their time was fast running out.

But what would happen to their vast classified files?

In January of 1990, something incredible happened.

The public had this idea

that the records contained in the stasi headquarters

were going to be destroyed and they wanted these records preserved.

They went and they occupied the building and they insisted

that the government preserved what had happened here.

They wanted to give some kind of a testimony

to what they'd lived through.

And they felt that if the records were gone,

there'd be no way to document these generations of injustice.

Eventually, the prison gates were closed and the stasi was disbanded.

Erich mielke was publicly disgraced live on television

and, himself, saw the inside of a prison cell.

In 1992, the stasi records were declassified

and people like Peter could finally see their files.

This is actually my stasi file.

This photo was taken a couple of hours after they arrested me

officially, in the remand prison.

But when his brother died in 2012,

Peter made the most extraordinary discovery of all.

This is my brother's stasi file.

When I opened it and read this, I found something really shocking,

surprising and something,

which I could never even have imagined before.

Peter discovered that his brother was actually a stasi spy

who had passed on information about Peter and his family.

While the Berlin wall has long gone,

the victims and perpetrators of the terror state, even now,

walk and live amongst each other and the memories are still fresh.

All the people who were loyal to

the state and worked with the stasi and so on,

they are still living in east Germany

and that makes me sometimes feeling uncomfortable.

Now 600 million shreds of paper from stasi files

are being pieced together using new computer technology.

A testament to just how much it all still means to those who lived

in this brutal police state.

They are ordinary Germans,

desperate for closure and to finally found out who betrayed them and why.

Off the coast of Croatia,

in the crystal-clear waters of the adriatic sea,

is the beautiful island of vis.

But not all is as it seems.

Vis island is a hugely popular tourist destination

and you can see why.

But every now and then, you catch a glimpse of something

you feel shouldn't really be there.

A relic from a bygone era.

If you sail around this island,

it looks like a mediterranean vacation paradise.

And then you come across this bizarre concrete structure,

it's like a keyhole leading in to the island itself.

What was the purpose of this curious building?

The concrete cave gives just a tantalising glimpse.

As you delve deeper into the island,

you realise there's a vast network of tunnels

that point to something really quite major.

But what their purpose was and who built them is initially mystifying.

Local guide tomislav mileis explains

how strategically important the island is.

Going all the way back to the time of the Greeks

and the romans, military leaders have recognised

this island's incredible strategic location

and how useful it is to control it.

After world war I, vis became part of

a newly formed nation, yugoslavia.

Within 30 years, this young country

would become a communist republic and take centre stage

in the ideological battle between the ussr and the west.

The buildings on vis are key to the story.

The origins of this hidden labyrinth of tunnels and caves go

back to the height of the cold war.

They were built to protect the island and yugoslavia

against the threat of nuclear attack by an unexpected enemy.

This is a secret communist base.

A maze of tunnels extends 12 miles across the island,

connecting camouflaged bunkers,

caves and gun emplacements.

And on the northern coast lies the centrepiece of the fortifications.

Probably the most impressive installation is

an imposing concrete submarine pen

that leads right into the island hills and,

although it's obvious from the water,

it's invisible from the air.

Codenamed 'lobster', this concrete cave hid submarines like the 'sava',

a yugoslavian attack vessel armed with ten huge torpedoes,

which replaced the older submarines.

But why did communist yugoslavia need this fortress in the adriatic?

Was it solely a defence against the military might of the west?

At the centre of the story is the country's most infamous leader,

josip tito, who was walking a dangerous political tightrope.

Josip tito was a communist partisan fighter

against the Nazis in world war ii and a very effective one.

When the war ended, he was able to unify yugoslavia

under his own very particular brand of communism.

When world war ii came to an end,

the iron curtain descended across Europe.

Tito and Stalin were allies until 1948

but tito is very, very afraid of yugoslavia becoming

an east Germany or a Poland,

which is effectively a colony of the Soviet union.

In 1948, he will take the step of formally breaking with Stalin

and saying that yugoslavia will not cooperate.

There will be no Soviet bases, no Soviet troops.

In fact, tito cleverly played off the powers of east and west against

each other and was instrumental in creating the third way,

or what was called the non-aligned movement.

So, tito was refusing to support the Russians or the west.

But this left his country under the constant threat of invasion

or even nuclear attack by the Soviets.

Yugoslavia's very existence was at risk

and tito had to protect his homeland.

The way to do it is what he learned during the war,

is establish these bases all throughout the country and,

if the Soviet union and his allies should invade yugoslavia,

they can retreat to the mountain areas,

they can retreat to these fortified bases

and they can carry out resistance.

It was a plan that put vis directly in the line of fire.

The island had been home to tito's headquarters

when he led the resistance

against the Nazis during the second world war.

Tito never forgot the strategic importance

of vis and kept a tight grip on the island,

making it one of the main naval bases of the Yugoslav people's army.

So these concrete caves and tunnels were actually built

to defend yugoslavia against the mighty red army.

But were they ever needed?

And why are these mighty fortifications now abandoned?

Tito's cold-blooded determination to maintain his grip on power

had terrible consequences for the people of yugoslavia.

Tito ran a ruthless internal policy

to suppress any internal opposition.

Tito's merciless regime is thought to have been responsible

for hundreds and thousands of deaths.

But what eventually became of his hidden island base?

If the Soviets had ever succeeded in invading yugoslavia,

they could have captured the base

and perhaps even used it to launch nuclear attacks on Europe.

The purpose of this massive defence system

in yugoslavia is not offensive.

It's purely defensive.

It is to make it so difficult to overrun yugoslavia,

it's a deterrence policy and it's a very effective deterrence policy.

Tito's plan worked.

Creating this forbidding fortress helped to ensure

that the Russians never attacked.

But there was another serious threat to yugoslavia on the horizon.

After tito's death, that iron-fisted rule that held

yugoslavia together went away and the different regions

and the different tribal animosities began

to manifest themselves

and the country really fractured into different,

sometimes warring segments.

No amount of military bases

could prevent the brutal civil wars of the 1990s.

Yugoslavia tore itself apart.

Tito's socialist republic eventually became seven independent countries

divided along ethnic lines.

The island of vis is part of Croatia,

which pulled away and became its own independent state.

After years of terrible conflict, the new nation simply wanted peace.

Tito's base in the adriatic was abandoned.

Now a place for sunshine holidays,

vis today is a far cry from tito's dark vision

of an island defence against the Soviets.

But these concrete ruins still offer

a chilling reminder of how different things could have been.

This submarine base reflects the very real threat

of nuclear attack that existed at the height of the cold war.

Set amongst thick woods and peaceful lakes 25 miles east of Berlin

is an innocuous-looking complex of buildings.

Little about this place betrays

the dark secrets that lie at its heart.

Until you explore a small, anonymous building

that is quietly tucked away.

Inside a spartan office,

the equipment comes from a different age,

but this is just the entrance to a secret world.

At first, it looks like a typical leisure centre or a sports complex,

but then, beneath, hidden from prying eyes,

is a secret underground bunker.

There are rooms full

of industrial-scale machinery, which once powered this hidden site.

Judging by the equipment on show,

this was a place involved in surveillance.

Rooms packed full of monitors and listening devices.

It looks like something straight out of a spy movie.

Why the sophisticated surveillance equipment?

What or who was it watching?

A clue to the sinister past of this place can be found

behind a strange-looking door.

This is the kind of door you'd expect to see inside a submarine.

Can you imagine descending down into this secret chamber?

Entering through a submarine-style pressure lock.

It must have been a daunting experience.

Inside,

there's a huge chamber filled with sports training equipment,

along with a room packed with medical supplies.

Other eerie rooms now lie silent.

Why would you create this?

And then, why would you hide it?

I find that really creepy.

Unlikely as it seems, this place once epitomised

the struggle between east and west.

During the cold war era, it was part of communist east Germany,

known as the German Democratic republic or the gdr.

And at that time, a proxy war was being fought on

sports fields around the world.

So, the communist athletes had to win for the greater glory,

not of their country so much, but for the greater glory of communism.

And the east German athletes also had the burden of the fact that

east Germans thought that they were absolutely the best communists.

Four-time olympic kayaking medal winner torsten gutsche

remembers this intense rivalry.

The gdr has always been one of the most successful

canoe nations in the world.

There was ongoing competition between Hungarian,

gdr and Russian athletes, who were also very strong.

The gdr was a small country and,

of course, as a socialist state,

they wanted to prove

to the capitalist countries

that socialism was superior to capitalism.

And of course,

sport was one of the best ways to prove it.

East German athletes did very, very well.

Over and over again,

east German athletes succeeded in international competition.

Between 1976 and 1986, east Germany won more olympic games

and world championship medals than any other nation.

Taking into account factors such as population size,

it was punching far above its weight.

But, a murky secret lay behind all the glory.

It used to be that east German athletes were known for being

completely pumped up on steroids...

..Which resulted in liver damage, reproductive damage, birth defects

for their children, tremendous difficulty for decades to come.

The health of east Germany's young athletes was sacrificed

in the name of glory and propaganda.

And it was the east German government, which was behind it all.

A directive called state plan 1425 coordinated a sophisticated system

of athletes' steroid use throughout the country.

But the world was getting wise to the dirty tricks.

All of the athletic governing boards

in the world, the olympic committees,

the athletics commissions, they were all starting to do blood testing,

so the east Germans could no longer cheat by using steroids.

So how did east Germany try to stay one step ahead of the testers?

The answer to that lay here, at the kienbaum training facility.

This was a top-secret location,

therefore it was a great honour for us athletes to train here.

It was very impressive.

This secret facility was developed as an alternative

to the steroid programs that had served the east Germans so well.

Built in 1979, this state-of-the-art centre was

fitted with all the usual training equipment you would expect

to find in any sports facility.

But it was this top-secret bunker that was most crucial to success.

So what made this chamber so unique?

So, the east Germans create a sports training

and development facility

that will be entirely done at high-altitude air pressure.

That means very little oxygen, very little air pressure.

A colossal ventilation system extracted air

until it simulated the pressure found at an altitude of 13,000ft.

That induced athletes to produce more red blood cells,

which increased their levels of endurance.

They're hoping that the bodies are going to get used to working

with little oxygen and then, when they go back to regular altitude,

their blood and their tissues are going to be saturated

with all that lovely oxygen,

and the east Germans are going to keep on winning.

But there was a dreadful cost to the athletes.

Compared to the regular training outside, it was very exhausting

to train in here due to the simulated altitude and air pressure.

It was physically very demanding.

It was very monotonous. The light in this room was very unpleasant.

The air was unpleasant

and the atmosphere was very unpleasant, too.

For two weeks at a time, they were locked in this underground bunker,

training 12 hours a day,

with no natural light

and no understanding how this high-pressured chamber was

affecting their long-term health.

You've got to pity those east German athletes.

They were good at their sports

but that turned them into special lab rats.

But the constant monitoring was not only about performance analysis.

The stasi's secret police were also hard at work behind the scenes,

watching and guarding east Germany's prized assets.

It was the issue of national security during the gdr era.

Therefore, you had to be a bit more careful

with the people you didn't know.

There were cameras everywhere and we didn't really understand

why they were filming.

For some athletes,

life in a repressive policed state was unbearable

and more than 600 elite sportsmen and women defected to the west.

As a result, before the fall of the Berlin wall

and the reunification of Germany in 1990,

many were branded traitors

and were hunted by the stasi.

Some athletes have claimed they were either forcibly or unwittingly doped

at kienbaum.

Torsten gutsche knows he was never consciously involved in doping

but also believes he was simply lucky never to have been given steroids.

Torsten just had to endure a strange underground environment

that strained his body to the limit

and left him with some very unpleasant memories.

In this room, I had a very oppressive feeling.

We were sitting very close to each other

and we were constantly under control.

That's why we were quiet.

We didn't talk much because we didn't know who might be listening.

And another question is, was this training good for our health?

These are the questions, which I cannot answer.

Today, kienbaum operates as an olympic

and paralympic training facility for a united Germany.

But that hidden chamber is still there,

a creepy reminder of a very different time.

This was a pioneering approach to sports performance.

You often hear of top athletes or soccer teams

going up into the mountains to training camps at high altitude.

This was creating those conditions but in a secret underground bunker.

South of Berlin, standing alone on the edge of the city,

is a vast complex of deserted buildings.

Through the mist and the Autumn leaves,

these grand buildings emerge, almost palatial.

At first glance, the architecture has an old-fashioned opulence.

Then, jutting out in the centre of this courtyard,

this strange circular structure that looks altogether different in style.

This odd concrete addition is decorated with distinctive murals,

which look very out of place.

When you come on an example of something that's clearly alien

to the middle of Europe, something that is clearly there

because some other culture has implanted itself

onto the soil of Germany.

Hundreds of buildings stand across this huge stretch

of Berlin suburbia.

Inside them are long corridors and seemingly endless empty rooms.

A theatre, the swimming pool and many of the other facilities

suggest something civilian,

but then the maps and the murals give you the sense

of something that feels far more military.

This place is cut off from everything around it.

Isolated, derelict and decaying,

the buildings are relics from the past.

Who was it all for and why was it abandoned?

Whoever was here obviously left in a mad rush,

which begs the question, what forced them into such a sudden evacuation?

On one cold march day in 1994, it changed forever.

The people who lived here were leaving

and everything was in turmoil.

Jurgen naumann, now the site's caretaker, saw it all for himself.

A certain chaos broke out.

There was no discipline anymore.

Order and discipline had gone down the drain.

They sold everything here, from gasoline to kalashnikovs.

The people here had been part of a tiny elite.

For decades, the place had been off limits to everyone except them.

They annexed this neighbourhood and they put this big wall around it.

It was forbidden for any east German to go in there.

With more than 600 buildings in an area of more than 2.5 square miles,

this site dominated everything around it.

So what was it?

As we know, after Nazi Germany's defeat in 1945,

the allied powers divided the country in half.

Soviet forces poured into their half of the newly-created east Germany,

and the army needed somewhere to station its troops.

When the red army took over eastern Germany,

the easiest thing for them to do was

to take over existing German armed forces' complexes

from the second world war.

When the Soviets arrived in April 1945,

they found a large military complex

and they simply rolled in and took it over.

This is wunsdorf, the headquarters of the Russian army in east Germany.

This was the most formidable concentration of Soviet armed might

outside the borders of the Soviet union.

The site was strictly off-limits to Germans

but that didn't prevent some locals from finding a way in.

The whole place was surrounded by fences

and there were several entrances,

large, fortified gates with guards.

But if you were to, say,

give a soldier a gift, they would let you in.

You could go shopping here, buy some cigarettes

and, well, a lot of alcohol because it was reasonably priced

for those who liked to drink a bit more.

By the late 1980s, wunsdorf had become more than just an army camp.

It was a whole forbidden city.

This place was home to 75,000 men, women and children.

It was known as 'little Moscow'.

It had shops, schools, leisure facilities,

even had a daily train service to the Soviet capital.

Here in wunsdorf, this area served as the cultural centre

for the Soviet citizens who lived here.

There was a theatre with a lot of performances.

In the big building behind me, there were exhibitions, museums,

memorial rooms and much more.

But all this would come to a dramatic end.

Europe was on the verge of a seismic change.

In Moscow, president gorbachev's new policies

couldn't prevent the collapse of the entire Soviet system.

In 1989, the Berlin wall fell

and, after 40 years, the end had come for the gdr.

The huge Soviet infrastructure

in east Germany was enormously expensive to maintain.

And as the Soviet economy collapsed,

the Soviet presence in Germany had to be pulled back.

After the reunification of Germany,

the Russians agreed to withdraw all their troops by the end of 1994.

But it was a far from straightforward process.

For the officers and their families at wunsdorf,

life was turned upside down.

This very orderly society

that the red army had lived under is now gone.

The government handled this relocation of their forces

very, very badly.

Jurgen naumann remembers

the deep distress felt by the Russians at the time.

Once, I went up to see a sales manager

who I used to see almost daily.

She was sitting in her office crying.

She had two little children.

She said, "we have to leave the country in two days

"and I don't know where we are going."

The turmoil in Berlin was mirrored 1,000 miles away.

The government in Moscow was in chaos.

Wunsdorf's returning army officers were a threat to the president

of the newly independent Russian state.

Boris yeltsin had already survived one coup attempt

so, with all these high-ranking

and loyal Soviet soldiers being sent back to the motherland,

they were purposefully split up

and sent to different locations, to reduce the risk of another

attempted military coup.

Certainly, in many respects,

the red army officers liked being stationed in east Germany

because actually, the standard of living

in east Germany was way above the standard of living in Russia.

They had access to goods and shops that east Germans didn't have.

They had swimming facilities, athletic facilities.

You would not have known you were in east Germany.

Life was, of course, much harder for those who lived outside the gates.

After so many years of being the masters there,

some Russians were afraid that the east Germans might

seize their chance for revenge.

For Jurgen, who worked nearby at the time,

the change in Russian attitude came as a shock.

Suddenly, we were not their friends anymore.

We were the enemy.

But in the end, serious violence in wunsdorf was narrowly avoided

and the Russians left.

After one final military parade,

they pulled out and they left in their wake a site littered

with ammunition, ordnance and rubbish.

Shops were simply abandoned, left full of electronics -

tvs, radios, fridges-houses were left full of domestic appliances.

By the end of 1994, every Russian soldier in Germany had gone.

The buildings in wunsdorf

were handed back to the German government.

But today, the former Soviet city is still deserted.

The only regular visitor is Jurgen naumann.

In terms of the architecture,

these are beautiful buildings and I hope they will be restored soon.

It's our history.

Once, they were at the very heart of the communist empire.

Now they lie abandoned,

leaving only dark memories of a time before the fall of the Berlin wall.

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