Original subtitles

A mysterious island that was once blighted by disease...

And the legend of her death still haunts the island, and some of

the locals refuse to visit this place.

..A pioneering complex associated with both glory and tragedy...

It's quite a mysterious place as well, and tragedies which happened

here throughout the last century really also are kind of

a mirror of our past.

..A shipping juggernaut that met a dramatic end...

This ship is clearly one that means business, but it should

not be on these rocks.

..And an abandoned masterpiece built by one of

the world's greatest engineers.

He had a solution, but what he was proposing was considered by some

to be both extreme and dangerous.

Some are engineering marvels that have been abandoned,

others are ruins shrouded in mystery. But each of these

crumbling structures bears the marks of history.

While some are associated with dark times, they all remind us

of human ingenuity and endeavour.

Now each haunted shell can be revealed

to tell its own unique story.

In the brandenburg district of west Berlin

is a unique complex that was once the centre of the world's attention.

Now it's a largely forgotten ruin.

Few Germans realise that the site even exists.

It's almost as if it's been forgotten on purpose.

There's a swimming pool, now empty and silent.

There is nothing quite so eerie as standing where there ought to be

11 feet of water, and instead there is nothing but a still, chill air.

A pommel horse stands alone in a deserted gymnasium, pleasant grassy

areas stretch out before carefully positioned huts with verandas.

When you look at this place

in all of its green and grassy, low-rise glory,

it feels as though you're seeing a purpose-built company town.

But the almost utopian feel here is disrupted by

military-looking murals and stark blocks which look like barracks.

They're ugly,

and really these are buildings that you don't want to keep.

The walls are covered with newspapers.

When you get closer, you notice something strange about them.

They're not in German.

The architecture has two distinct styles, yet every building appears

to be part of a single purpose.

What this place conveys is a sense

to take people's lives and mould them.

It's all about people coming together for a purpose,

but it's not at all clear what that purpose is.

In 1934 this site,

which sprawls across 136 acres, was set to be remodelled.

The man in charge of the project was Wolfgang furstner.

This was a pioneering concept which would play a central role

in an era-defining event that

captured the imagination of people across the world.

Yet just days after the project was completed, furstner walked out

of his house and down to a lake,

stood on this jetty and put a pistol to his head.

He was in charge of the construction.

He was made an outsider

and really pushed so much to the edge that he decided

to take his own life.

What drove this man to suicide just

days after what should have been the proudest moment of his life?

Jan bejsovic is an expert local historian

who is fighting to preserve this unique complex.

This site really mirrors much of

our past, much of the wars and tragedies of the 20th century.

Many lives ended in this place.

We have the beauty of youth on one side and we have

the tragedy of death on the other.

This is the olympic village for the 1936 Berlin games.

When Adolf Hitler became

chancellor of Germany in 1933, he inherited the games

which had been won two years previously by the weimar government.

Its bid had beaten the city of Barcelona.

This site would house athletes

from all over the world in a great festival of sport.

Now in 1936, he has an opportunity to show to the world

a new and rebuilt, completely new kind of Germany.

This is going to be an opportunity for Hitler, who's been in power

for three years, to show off the fact

that depression-era Germany is gone, the weimar republic

is gone and the Olympics are going to show that to the whole world.

This was Hitler's chance to show the world that

a new, rejuvenated Germany had emerged from the great depression.

For inspiration he looked to the Los Angeles Olympics of 1932.

The games in Los Angeles were really important for the Germans

because for the first time we have an olympic village

there, a real one, and the Germans could learn quite a lot

and everybody was impressed of what the Americans did, but still

it was easy for the Germans to take notes and to improve things.

It was army captain Wolfgang furstner who oversaw

the construction of the first ever permanent olympic village,

which was built with ultra-modern facilities to be

enjoyed by nearly 5,000 athletes.

They included the likes of the famous German boxer

Max schmeling and, of course, the great American Jessie Owens.

Here we can clearly see how the Germans improved

by building a olympic village which nobody had seen so far.

It's not just having little houses for accommodation.

It's having real houses with a terrace for sunbathing, with

a central heating system inside and all the luxury of that period.

And all the people who were here in 1936 were really impressed by it.

The athletes were even more impressed they were

able to see their team mates perform live on the big screen.

These games really was the first media games, the first real

propaganda games, so incorporating everything they had - radio,

movie, we have the two olympian movies by leni riefenstahl,

but for the first time also television.

So these are the games which see live broadcast

for the very first time.

Of course, Hitler wasn't slow to show off Germany's military might,

as the artwork in the village media centre illustrates.

It was clear to everybody, after seeing this mural,

what the propaganda was about.

It was about celebrating the newly gained strength of

the German military.

And just some years after

the olympic games, many European nations would exactly see the same

scene, having the German army occupying their countries.

Despite the demonstrations of a new military strength, the world

bought in to Hitler's image of a reborn but peaceful Germany,

and the magnificent facilities here

were certainly a hit with the athletes.

Having convinced the usa and Great Britain to compete

after both had threatened to boycott the games,

Hitler had now built the perfect stage.

Only the Soviet union and her allies followed through on their threats to

stay away.

Hitler successfully showcased German engineering through cutting-edge

technology, including the first ever live television broadcasts.

There were also innovations to the games themselves.

The Nazis were hugely

into torchlight parade, and the Nazis introduced the idea

of the olympic torch going from Greece all the way to Berlin.

By while the glitz and glamour of the Olympics were dazzling

the world, the racial purification of Germany was continuing

discreetly out of view.

While the Germans allowed Jews to participate in the games,

they were behind the scenes rounding up gypsies and continuing

to pass anti-semitic laws.

Wolfgang furstner, the man who had helped make the olympic village

such a success, soon became its victim.

It turned out that he had a Jewish grandfather, and he was taken off

the project in the end.

It was here at the lakeside two days after the games ended

that a real tragedy took place.

The commander of the village came down from his house through

the woods and took his life with his own service pistol.

The Nazis tried to cover it up, saying it was a car accident.

However, journalists uncovered the truth.

Furstner had already been demoted

and, as a career officer, he knew that his Jewish

ancestry would eventually see him dismissed from the army.

Instead he chose suicide.

With the games over, the village had served its purpose and the complex

was handed back to the German army to become what was always intended -

a ready-made military base,

but there were tumultuous years ahead and the army's stewardship

wouldn't last long.

Here we see traces of a very different army - that's the Soviet

army, which took over the whole site in 1945 and which did not

only leave that kind of equipment but even their newspapers on

the wall - the pravda, the truth, which you can still find here.

This was now a new Soviet military base.

For a period after the war, the Soviet counter intelligence

agency, smersh, established themselves here, hunting for

ex-Nazis.

And rumours abound that the underground heating system

and the swimming pool were used for interrogation and torture.

Since the collapse of the Soviet union,

the complex has been left to rot.

Perhaps it brings back memories that Germans would rather forget.

But now the site is being

repurposed once again, this time as a development of modern apartments.

You can actually see the long-jump pit where Jesse Owens,

one of the greatest American athletes of all time, trained,

and also where the boxer Max schmeling did his prep in

the lead-up to the big day. And now it's all about to be demolished.

But perhaps a future as contemporary

housing might finally help lay the ghosts of the Nazi era to rest.

Off the coast of Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean is

a lush green island but one with a history of sickness and disease.

When you see this island from the water, it looks like a lovely,

tropical vacation spot, a nice place to build a resort.

But as you get a bit closer, you see these colonial-style

buildings on the shore are a little bit dilapidated.

They're falling apart.

Looking forlorn and neglected, a once-grand house sits by the shore.

A broken pier reaches out into the water,

while inland in the jungle, there are more strange remains.

Some buildings look like they were part of an old hospital complex or

a religious site perhaps.

It's clear they was some kind of a large compound here.

There's one part of this place that suggests

those who came here never left.

You see graves but not just a few, there's a whole graveyard. Clearly

an entire community once lived on this now uninhabited island.

Whatever happened here certainly created fear and dread

among its people.

Some local fishermen are to this day

still too frightened to venture onto the island.

It hasn't always been this way.

100 years ago this island was a popular holiday resort.

It was previously a fishing village and a holiday paradise

where people came to relax, but it became something more sinister.

In 1924, the island changed forever

when Trinidad's British rulers tried to solve a tricky problem.

It saw a huge influx of people arriving from the capital

Port of Spain.

Unfortunately they brought with them sickness and disease.

Michael forde, a local expert, explains more.

This bay, Saunders bay, was designated for the women,

while the neighbouring cocos bay was designated for the men.

You'd arrive by a launch or schooner

and have to go this building here, where you would be administered,

registered and assigned to one of the facilities.

If you were not well enough to live in the cottage on your own,

you would have to be admitted to the hospital.

These new arrivals were

the unlucky victims of a century of dramatic change in Trinidad.

Trinidad had been a colony of Great Britain since 1814.

In 1833, britain abolished slavery, leaving the island's landowners

short of workers for their sugar and cocoa plantations.

A flood of immigrants poured into Trinidad and Tobago, but with them

came an influx of leprosy.

That was one of the world's most feared diseases.

Leprosy was this devastating and really tragic disease.

It's caused by a bacterium that lives in the skin,

develops slowly over many years.

It does nerve damage, it can cause

blindness and in severe cases it causes this terrible

disfiguration of people's faces or other parts of their body.

There had been outbreaks of leprosy in the Caribbean for centuries,

but by the late 1800s, as migrants from all over the world arrived

in Trinidad, it had become an epidemic.

The colonial government opened a leprosarium in the 1860s,

but on one occasion, 300 patients fled the facility.

There were fears that this terrible illness was running out of control.

Painful, incurable and highly contagious, it was thought that

the only way to stop the spread of leprosy was to isolate sufferers.

The Trinidad authorities decided to act and began

to round up leprosy victims.

These lepers were taken from their homes, torn from their families

and forced onto a boat, sent away to live in total isolation.

And this is where they were taken - the chacachacare leper colony.

It opened in 1924 and it was designed to house

300 patients, providing them with everything they needed to survive,

but with only minimal contact with the outside world.

This is a completely self-contained medical facility with

living quarters, hospital, laundry.

What is behind me is a typical quarters that

the patients would stay in.

There was something like 50 quarters like this. A typical one

would have accommodations for two patients... some of them have

small kitchenettes and running water and a little veranda.

Although the colony provided the lepers

with some creature comforts, it was an unhappy existence.

Life was not easy for these patients.

Men and women were kept in separate camps,

so there was none of the normal romantic or family life

that people expect as part of the human experience.

And you also had to work, but you were only paid

25 cents for the whole day.

Water was very short. They only had rainwater they collected.

You weren't even allowed to swim except up to chest height, and if

you broke those rules you could be sent into even further isolation.

Worst of all, once you had been sent to chacachacare,

you could never leave.

They were allowed no visitors,

no contact with their families or even the mainland.

So, even though they were in something that looks like

a tropical paradise, their lives were actually closer to a kind of

a hellish half-life, where they couldn't go back,

they couldn't see their families, but they also couldn't start any

kind of new life that would be a semblance of what they'd lost.

Today many locals still avoid the island at all costs.

Here are the remains that give us a clue as to why.

So, they were cared for by a group

of Dominican nuns brought from France, and these nuns had

to live under the same conditions as the lepers. It was incredibly

dangerous and they suffered along with their patients.

Two of the nuns caught and died of leprosy.

And one of them actually committed suicide,

which is definitely not something you're supposed to do

if you're a nun, and the legend of her death still haunts the island.

Some of the locals refuse to visit this place, not because it used to

be a leper colony but they're afraid of the ghost of the nun

who committed suicide.

It seemed the lepers of chacachacare

were condemned to a life of disfigurement and then death,

but in 1942 there were

new arrivals on the island and things began to change.

They were 1,000 us marines.

The Americans established barracks all over the island,

but one significant improvement that it did for this island,

they established diesel generators that improve conditions tremendously

on the island.

For the first time, there was electricity for the leper colony.

The authorities began to relax the rules,

allowing male and female patients to mix.

Medical advances were also being made in the wider world.

By the middle of the 20th century, treatments for leprosy were getting

better, a combination of antibiotics can actually treat

the disease and reduce the symptoms.

As leprosy finally became a treatable disease,

it was no longer necessary to keep those affected locked away.

Also, the Dominican nuns were a declining group.

There weren't a lot of new people coming into the order

to replace the ageing nuns who, by this time were dying off or needed

care themselves, so eventually the colony was shut down.

Chacachacare was a prison no more.

The last patient left on July 23, 1984.

The entire structure was abandoned and left over to the elements.

Today there are plans to redevelop the island for tourism,

but right now chacachacare is still haunted by its history

and tormented by its past,

and its future remains uncertain.

On a dramatic stretch of coastline

near the port city of Cape Town in South Africa

is an amazing sight.

In this area of incredible natural beauty, it's got the amazing ocean

and the rocky backdrop, and then suddenly it hits you

right between the eyes, that absolutely should not be there.

You're suddenly confronted by this extraordinary sight.

This huge ship lies beached on the rocky

coastline with this enormous crane reaching up for the skies.

Only part of this giant machine is still visible

above the crashing waves,

yet the rusting crane and turret suggest it was once

a majestic vessel.

This ship obviously is built for a specific job.

You've got the huge crane at one end,

but this beautifully designed ship should not be on those rocks.

At sea things go wrong, things go wrong all the time, and that's why

for hundreds of years there's been a healthy salvage industry,

where ships that run into trouble get rescued and recycled.

But something's gone wrong here.

This crane has clearly been here for some time.

Why has no-one rescued it?

First and foremost, there's

obviously been some kind of disaster here.

You just want to know how this mighty vessel has

ended up stranded on these rocks.

The story begins in 1994 when South African salvage expert

captain Nick Sloane received a distress call.

So, we were busy in false bay hiding with the super tanker.

So, false bay is a perfect place of refuge for large ships in distress.

And we knew the storm was coming, so we had

suspended all operations in case we lost control of the super tanker.

And then Cape Town port control called us up and said

that the bos 400 was drifting onto the coast.

This is the bos 400,

a French-built vessel known as a lay or crane barge.

It was built to do a very specific job.

It's basically a pipe-laying vessel, so that

beautiful engineering is designed so it can lift up,

move and then lay giant pipeline.

You're building an oil rig from scratch, you would call it in.

It's a one-off machine, and it travelled the world

building huge structures in difficult marine environments.

This was one of the most powerful crane barges ever built.

In its prime it was

an engineering marvel, touring the globe, helping to construct

some of the most ambitious projects anywhere in the world.

This giant beast was capable of

lifting 1,200 tonnes and was valued at over us $70 million.

But the bos 400 now found itself in perilous waters, waters that

captain Sloane knows all too well.

So you've got these frontal storms that come all the way across

the south Atlantic from Brazil, and they're already full storms

when they hit the coast.

Then they hit the warmth from the agulhas current, and those

storms that are already bad go crazy, with all the extra energy.

So you don't wanna be stuck in a winter storm off South Africa.

This treacherous stretch of coastline

is known for its changeable weather and its violent storms.

In fact, cape point is known as the cape of storms.

Crane barges are not fitted with engines

and rely completely on tugboats.

Pulling the bos 400 that day was a Russian tugboat called the tigre.

So, the barge is not designed to move under its own power,

and for that you need a tug, a small, powerful, manoeuvrable boat,

and that does the hard work.

But there were problems with the tug.

Not only was it dragging a huge tow-wire

nearly 4,000 feet in length, it had also lost its main engine.

With just the back-up engine,

you've got a lot less power and manoeuvrability,

not to mention the fact that you could be left with no engine at all,

and as it turned out, this was no ordinary storm.

The crew were completely unaware,

but they were heading into grave danger.

The port of Cape Town was closed, but the tug still continued to make

her approach inshore to Cape Town.

They then started to try and turn around, and that's when they got

into real trouble.

The tug crew had actually been radioed repeatedly,

but because of their poor English they didn't understand.

So they carried on.

And they tried to turn around to get further back out to sea,

and during that operation that's when the wire, the tow-wire sank to

the sea bed and snagged on the reef.

The crews of both ships were now in perilous positions.

Nick's salvage teams were in a race against time

as the juggernaut floundered and drifted towards the rocks.

We ran round from false bay to try and see if we could get a line on,

but you know, in those weather conditions,

even with a helicopter, there was no way we could get close to her.

If you look at this now, it's summer season,

you've got maybe a 1m, 1.5m swell, but in the winter storm,

where the swells are actually almost up above the crane house,

so that's the type of swell you're talking about.

The swells were so severe that the bos 400, despite its enormous

size, was actually disappearing completely behind the waves.

It was simply too dangerous for the salvage teams to attempt to

reattach the tow line.

And we just had to sit there and watch her slowly break apart.

The helicopter took the crew off and then mother nature took care

of her, and she ended up on top of the pinnacles that

went straight through her bottom and then she was fast on the reef.

The crew were eventually airlifted to safety,

but their ordeal was far from over.

When they arrived at the port of Cape Town, they were all arrested

and detained, pending an enquiry into the disaster.

That wasn't the end of the story.

A vessel of that size wasn't going to be left

without attempting salvage.

That was the first attempt to try and get closer.

We had to abort, wait for better weather, then we sent in smaller

boats and we sent people onboard by helicopter to assess her.

The tanks right on the bottom of the ship, they were all breached.

If you don't succeed in that first 24 hours on the South African

coast, it's very unlikely that you're going to succeed later on.

An American company later launched another salvage operation

but without success.

There was a long-running, acrimonious court case.

Some members of the tug crew were held for a full

six years before they were allowed to return home to their families.

In the investigations that happened after the event, it was found

that this tugboat was underpowered

and quite frankly just not up to the job.

It was about $80 million insurance claim, and that's why

they arrested the tug, the tigre, and held their owners responsible,

but they didn't have that type of money or insurance, so it was

a total loss and a disaster from the French construction company

and from the underwriters.

The tugboat was eventually auctioned off but unfortunately

it's simply too dangerous to salvage the remains of the bos 400.

But today the bos 400 is not just a unique spectacle

for tourists and hikers.

It may well have some kind of future after all.

There's not much of the barge that has survived. The core structure,

the foundation of the crane, in the next four, five years

I wouldn't be surprised if she topples into the water.

It will add some value, you know,

as a recreation sport area, and you'll find artificial reef

and a whole ecosystem will grow up on top of her.

In the green fields of south-west england

is a valley littered with unusual ruins.

Sweeping over the stunning cornwall countryside,

you come across a grand stone viaduct that spans a river valley.

But as you get closer, you see that there's something

different about this one.

Right next to it, there's these series of

tall columns that are clearly a lot older and have obviously

got some kind of story to tell.

So, for what purpose was this structure built?

Why is it now derelict and abandoned? What became of it?

Did it somehow collapse or was it deliberately destroyed?

The mystery deepens as you look up and you see that the columns

just end, there's no bridge there anymore.

First impressions might suggest that this was a fairly

straightforward thing to build, but that was certainly not the case.

On the valley floor you can see, it's quite muddy, a bit boggy,

doesn't really look that stable a surface to build on.

Look at these tidal mudflats, look at the depth of the earth here.

This is not going to be a simple place to accomplish

such a feat of engineering.

The structure that stood here was not only pioneering, it was also

controversial and the subject of ridicule, but its story is

forever linked to that of one of the world's greatest ever engineers.

Today a new viaduct carries

the modern railway across the valley,

but back in the 19th century, steam trains were helping to power

the United Kingdom's booming economy.

Cornwall was home to a thriving mining industry,

but without a railway the region was in danger of being left behind.

If they wanted to keep that business and keep that trade alive,

what they needed was a railway to connect into

the other mainlines and ultimately continue all the way up to London.

Now, railways, when you're dealing with flat ground, it's easy enough -

just lay down the tracks. But that's not the case in cornwall.

You've got river valleys, you've got steep hills.

This is gonna be a more complicated exercise.

This particular valley was a key part of the route.

There were dozens of Bridges to build, miles and miles of track

to lay, but if they couldn't

cross this valley, all of that was for nothing.

You have to get across the valley,

and the viaduct is the answer to that.

These are the remains of the first carnon viaduct.

The plan was to build a vast bridge some 750 feet long supported by

11 stone pillars. It was an ambitious project.

Local historian Bob Richards explains the challenges

its engineer faced.

This was actually one of the deepest valleys they had to

cross on the whole route, and so this viaduct itself,

the track bed was some 96 feet above the valley floor.

When you're building a viaduct, you want something that's stable,

you want it flat and you want it to last, and that's not

an easy thing to accomplish here.

You have soft, muddy land that's over 20 feet thick in some places.

The water level was higher in those days and it's also tidal.

Not only did this make construction conditions difficult,

it also put different stresses and strains on the structure.

It's almost as though everything was against them.

So building the viaduct was always

going to be a huge structural and technological challenge.

Luckily, the man given the job of building it was no ordinary engineer

but a great colossus of the age.

At the time there was only really one person who could solve this

particular problem - isambard kingdom brunel.

Brunel was one of britain's greatest ever engineers.

Born in portsea, Portsmouth, on April 9, 1806, to an English

mother and a French father

who was also a civil engineer, brunel was a precocious child.

He'd learned euclidean geometry and was fluent in French by

the age of eight.

After completing his apprenticeship in 1822, brunel worked

as an assistant engineer on the pioneering project to build

a tunnel under the river thames between rotherhithe and wapping.

Few then could have predicted he'd eventually be responsible for

many of the innovative railroads, steamships, tunnels and Bridges

that underpin the industrial revolution in britain.

Brunel is probably best remembered

for the magnificent Clifton suspension bridge in Bristol,

which at the time had the longest span of any bridge in the world.

But the railway and shipbuilding industries both

also famously benefitted from brunel's great vision.

In fact, a poll carried out in the early part of this century to

choose the 100 greatest ever britons placed brunel second on the list,

with only sir Winston Churchill ahead of him.

But even for a man of brunel's brilliance, the carnon viaduct

was a highly challenging project.

He had a solution, but what he was proposing was considered by some to

be both extreme and dangerous.

Why not complete the top of

the viaduct with wood instead of stone?

Much cheaper, easier to work with, and you'll be done much quicker.

But people wondered, would a wood structure

hold the weight of a train?

Brunel designed timber trestles that fanned out from the stone pillars

to support a wooden deck, which would carry the railway.

It was an innovative design, and by using timber instead of stone,

brunel would certainly save the railway company money.

But this was highly unusual for

the time, and brunel's plans were ridiculed in the press.

In 1860 this is cutting-edge stuff.

It's scary. People don't know it's gonna work.

They haven't seen it. To modern eyes, we see a big,

stable structure, but to everyone else back then, this is the future.

Brunel's imaginative design was controversial, and today we see

that a new viaduct has replaced it.

We have these stone piers, stumps, really,

with nothing on top of them. Did the wood survive?

Did it collapse? What happened?

Don't underestimate timber.

It might not look as solid and as heavy as the masonry, but

actually it's incredibly strong, and if it's used in the right way,

you can transport incredible loads across it quickly and safely.

In fact, brunel's wooden design worked.

Its success was at least partly down to his work on the valley floor.

The stone piers going down

under the ground to the bedrock were what took the real weight

of the construction, and the wooden fan design on top spread the weight

evenly across the whole of the 750 feet expanse of the viaduct itself.

The supporting pillars were made from hard rock driven deep into

the ground. That was what made the whole structure so strong.

During construction, brunel made full use of an ingenious invention

he'd worked with before.

He sinks these caissons, these round, steel rings,

into the river bed and then pumps out all the mud and silt,

which then enables your labourers to get down there and build proper

masonry foundations.

Using caissons kept the foundations dry and meant that

they could be placed deep beneath the unstable earth on the surface.

While the soft ground may have once

been a concern, brunel's designs certainly overcame that issue.

These columns aren't going anywhere for a very long time.

This victorian masterpiece carried trains for 70 years, but sadly

its creator never saw it in operation.

Brunel died before it was completed.

So, what did signal the end for his extraordinary invention?

Although it lasted an incredibly long time, its major downfall

was the cost of maintenance and particularly

that top timber section.

In the 1930s the railway authorities designed to replace brunel's viaduct

with a new stone structure, but his remarkable construction

was one of the last original timber viaducts in cornwall to be replaced.

Today the modern viaduct carries tourists along a branch line,

but brunel's great columns still stand beside it.

Anything that isambard brunel

got involved in was built to last, and these are a fine example of

his engineering genius and a fine example of

the workmanship that went into them, the fact that they're still here

150, 160 years after they were initially constructed.

Now they're abandoned,

but many were once 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.

Captioned by ai-media ai-media. TV