Original subtitles

A hidden facility built in the service of an evil regime.

No matter how healthy you were when you went into those tunnels,

after only a few weeks, your body is starting to fall apart.

A ghostly town, which is home to hidden treasure.

People have to be pretty desperate to come out here. Well, there must

be something that makes it worth all that trouble and danger.

A peaceful village that was shattered by the terrors of war.

The level of destruction here is on such a scale

that some major event has happened.

And a mysterious facility with a toxic past.

It has been fenced off because of concerns about

contamination and public access, but you can see the multi-walled

nature of the labyrinth here.

Some are engineering marvels, now abandoned.

Others are ruins shrouded in mystery. But within each of

these crumbling structures are the echoes of history.

While some are associated with

dark times, they are all reminders of human ingenuity and endeavour.

Each haunted shell is now ready to be unmasked, to tell its own

powerful story.

In the remote wilderness of southern Montana in the usa,

there's a deserted valley, which is haunted by a dark past.

This is a hard land to live in.

There's not a lot of water, it gets incredibly cold in the winter.

This is one of the most sparsely populated regions

in the whole country.

At first glance, the landscape appears stark and desolate,

but there is eerie evidence of life here,

in the shape of a derelict town.

Coming over the hill and seeing this town,

you'd think there were people still living in it.

The outside, the inside, it's like time was frozen there

and the people were just vanished away somehow.

This was a well-established and large town

that had the infrastructure

to cater to a large population that had a reason to be there.

But just why they were there is not

abundantly clear from the sort of ghost town that's there now.

The first clue to the settlement's history lies in its location.

All of the buildings follow very closely the route of the river.

It makes you wonder whether there was something more

than just the supply of water that was valuable about this river.

Something has drawn people there for hundreds of years.

There's value in the ground and in the rivers.

There's something there that's worth killing for.

You wouldn't know it to look at it now, but this was once one of

the most violent places in america.

Killings, robberies, shootouts, hangings.

What could have caused all this violence?

But the valley is haunted by a rumour that just won't go away.

In the surrounding area, somewhere nearby,

buried, is a great, great treasure.

The story surrounding those hidden riches is just one of the mysteries

that still torment this town.

The graphic tales of robberies,

murders and betrayals that swirl around this place

come from a time when it was one of the last frontiers of the wild west.

The story begins in the 1860s, as park ranger John Phillips explains.

In July 1862, John white and a party of men were on their way to

the salmon river, to the community of Florence and en route,

they came upon this stream.

Like thousands of others in the middle of the 19th century,

these pioneers were travelling across

america in search of a new life and hoping to make their fortunes.

They were going to put their pans down into this stream,

go through these gravels, looking for black sands

and, lo and behold, after a little test, they found out

that they had found what they were looking for - gold.

John white and his fellow travellers

had hit the jackpot, and this wasn't just ordinary gold.

It was 99% pure.

That find started the gold rush to what we now call Montana.

Within weeks, there were hundreds, within months there were thousands

of people in this community, all trying to get rich

by out there panning for gold in this little stream.

The gold mining town of bannack was born and it was soon booming.

You would have seen

houses and tents and wagons as far as the eye could see.

There were people, there were saloons, there were brothels,

there was everything. This was a very active and wild place.

But inevitably, the new wealth also attracted criminals.

Once people realised there's gold in the river, greed overruns

everything else.

The idea that you need law and order, well,

that's a secondary consideration.

Morals, they were out the window.

Outlaws, they came like a magnet, and that

created nothing but trouble.

The hills around town were practically filled with

bandits and outlaws and guess what?

That led to murder.

Even in a town as wild as bannack,

the crime-wave needed to be brought under control.

The lack of law enforcement couldn't last forever.

A sheriff finally arrives with a couple of deputies.

He's here to promote law and order.

But, is that all he's here to do?

The sheriff's name was Henry plummer.

Plummer was a man with a colourful, some might say chequered, past.

He had been a successful prospector who became quite rich early in life

but he was known to have killed several men,

although he had somehow managed to avoid gaol or the gallows.

In 1863, he managed to get himself elected sheriff of bannack,

pledging, perhaps improbably, to establish law and order there.

At first, he seemed to be living up to the promise.

Troublemakers were identified,

rounded up and put inside the newly built gaol house.

The first gaol in Montana.

You can just imagine what it would have been

like here in the wintertime.

Henry plummer was a man that had multiple sides.

He put on this great front and he showed, you know,

by building the gaol and things, that he was an honest, hardworking

law enforcement official.

But on the other side, nothing is ever as crystal-clear

as we like to believe it is.

And of course, plummer wasn't all that he seemed.

And despite the apparent efforts of the new sheriff, bannack soon

became more violent, not less.

So, what happened to Henry plummer

and what does he have to do with

the stories of buried treasure that still haunt these streets?

With crime getting worse, before long, some townsfolk decided to

take matters into their own hands.

So, a sheriff and his deputies

are just not enough to bring law and order to this place,

so a new group sets itself up, the Montana vigilantes.

The locals band together to do something about all the crime.

The masked men of the Montana vigilantes began hunting down

suspected criminals and simply executing

those who they deemed guilty.

The entire town was riddled

with corruption, but what's really interesting is that it comes to our

attention that the centre of that corruption was the sheriff himself.

A rumour spread that plummer was actually

the secret head of a terrifying gang of bandits, known as the innocents.

So, at the beginning of 1864, the Montana vigilantes decided

to take action.

On a freezing cold night, Henry plummer and his men, taken from

their homes and from the saloons or captured by vigilantes, and brought

into this area out here where they would meet their final demise.

All three men were hanged on the gallows.

So, was that rumour about Henry plummer true?

There's a tale about his final moments that has some convinced.

One legend has it that on his way to the gallows, sheriff plummer

pleaded for his life.

And in exchange for his life, he offered the location

where a secret stash of gold worth $100,000, back then, was buried.

But despite the sheriff's death,

the violence continued, making many think it was the Montana

vigilantes themselves who had been behind the crimes all along.

Whatever the truth, bannack remained

as lawless as ever until 1870, when the gold began to run out.

With towns like these out in the wild, when the incentive for

people to stay is gone, people just left.

Only a few stayed.

But there was the little matter of the sheriff's hidden treasure.

What about this

buried gold that plummer had tried to buy his way out of death with?

Did it really exist?

It was never found.

A small number of Hardy people continued to eke out

a living in bannack, but by the 1950s, they'd all but gone

and what remained of the infamous mining town became a state park.

But the mystery at the heart of its wild, lawless past still endures.

Was sheriff plummer bannack's real criminal mastermind?

And will they ever find his missing treasure?

Did they get rid of him because he was bad?

Or did they get rid of him because he was good?

No-one knows for certain.

Deep in the woods of the owl mountains

in south-west Poland lies a secret entrance into a dark underworld.

From the outside, it doesn't really look like much at all, but when you

get underground, it's vast

and it's all in solid rock.

Inside, murky tunnels lead to eerie halls and flooded caves.

Is this perhaps a natural phenomenon?

Or is it proof of something more sinister?

It's in rock that wouldn't normally form caverns like this.

There's something that's been built here to create those hollows.

Somebody has gone to great lengths

to build this secret underground facility.

The only reason you carve your way into rock is either

to get something valuable out of it or put something valuable into it.

Above ground, the puzzle continues.

What are these strange concrete structures?

And who built this vast complex?

To make those holes in that rock, anyone working on that is going to

be in horrendous conditions.

This is a creation born of

terrible suffering, in the name of an evil and ruthless regime.

It's a place that demonstrates

the willingness of people to do the most difficult things.

To carve their way into mountains

in order to keep the machinery of death operating.

Polish author Igor Witkowski knows these underground tunnels and their

secrets better than anyone.

The largest holes existing are about 100m long,

12m high and around 10m wide.

That gives some idea as to the scale of the project.

These enormous halls were about the length of a football pitch.

So, what was the dark purpose behind this vast complex?

How did it come to be built and why is it situated in such

a remote location?

Here is a place that is isolated from other population centres.

It's hard to get to.

Hidden by forest, the building is almost invisible from the air.

Its construction was deemed high priority when building began at

the height of the second world war.

The Nazis and the axis powers had dominated Europe, including

this part of present-day Poland, but by 1943, their empire of evil

elsewhere was beginning to crumble.

In north Africa, the German army had finally been defeated.

The allies had invaded sicily, and Italy and Mussolini's

government, once a staunch ally of Hitler, had fallen.

At the beginning of 1943, the Germans suffered a heavy

defeat on the eastern front, when the last of its soldiers

surrendered at stalingrad after one of the most brutal and bloody

battles of the entire war.

Germany was losing the war on the seas and in the air.

The allies were stepping up their attacks

and were now raining down bombs on cities across German territory.

It's a shock to the Germans.

All of a sudden, the reality

of the allied bombing campaign becomes very, very real.

As Germany loses control of the skies over the third reich,

Germany has got to harden the protection of its industry.

And they start a program to put as many things as possible

deep underground, for fear of the allied bombers.

In a desperate attempt to turn the tide of the war,

the Germans invested in this colossal piece of engineering.

It was part of a top-secret Nazi project codenamed 'der riese' -

'the giant'.

If we were building a tunnel complex like this in peacetime,

tunnelling through hard rock, we'd use machinery, we would use fuel.

But of course, the Nazis were

fighting the second world war, they couldn't spare resources.

This lack of machinery may appear

to explain why the tunnels had to be abandoned before they were finished.

But in fact, the Nazis had found another way to get them built.

We're looking at a facility that has been built with

thousands of slave labourers and, by 1943-'44, the German

war economy is operating under a massive slave labour system.

Der riese was situated near to several of the most sickening

apparatus in the third reich, the concentration camps.

Now the Nazis had found a new, twisted use for the men and women

they had forced into them.

This is like a concentration camp

that has been deployed into a mountain.

Everyone there is being worked to death.

The fact that there's this almost

inexhaustible supply of slave labour makes it even more eerie

when you look at how much of a hollows and how much of a network

was built by the blood, sweat and tears of slave labourers.

It was a horrendous work.

I would say that it was the closest analogy to 'Dante's inferno'.

There were 3,000, maybe more, prisoners killed in the process.

The Germans were desperate to complete this secret construction

at any cost, but why

even after the war, its true purpose was never clear.

Some Nazi leaders claimed it was

intended to be a secret headquarters for Hitler.

The theories still swirl around these tunnels and caverns.

Igor has his own chilling ideas.

Der riese was part of a larger

undertaking of the ss, which purpose was research

and manufacture of weapons of mass destruction.

Large halls of this kind might have been used, and usually were used

for assembly of large weapons, such as aircraft, missiles and so on.

With the allies advancing into German territory, the Nazis

were searching for a miracle weapon with which to hit back.

Was this where they planned to produce it?

These tunnels are intended to be the place where German knowhow,

German racial superiority is going to create the wonder

weapons, the wunderwaffen that will enable Germany to win the war.

It may have been that an experimental

super-weapon was being developed here,

but the mystery only deepens when you explore further.

Just vast in itself, but actually, there's another five

underground constructions along this particular mountain range.

In fact, the whole region is littered with facilities like this,

which were all heavily armed and hidden from view.

They were abandoned at various stages of completion

and it's believed that the intention

was for them all to eventually link up, thus forming a vast underground

city that would help win the war for Germany.

The Germans hoped to build probably the largest underground

facility in the entire third reich, but at least der riese itself

has never been finished.

The red army, the Soviet army, is relentlessly

invading westward, taking back big chunks

of Europe from the Nazis.

As the red army comes closer, like the rest of the ss's

concentration camp system, everything is death-marched back

into Germany in order to ensure that there will be no evidence left

for the war crimes tribunal.

By the end of 1944, the Soviets had reached the Polish capital, Warsaw.

Early the following year, the Nazis fled der riese,

abandoning for good their mysterious underground project.

Today, questions are still

asked about der riese's true role in the Nazi war machine,

but what's certain

is the terrible price paid by those who were forced to build it.

This is an underground concentration camp, where

thousands and thousands of people were forced to breathe their last,

in the service of an evil regime.

This is a monument to the deaths of millions.

At the south-western tip of england in the tranquil cornish countryside

is a valley scattered with overgrown remains.

There's all sorts of curious things going on here. There's the chimney,

there's obviously foundations from different buildings.

It's a confused site, with a variety of abandoned buildings,

some partly buried masonry, some collapsed structures.

From beneath the grass, bizarre circular mounds

appear alongside the ruins.

Looking deeper here, there's clearly been a lot of activity

over a considerable period of time.

It's got the makings of some big buildings but in part,

it looks like they've been pulled down or they've fallen down or

something's even broken them.

Almost nothing remains of the many structures that once stood here.

Clearly, nature has taken its toll on the landscape here

but there's also, could there have been something more explosive

in the past? What has destroyed this environment?

But look closely

and you can begin to uncover the landscape's deadly history.

In this particular

part of cornwall, it's not what's above the surface that's the clue.

It's what's below.

Beneath nature is a toxic past.

So, how was this place contaminated and poisoned?

And does that explain why it's now abandoned?

When I first came to this landscape about 30 years ago,

I felt a real sense of mystery and definitely an urge to explore.

Ainsley cocks, research and information officer

at cornwall council, has made extensive studies of the site.

Here at the head of the poldice valley in mid-west cornwall,

we're in a very much rural setting and you'll see around me crumbling

walls, crumbling features, which allude to an industrial past.

This valley was once home to the region's biggest business,

mining.

Cornwall is famed for its tin mines.

This is where it started and the expertise that people

built up here, they exported round the world.

Cornish tin drove the industrial revolution.

Cornwall has been described, as being in the mid-19th century,

as probably the most important mining district in the world

and the production of copper and tin specifically

was the principal reason for that.

But these aren't just the remains of a tin or copper mine.

There's evidence of something more lethal.

What was produced here had the capacity to kill millions.

This site was at the heart of an international trade

in top-grade poison that spread around the world.

So, what deadly chemical was produced here and for

what evil purpose was it used?

Originally in cornwall, tin was the goal. That's

the product that had the market and commanded the profit,

and anything that got in the way of that profit was a nuisance.

One of the biggest ones

was arsenic, a completely poisonous, toxic nuisance.

Odourless and tasteless but highly toxic, arsenic was known

as the perfect poison.

But in these mines, it was impossible to escape it.

What's interesting with tin mining is that the very nature

of those types of tin-rich veins is, they often contain

quite high concentrations of arsenic and sulphur, as well.

And for the most part, early on, you'd try and discard these,

particular things like arsenic, which are highly poisonous.

This is poldice valley, where arsenic was produced

for more than 100 years.

In the 19th century, the mine here stopped making copper and tin

and turned out poison.

But why would anyone need industrial amounts of arsenic?

It has been fenced off because of

concerns about contamination and public access. But you can

see the multi-walled nature of the arsenic labyrinth here.

The labyrinths were where the purified arsenic was collected.

First, the metal ore extracted by

the miners was heated to a fiery 540 degrees celsius.

During this process, the arsenic separated

from the metal and turned into gas.

That gas was fed through flues that led to labyrinth chambers,

where it cooled down and solidified as crystals.

The doorways would have been unplugged,

opened up and then workers would go in

with shovels and brooms and, basically, remove all

the arsenic soot, as it was called, from the interior of the labyrinth.

In the 19th century, the arsenic industry was booming

and mines producing it opened throughout this valley.

By the 1870s, a handful of facilities in cornwall

were providing over half of the world's arsenic.

This lethal commodity was in demand for a variety of reasons.

By about 1800,

the world is starting to meld a wider range of raw materials.

One of those was arsenic,

a toxic poison. It's hard to think of a use for it, isn't it?

But, people needed it for all sorts of different reasons,

all around the world.

As the industrial revolution gained momentum, investors realised arsenic

could be used to make new manufactured products.

Arsenic was suddenly everywhere.

It was a key requirement for wallpaper colouring,

glass manufacturer, lead shot, pharmaceutical

processes, sheep dip.

Arsenic was suddenly the wonder compound over the early 1800s.

Women even used it as makeup to whiten their faces.

It found its way into almost every aspect of 19th-century life,

but those worst affected were the people who worked

in the plants that produced it.

This is not a mechanised process,

so it's all done by hand, with shovels and scraping

of the crystallised arsenic off of the walls.

There were no organised safety measures or protective clothing

for the workers. They individually

covered their skin in Clay and used wet rags to cover their faces.

And as you can imagine, neither of these were effective.

Prolonged exposure to arsenic could have devastating consequences.

People start to get fatigue and become quite -

you get stomach cramps and so on.

And ultimately, in very extreme exposures,

this can lead to body shock and death.

It was truly a deadly job.

Just one teaspoon of the arsenic they produced

was a lethal dose for six people.

Before long,

arsenic was killing more than just the workers who made it.

During the first world war, chemical weapons containing

arsenic made in england were used for the first time.

Poison gas including

chlorine, phosgene and mustard gas was a terrifying new weapon intended

to break the stalemate on the western front.

It was first deployed in 1915.

Its effects on victims were dreadful and, not surprisingly, gas attacks

struck fear into the hearts of soldiers of all armies.

But they were dependent on the weather for success.

Unfavourable winds could disperse the gas, making it less potent

or, at worst, blow it back towards those who had launched it.

And it never produced the decisive breakthrough that it once promised.

Back in england, it became

clear that prolonged exposure to the chemical was causing serious

health issues for people employed in pharmaceuticals and agriculture.

Eventually, the dangers could no longer be ignored or denied.

Despite arsenic's use in a range of pharmaceutical and medical

products, increased knowledge about its intense toxicity and its

links to cancer soon spelled the end for the arsenic trade.

One of the sites in cornwall did continue to produce arsenic

until the outbreak of the second world war.

Works continued until 1939.

At that time, other materials had come along for

use in insecticides and so forth, so arsenic was no longer needed in

the huge quantities it was, particularly in the 19th century.

For decades after these sites closed, the valley's toxic past

was all but forgotten.

But in 1994, a ground survey revealed that the countryside still

contained high levels of the poison and the area had to be

decontaminated before it could be opened to the public.

These days, the site is a nature reserve.

Most visitors to the site are blithely unaware of

the deadly past, which lies just beneath their feet.

In the province of mugla in Turkey is a ruined town with centuries of

extraordinary history.

As you come inland from the coast

of anatolia through the pine forests, a vista suddenly opens.

But as you approach closer, you realise there's something

a little wrong with it.

This is a devastated village.

It's clearly been abandoned for a long, long time.

It just keeps on going. It is absolutely huge.

Carved into the side of the valley

are hundreds upon hundreds of deserted buildings.

You've got trees growing out of where there once was roofs.

You've got just undergrowth everywhere.

This place is clearly just a shadow of its former glory.

The level of destruction here is on such a scale

that some major event has happened.

This is not a one-off, small occurrence.

Was it some kind of natural disaster?

Was it war?

People fled en mass, but why?

Spread far and wide across the hillside,

the ruins here are testaments to a long and rich history.

This town goes back almost 1,000 years.

It's clearly moderately prosperous.

This town was clearly important at some time.

These aren't temporary shacks that are built.

It's very well-located, for local and even international trade.

You feel here that this was a place that had strong, deep roots.

The inhabitants nurtured a close relationship with the farmers in

the valley below but there was a key difference between the two peoples.

The architecture reveals a lot about the people

but it's not only houses that are part of this village.

There's one key building that still survives and gives the clue to

who this community were.

For centuries, this area had been part of the ottoman empire,

a predominantly Turkish Muslim society,

but one that embraced different

nationalities and cultures, including those who lived here.

These are the remains of the town of kayakoy,

the home of a Greek Christian community,

which has long since disappeared.

In many parts of the world, identity,

ethnicity and culture

often form no part of daily life.

Communities cohere

and undertake the project of building their lives.

But we also know that those very same factors

can be the basis for some of the bloodiest conflicts in history.

For more than 500 years, the two communities

lived and worked side-by-side,

often coming together in the maze of streets.

Here, you had these two communities

working together and forming friendships.

This vibrant town had flourished for hundreds of years,

but when the ottoman empire

began to falter at the beginning of the 20th century,

the first problems started to appear.

So, what destructive force hit the town?

And what happened to the people that once called it home?

For answers,

we need to look to the unsettled years

following the first world war when the ottoman empire collapsed,

beginning a heated battle between two opposing nationalist movements.

In Greece, you have a movement towards a greater Greece.

From the Turkish side, they want to create a republic

for all the Turkish ethnic people.

These two powerful national forces collide.

As the conflict enveloped modern-day Turkey,

many small, peaceful rural communities were drawn in.

Despite the centuries of Harmony within these communities,

the arrival of war meant that all the horrors of war came with it.

Torture, atrocities, intense cruelty on both sides.

We know about the abuses that the Greeks carried out on

the Turks. We're talking murders, we're talking destructing homes.

Now we have reports about the Turks carrying out revenge attacks,

burning Greek properties, killing Greeks.

By 1922, hundreds of thousands of Turks and Greeks had been killed.

Both sides agreed upon a so-called compulsory exchange of populations,

which meant that even communities that had remained on good terms

were forced to leave.

Half a million ethnic Turks who were living

within Greek territory are simply deprived of their property.

They are shipped out to Turkey.

About 1.5 million

ethnic Greeks who had lived,

in some cases, in majority Greek villages are expelled.

You've got this once beautiful town

with these communities thriving side-by-side and a joyful town,

and then it's abandoned, its soul is ripped out of it.

In 1957, the abandoned remains suffered a final blow

when an earthquake struck, tearing down fragile walls.

But the true damage had already been done.

It's hard to overestimate

the seriousness of the effect of these kinds of actions.

Effacing the culture of a people, which is what this is doing,

is seen as on a par with effacing actual people because,

if you take away culture in history, you leave nothing.

Ultimately, that's all communities have.

Now they're abandoned, but once, many were beacons of hope and progress.

Each one is steeped in history.

Some remind us of difficult times but also of human imagination,

enterprise and spirit.

Captions edited by ai-media ai-media. TV