Original subtitles

A vast snow-covered building in Alaska...

A lot of this damage that you see around here, it obviously came from

the weather but something else happened, it feels like something

more powerful hit this place.

..The rusting carcass of a cold war relic...

The strangest thing about it all is that it somehow feels scarred,

like the building,

the decaying trains have suffered through the history.

It's like a dark secret that's been locked away for decades.

..A powerful symbol of a country's renewal and rebirth...

The curious thing is that

on one hand it's ultra-modern, these things are really futuristic

but it's also kind of dated and retro in a strange kind of way.

..And a long, winding reminder of the horrors of war.

The first time I came into these woods I had a strange feeling.

It felt quite haunted and it was spooky.

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 all remind us

of human ingenuity and endeavour.

Each haunted shell is now ready

to be unmasked to tell its own unique story.

In the small town of whittier, in the icy wilderness of

southern Alaska, stands a huge concrete building.

It's this epic scene,

you reach it by crossing these freezing cold waters and then

suddenly there's this small town at the base of a mountain.

In this harsh landscape, one ruined superstructure

overshadows everything.

The first thing that strikes you about this place is the sheer

scale of the building.

You're talking about a space that has the same interior area

as 5 football fields.

Behind shattered windows and ice-covered staircases,

the building hides hundreds of derelict rooms.

From the outside, it's not obvious what this place is.

And when you get inside the mystery remains, there's so much in there.

This is essentially a tiny fishing village

and it's dominated by one gigantic building.

Why would a town this small need a building this enormous?

Miraculously it's still standing, but this vast construction has been

ravaged by the elements.

It snows 22 feet a year here,

that's 1000 times the national average.

Nature's spent years hammering away at this place.

Cold, harsh winds beating every inch of it.

But this isn't a weak building and it feels like something far

more powerful than just weather has struck this place.

This building found itself at the centre of one of the

20th century's greatest conflicts.

It played a part in averting nuclear war and also came face to face with

one of nature's gravest dangers.

It might look like it's in the middle of nowhere

but at one point in the 20th century, Alaska became a hot

bed of military activity.

Prior to 1940

there is a very small population in whittier.

And then world war ii comes.

Alaska is vulnerable,

it is seen as a possible place that

might be attacked by the likely enemy, which is the Japanese.

The American military began to increase its presence in Alaska.

And when the second world war ended,

this remote northern territory gained a new strategic importance.

At the time, Alaska had been part of the us for less than a century.

In fact, Alaska used to be Russian territory.

It wasn't bought by the us until 1867.

It's this historic link that offers a clue to the purpose

of the building.

Situated at the northern most edge of the pacific,

Alaska occupies the area between North America and Russia.

We tend to think of these two countries as being miles apart,

on different sides of the globe from each other.

But from a different perspective you can see they are practically

neighbours.

And as tensions between the super powers during

the cold war increased, the threat, however small, of a Russian attack

on Alaska, focused American attention on this remote region.

But what if it became a Soviet territory?

Suddenly it would look very different and would be a very

dangerous prospect for the us.

In a worst case scenario, the ussr

gains control of Alaska, it got a foothold for launching

troops, launching missiles, launching planes, you don't want

the Soviet union with territory just off your northern border.

Such a situation might seem a little unlikely now, but during the tense

years after the end of world war ii, it was anything but.

In 1949, the Soviets shocked the world by exploding their

very first atomic bomb.

And the following year, backed the invasion of

South Korea by North Korea, sparking a war on the peninsula.

Elsewhere revolutionaries declared victory in China,

it all added to fears in the usa that communism was spreading.

In this climate of fear defence became a number one priority.

In 1950 they finally decided to act by building this.

The Buckner building, a cold war us military facility.

It would play a crucial role in america's battle with the Soviets.

Brenda tolman, a long time

whittier resident, has lived in its shadow for nearly 40 years.

Built in the early '50s and surplussed out in '58,

the building has had no maintenance in almost 70 years

and still stands as strong, probably, as when it was built.

The construction of the site at whittier coincided with

a massive expansion of the us army.

This one building was designed to accommodate an entire battalion of

1000 troops.

What we're looking at here is what was once the largest

building in Alaska.

It is a vast complex.

It's got 6 visible floors and then another basement level hidden away

underneath.

You'll have your troops, you'll have your medical support,

people for security, your military police.

It had accommodation, it had a canteen, it had a movie theatre,

it had a rifle range, it even had a bowling alley.

Normally, in a us army post, these things are scattered over

a large area.

Here you have them all concentrated in one place.

Covering 275,000 square feet, this enormous concrete bunker

was a city under a single roof.

So that if it came to it,

none of the 1,000 troops would ever have to leave.

Because in this place you get such a massive snow fall during

the year, it made perfect sense to put everything into one building.

It was vital that the Buckner building was able to withstand

the very worst of the Alaskan weather.

The reason whittier was built was because

it's an ice-free, deep-water port.

It was built to bring supplies to interior Alaska by rail.

95% of everything consumed in Alaska is brought in,

47% off that still comes through the port of whittier.

This was the us military's primary route into Alaska,

troops, weapons, equipment all had to come through here.

It needed to be up and running 365 days a year, otherwise the whole

operation would be at risk.

The Buckner building allowed the us to maintain control of,

and access to, Alaska.

And as the threat of an aerial attack by the Soviets increased,

it became even more important to American strategy.

In the cold war equation, Alaska is very important.

Because one of the best routes to attack the United States with

nuclear weapons is over the north.

A series of radar stations were built to warn the us

about potentially nuclear armed aircraft approaching its shores.

And many of them were based in Alaska.

Without Alaska any attack coming from that direction wouldn't be

picked up until it was too late, leaving very little time to react

and possibly a deadly scenario to follow.

But the radar defences could only be maintained if supplies could

reach them via whittier and the Buckner building.

This was incredibly well-built, thick concrete walls,

solid structural foundations, it was designed to survive

whatever the Soviets or nature could throw at it.

By the end of the 1950s,

weapon technology had advanced dramatically.

The invention of intercontinental

ballistic missiles meant that the Soviets were now able to launch

a nuclear attack on the us from thousands of miles away.

So why go through the extraordinary expense and trouble of maintaining

this massive military facility on the edge of nowhere?

In 1960, the military left whittier and the city under one roof

was left empty.

In the end it wasn't the Soviets that gave Buckner its greatest test.

It was a natural disaster in 1964.

Whittier is hit by the largest earthquake in us history,

9.2 on the Richter scale, Tsunami over 40 feet,

kills 139 people, 13 of them in whittier.

But despite this devastation, the building survives,

the ground moved for 3 minutes and the building stayed up.

They built this thing right.

The town of whittier took an absolute

beating from this earthquake but amongst all the destruction,

this building remained

standing tall, surviving whatever mother nature could throw at it.

Today, the Buckner building lies derelict.

This mammoth feat of engineering is still standing.

A monument to america's determination to defend itself

even in the harshest of conditions.

In the south-west of Spain, in the city of Seville,

is a landscape of surprising and bewildering structures.

There are a number of odd, whimsical elements, there's a large

rocket, something that looks like a giant satellite dish.

You have a platform for a train, you have a globe, you have a bridge

that doesn't go anywhere.

It's almost as if some child was imagining the super

fantastic city of the future, started building it and then

got bored and went out to play and left his toys on the floor.

But this is no ordinary abandoned site.

In fact, much of it is still a hive of activity.

On one side we've got these crazy pockets of abandoned space,

but on the other side we're in a modern, bustling city full of

people working and going about their business.

If there is a message to all this architecture it's kind of

hard to figure out what it is and why were some parts preserved

and other parts left to decay?

Completed in 1992, the remains of this place today are a strange

mixture of the new and the derelict.

But when it was originally built, this was a symbol of hope

and progress for the city of Seville.

In the 1970s, Spain went through an amazing transformation and they

managed to convert from a fascist dictatorship to a free Democratic

society without violence, without a revolution. This was a first.

Here was the new Spain.

And this was supposed to be a bold statement that reflected

it's positive plans for the future.

Spain began to boom, and all through the '80s, this country that

had been an economic and cultural backwater for a few decades,

was all of a sudden entering

the elite nations of Europe and the world.

By the early 1990s, Spain's dramatic renewal was capturing the attention

of the world.

And it was this place that seemed to be leading the way.

1992 for Spain is a new start, suddenly we're into the modern

age, we're moving forward

and Spain is about to announce its arrival on the world stage.

This is the site of the 1992 world expo, or world's fair.

To host an expo is about dreaming big, it's about looking

forward to the future and showing the world what your country can do.

They get remembered, they are huge.

Not a one day event,

it's not a week event, it's 6 months and with millions of visitors.

And the legacy they leave lasts for years.

Spain really had a lot to be proud of

and they wanted to show it off to the world, they wanted to tell

the other elite nations "we've joined your club, we've arrived."

In truth, the curious collection of structures now left at the former

expo '92 site don't really tell us what that event was all about.

Joe Cooper, the former British commercial consul in Seville,

explains more.

These structures here in front of us

are really symbolic of what the expo's all about.

The main theme of the expo is about celebrating the 500th anniversary

of the discovery of the new world by Spain, but also it was

about projecting, if you like, an image of Spain as a modern country,

looking forward, being involved in discovery in the future as well.

In that context all these weird and wonderful things

start to make a bit more sense.

The entire place seems to be a celebration of that ideal.

More than 100 nations came here to build pavilions and be part of

the event.

But keeping to the tight schedule of the largest expo ever staged was

a monumental challenge and as time slipped away, the pressures grew.

One can say that Spain was overly ambitious with the expo.

Project-managing infrastructure on this scale is a nightmare.

Especially with that deadline, an opening ceremony cannot be moved.

They were trying to do too much in a short period of time

and it could lead to problems.

The hosts themselves were building

a number of large themed attractions like this.

The future pavilion.

But in the rush to get it all finished in time, disaster struck.

The discovery pavilion unfortunately caught fire

just before the expo started,

sort of doing lots of things together as it were, painting

and welding at the same time, pots of paint on the floor and welders

up above on the ceiling, spark fell down and it all caught fire.

Thick clouds of black smoke were soon enveloping the pavilion.

The disastrous fire looked set to put an end to the Spanish

expo dream.

Incredibly, it turned out to be just a small stumble.

Despite the problems, the expo was a huge success, they had

a record number of visitors from all over the world.

If Spain wanted to show off to the world that they'd

arrived, they really succeeded.

Over 240,000 people turned up every single day

to look at these buildings, to wander through these structures.

What an incredible success.

More than 41 million visitors came to the expo.

Many of them winding their way along this stretch here

which used to be a flowing canal.

You could either come here by boat or you could come by cable car

or you could just simply walk across one of the Bridges that

linked the city to the site.

People would visit the pavilions,

they had a good look round, then they came

out and went on to the next one and so on and so forth.

So the expo, which was supposed to symbolise

Spain's new role in the world, had been a triumph beyond her dreams.

But what happened to the site after the expo finished?

At the end of an expo, everyone disappears,

the site has done its job

and what you're left is this crazy aftermath of an engineering party.

And how different countries choose to move on is up to them.

Often what's left behind after events such as expo resembles an

industrial wasteland but not here, as Luis Perez, innovation manager of

the site explains.

Over the years, many buildings have been replaced

while others have been overhauled and renovated.

Today, just a few solitary

structures remain in fenced-off areas.

And the most recognisable have been saved for last.

People really appreciate those

landmarks today, they don't need to be re-used for any new

purpose, they mean lots to a lot of people

standing just the way they are.

The rocket and the satellite dish,

they've become quite iconic

and gradually they're going to get absorbed.

And once again, this area will be redeveloped and thronged and busy

with people with new purpose.

Cutting across the quiet countryside

near Germany's western border is a strange line of concrete spikes.

You start passing the first bits of concrete and you

think that maybe you're going to go 3m or 4m and you'll be passed it

and there's more and there's more and there's more.

You could be walking through a field or through the woods

and here and there catch site of

remnants from a different era, it's not really clear what it is.

These bizarre relics remind us of this area's dark past.

When I came here the first time

I had a strange feeling, it was a spooky feeling like haunted woods.

It was a feeling that made you shiver.

The strange rows of concrete teeth here aren't alone.

Across this rural landscape are dozens of other structures, all

of which bare the marks of a violent struggle.

There are these concrete structures hidden throughout the woods,

just coming out from under the moss and under the tree branches.

You might see these structures and really wonder what they are,

what purpose do they serve.

We're used to seeing concrete that's degraded, that's crumbled.

But this concrete has been hit with something very heavy

over and over again, they look like they've been smashed.

So what connects these forgotten ruins and what left them in this

shattered state?

Construction of these concrete spikes, known as dragon's teeth,

began in the years leading up to the second world war,

when Adolph Hitler was looking to shore up Germany's defences along

its western border.

Local expert, Michel baert, explains.

Dragon's teeth are anti-tank defences.

And these anti-tank defences are built in reinforced concrete.

Each one of these blocks is linked to the one on it's left, on it's

right and behind it and in front of it, so you can't just pull one out.

The only way to destroy a way through is to use

dynamite to explode them, and even that is quite difficult.

The idea was to stop an enemy tank invasion in its tracks.

The plan was simple but very effective.

You have different sizes, so as the tanks, when they advance,

would go upwards

and expose their belly to anti-tank guns that are further behind.

Running north to south across almost

400 miles of German countryside, Hitler's defensive network was

known as the west wall or the siegfried line.

The siegfried line is actually not a continuous

line or a continuous defence.

Certain areas are fairly heavily defended with clusters of bunkers

and anti-tank defences, some areas

are much less defended due to the hilly terrain.

Stretching for hundreds of miles and designed to be strongest

where an attack was most likely, dragon's teeth were placed in

areas considered to be vulnerable.

Some places had multiple rows of them.

But to make the siegfried line really work,

dragon's teeth had to be part of a fully integrated defence system.

The siegfried line is more than just dragon's teeth.

These dragon's teeth have no use if behind it

you don't have the pillboxes and bunkers with anti-tank guns.

So behind this there's a row of 18,000 bunkers.

Really it's more like a zone, in many cases going miles deep

into Germany, of a combination of different kinds of defences.

In 1938, Hitler showed off

the strength of the siegfried line in a specially commissioned film.

But not all was as it seemed.

Hitler gave the impression that the siegfried line was

like the maginot line with massive underground forts.

In reality, this is a very relatively thin defence line.

This is not an impregnable defence line.

It had great propaganda value at home, as Hitler was

getting his country ready for war it helped him reinforce the idea

that he was protecting his people from these hostile neighbours.

At the beginning of the war, defence was probably the last

thing on German minds.

Its army stormed through Poland the low countries and France.

It seemed that nothing could stop them and victory was assured.

So guns and equipment were stripped out from the siegfried line and sent

to the front.

The one thing I don't think Hitler did plan on was the situation

in which the line finally did become quite useful to the Germans.

After the d day invasion of normandy,

the allies were slowly advancing towards the German borders.

The siegfried line then became an important part of their defences.

In 1944, the Germans had to quickly scramble to defend

the now badly equipped line.

They began to deploy troops, they began to dig new trenches

and they really got the line fully occupied and staffed up

only a few days before the allied forces reached it.

Some parts of the line were easily broken

but early successes in areas such as

the hurtgen forest near aachen soon turned into slow and costly battles.

The fighting in the hurtgenwald is immensely difficult.

The Germans are defending area that is densely wooded.

And that not only means that it's hard to see other people,

it's hard to see the enemy, it also means it's hard to use artillery.

Because aachen was symbolically very important, the Germans placed

a priority on its defence and, in fact, a few first rate troops

managed in that very horrible terrain, in very, very bad weather,

to slow down, inflict a great many casualties the American army.

On September 19th,

the us army began to make ground through the suffocating woodland,

the siegfried line was finally being put to the test.

A defensive zone like the siegfried line,

it doesn't have to be impenetrable.

In fact in some places they made it intentionally weak.

So if the allied forces were to penetrate through it and move

a few miles into German territory, then they might get bogged down in

a deeper area where there are more hidden bunkers, more tank traps.

The terrain in the hurtgen forest

and the approach to aachen is very tough terrain, it's very

hilly, there are many ravines, it's easy to channelise the attacker.

A first row of dragon's teeth was sometimes backed up by a second row,

giving two points at which to stall and attack the enemy.

Beyond these, often hidden in thick woodland, were pillboxes waiting for

an advancing infantry.

The results could be devastating.

Communication was the key to making it all work.

We are standing here in front of

one of the 18,000 bunkers that form the siegfried line.

This one in particular is a command and communication bunker,

so it's keeping the other bunkers advised of the enemy movements.

The us army was about to engage in one of the deadliest battles

in its history.

The American army fights its way through the hurtgen forest by

clawing their way through those woods and dying in the process.

Imagine climbing these hills, through the woods,

and often in very bad weather, it was a very wet Autumn.

They would be climbing in the mist, and suddenly

in front of them there's a pillbox that starts shooting.

For 3 months there was a bloody stalemate and bitter fighting,

during which tens of thousands died.

Finally, the Germans mounted a counter-attack to the south,

remembered by history as the battle of the bulge.

The aim was to break through to antwerp and to cut British forces

off from the American army, and most importantly, from its supplies.

The plan was then to overwhelm the isolated British army.

Launched at dawn on December the 16th 1944, the results

were at first spectacular, creating confusion and panic

among the allied armies.

It seemed for a brief time that the great German counteroffensive

was all going as planned.

The attack eventually stalled for the simplest of reasons.

The petrol for the tanks began to run out.

After an allied counter-offensive that drove the Germans back,

the last chance to turn the tide of the war had gone.

120,000 German soldiers

became casualties during the battle of the bulge.

And vast quantities of irreplaceable war materials were lost.

After that great German defeat, the allies were able to break

through the siegfried line and head for the heart of the reich.

By the time they broke through in February of 1945, they had also

decimated the strongest elements of the German military, and that meant

the path to Berlin was much easier than it otherwise might have been.

Today, much of the siegfried line has been demolished or removed.

But the sacrifices made to break them will never be forgotten.

To walk the fields where this fighting happened, to

see the extraordinary efforts that went into building these defences,

to see a hint of just how grandiose Hitler's plans were,

it's an important lesson, it's an important part of our history.

These bunkers, when we come across them, it reminds us of those days.

It's important, I think, to remember and to keep the memory alive.

In central Europe, in Hungary's capital city of Budapest,

is the carcass of an industrial relic.

These buildings are on the brink of collapse.

They look like even the slightest knock or maybe a strong wind might

bring the whole lot crashing down.

Pieces are falling off the walls, the skylights are without their

glass, it is as though thousands of years have passed.

But somehow they remain standing and these warehouses are now vaults

crammed full of memories.

What you're seeing here is almost a century of transportation history.

You see Hungary's economy and government all wrapped up

in this one building.

These buildings are filled with locomotives,

carriages and all kinds of equipment from a past world.

It looks like someone locked it all up and threw away the key.

But now finally we can get a glimpse inside.

Stranded on overgrown tracks are rail carriages that tell

of a troubled period in Hungary's history.

In the latter stages of world war ii, a more radical extreme regime

comes to power and in 1943, '44,

the Jewish community is quite

brutally rounded up in Budapest and placed on trains and sent to

concentration camps, where the vast majority

of Hungary's Jews will be killed.

More than half a million Hungarian Jews were massacred during the war.

And these railways played a part in the terrible slaughter.

Some of those carriages left standing in the yard are the same

type used to transport the Jewish population to concentration camps.

Carrying them to their death.

Perhaps even some of them are the very same ones.

After the war, this place felt the terror of a new occupying force.

The ruins here serve as a reminder

of the country's struggles throughout the 20th century.

They were once at the very centre of the rail network, as sandor tibor,

an engineer who worked here, recalls.

Translator: Here we are in front of the istvantelek metal works.

It was built in the 1920s and practically all the steam

engines of the Hungarian state railways were repaired here.

Eastern Europe was always an area that was undeveloped in roads,

and in the 19th century when the railroad came,

this opened up Eastern Europe.

How does the economy work? How do you transport goods?

How do you transport people? You do it by rail.

At the heart of it all were the Hungarian-designed

mav locomotives.

Since we are a landlocked country,

Hungarian state railways plays a vital role in transporting goods.

This was a high speed train, it was a very fast locomotive.

It could transport passenger carriages at great speeds.

Once a vital facility for the state railway network,

this place has more recently become known by a different name.

One train found here reveals what happened to

Hungary after the second world war and it gives this place its name.

The red star graveyard.

The red star,

which was the ubiquitous symbol of the Soviet empire, was everywhere.

This Mark of the new oppressive ruling regime pointed the way to

more dark days ahead.

At the end of the second world war Russia is economically

very unhealthy.

And they rip out

as much industrial capability in Eastern Europe as they can.

The Hungarian locomotives and rolling stock are stripped out

and shipped back to Russia to be reused.

For a country like Hungary which was so reliant on its railways,

this was another devastating blow.

But history shows that oppression often sews the seeds of discontent,

and finally, rebellion.

Engineer Josef deak recalls hearing about those tough post-war years.

There was a dire need for the renewal and restoration of

the railways because the country would have been

paralysed without it.

The railway was the pulsing vein of the country.

Hungary had lost a quarter of its industrial base during

the second world war.

And in the immediate post-war period, the country was crippled

by inflation.

Despite radical economic reconstruction and land reforms,

its poorest people barely had enough food to keep themselves alive.

One has to understand that the eastern bloc end of

the Soviet union was essentially a colonial system.

The Soviets expect their slave states

to rebuild their economies and get functioning very quickly.

If you were not achieving your production norms, you could be

taken out back and shot and your deputy would be put in charge.

This place played a huge part

in the efforts to satisfy the ruthless Soviet demands.

Translator: There were different regions.

The reason why Budapest is important is because at the time,

there wasn't a similar repair plant in the region.

Others came later but this was the only place for the restoration

of steam engines that had both the capacity and the capability

to work on the larger models.

But in 1953, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin died.

And suddenly everything began to change.

Many Hungarians saw an opportunity to break free from the shackles of

Soviet oppression.

Revolution was in the air

and for the first time there was a direct threat to Soviet control.

There is a feeling in Hungary that with the old dictator gone in

Moscow, Hungary might be able to stand on its own feet again

and Hungary might start to liberalise.

The eastern governments are trying to repress this but there are hopes

in the population.

The hopes reach a point of outright rebellion in 1956.

Eventually, state security police open fire on the crowd

and that triggered the start of the violence that followed.

The Hungarian uprising saw Soviet

troops marching through the streets of Budapest.

Many had arrived there by rail.

In 1956, the Soviet army is not a fully motorised army.

It is very, very dependent on the rail system.

It was the Hungarian railways

that became the life blood of the Soviet occupation.

The Soviet army crushed the Hungarian uprising,

killing thousands, imprisoning thousands and exiling thousands.

In the aftermath, the railways,

locomotives and carriages were put back into service

and for more than 30 years Hungary remained a communist state.

With the arrival of diesel engines, the locomotives and this old

workshop have long since been retired and now this

place acts as a keeper of memories, of both the good times and the bad.

The warehouse and the trains inside it look like they've been through

hell and that's just it, the history of the 20th century

has been a series of huge challenges and devastating wars.

And you can see the marks of that toil on what remains here.

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.

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