Original subtitles

Tom ward (narrates): Four huge scaffolds

dominating a remote Alaskan mountain.

These structures don't look super technological,

they're like giant billboards.

But they were part of what was in it's day

the most sophisticated technology we had.

A war torn ruin left standing in the shadow of North Korea.

If you went in to the building

you would quite possibly come out in a box

and if you came out upright

you might come out shattered beyond sanity.

A factory complex in an idyllic valley

that is not quite what it seems.

You start to see clues

that this place might not have been so friendly after all.

The big heavy metal door on the rock face,

how are they trying to keep out

or what were they trying to keep in?

A medieval castle that became the playground of a vengeful killer.

So, either the bloody countess

was a stone cold mass murderer of young girls

or she was a powerful but innocent woman

framed by her unscrupulous rivals.

Decaying relics.

Ruins of lost worlds.

Forged through years of toil now haunted by the past.

Their secrets waiting to be revealed.

Slovakia, 60 miles from the capital Bratislava.

An imposing hilltop structure was the scene

of one of the 17th centuries bloodiest scandals.

Looking up on to the hillside clearly man has made

it's Mark here in a very fortified, defensive kind of way.

It doesn't seem big enough to be a fort

and dare I say it's not grand enough to be a place.

Two towers loom over the grounds,

one leads in to a three metre deep pit.

It's a hole in the ground, it looks like a dungeon.

The other tower is reduced to just one perilous standing wall.

This isn't just nature has destroyed this,

there's been some kind of deliberate effort too.

The perimeter walls lined with Cannon battlements

suggest a violent past.

If you're expecting uninvited guests

this is the perfect spot to be,

it looks like it's ready for an attack.

The events that took place here became folk law then legend.

A reminder that history is written by the Victors.

In 1610 blood curdling screams were echoing from the basement,

young women are suffering unbearable torture

at the hands of a psychopath.

It was eight girls

who suffered this way.

Marcela bednarova grew up hearing the terrible stories

surrounding this place.

The girls were humiliated...

And there was some psychological and sexual torture as well.

They were waiting for their destiny in shackles.

The girls were made to stand naked

in a cold cellar for days.

The rumours surrounding this place are extremely disturbing

and we don't know exactly what happened here

but everyone who knows something about this place

agrees that it was terrible.

This is cachtice castle,

built in the 13th century to defend the border of the Hungarian empire,

for generations the castle was traded

between warring noble families

until 1604

when countess Elizabeth Bathory changed the castle

and the town of cachtice forever.

When Elizabeth in her early 40s as a widow

moved full time into the castle

she must have appeared unbelievably glamorous

to the local villagers with their hard lives,

she had the sort of youthful glow about her.

Elizabeth inherited the castle upon the death of her husband,

a member of the powerful nadasdy family.

She inherited all of this property

and suddenly she was the head of a wealthy noble household.

Possibly one of the most powerful single women

in Hungary at the time.

In a period when women were largely treated as second class citizens.

She invited young women into these rooms

to sweep the floors and cook her meals.

In her 40s she's there offering the school

basically for other young noble women,

it wasn't uncommon, it was a normal thing to do

to go and live with another family

and learn how to housekeep,

how to prepare for marriage and life ahead.

But the true cruelty of the Hungarian nobility

was about to be exposed.

Rumours started to circulate,

the girls who went to cachtice castle

didn't always come back.

On the 29 December 1610

soldiers stormed through the castle gates

and searched the grounds.

When the soldiers looked around

they found one dead girl

then two girls were reported injured

and almost dying with visible marks of cruelty or violence.

One of them was already dead

but the others had just enough life force

to point the finger at her killer.

Elizabeth.

The young widow may have been a woman in a man's world

but she also had a reputation for barbarism.

It's said that she physically hurt her students

for minor infractions

like folding the sheets wrong or spilling water.

Even for just looking at her the wrong way.

The punishments ranged stories say everything from er,

just a slap around the face to drawing blood

and then it got more and more gruesome.

Supposedly she would prick them with sewing needles.

She bit them until she drew blood,

she smeared honey on them

and exposed them to bees and ants.

Cut them with scissors.

Scald them with hot metal bars.

Leaving girls out in the cold to freeze to death.

And one of her most notorious acts happened inside the castles dungeon.

Elizabeth needed her main house free

because she expected a visit of her daughter, Anna.

So, she ordered the girls to move up to the castle

to stay there during the daughter's visit.

The girls were made to stand naked in the cold cellar for days,

when they were let out some of them could barely even walk.

And they were killed very soon afterwards.

It's said that Elizabeth Bathory killed up to 600 young girls,

she literally has a guinness world record for it.

The rumours of her savagery go all the way back to her childhood.

She came from a family notorious for it's alcoholism,

incest and sexual deviancy.

When she was young she suffered from terrible migraines

which her family diagnosed as demonic possession.

It's said that she even bathed in the blood of her victims.

That might explain the youthful complexion.

The soldiers arrested Elizabeth.

She was tried and banished to her castle tower

for the rest of her days.

The tyranny of the bloody countess was over.

But not everything is as it seems in this grim fairytale.

There's one thing that doesn't quite add up here.

Out of an alleged

600 or more victims of Elizabeth

we haven't found a single grave or a single skeleton.

Nothing.

The man who arrested her and found all the bodies

just so happened to be head of a rival house

in the neighbouring province which is unreliable and suspicious.

Elizabeth was clever, she was literate,

she could speak four languages but she was also a woman,

she had a massive target on her back.

Looking at this as a lawyer

despite concerns over the evidence

I can't help but think

there was something ghastly going on in that castle.

It's very rare that there's any smoke without fire.

So, either Elizabeth Bathory

the bloody countess

was a stone cold mass murderer of young girls.

Or she was a powerful

but innocent woman framed by her unscrupulous rivals.

You may never know for sure.

The castle stood for another 100 years

until it was sacked in a rebellion.

What remains is open to tourists

seeking to learn about the legend of Elizabeth Bathory.

In the remote north west of Alaska

a cluster of constructions loom over a barren landscape.

Only 150 miles from Russia

sit these curved steel monoliths of the crest of anvil mountain.

There's not a tree, there's not a barely a bush

and rising up on the top of this hill

are these four huge structures

they almost look like some warped Salvador dali idea of a billboard.

It's almost like they've left

a segment of a modern art museum

propped up by some kind of scaffolding

right here in the middle of nowhere.

Their simple form belies their once crucial function.

Very top secret I mean it was, it was high

er, you know high security up there

because this was all cutting edge technology.

When you think about it for a second it's clear

it's some sort of communication device

whether it's for radar or microwaves or something

but it's not clear what exactly.

Richard beneville is the mayor of the nearby town of nome

and this site holds a particular resonance for him.

Sometimes I feel like it's walking among the pyramids,

I'm very proud sometimes to what mankind can do.

I feel a sense of pride, I know that this site worked.

The roots of this facility

can be traced back to the 19th century

when Alaska became American property.

A time when Russian and the us were allies.

At the time that the us purchased Alaska from Russia

it was a very good investment,

I don't think anybody anticipated that would,

that Russia would become our biggest geopolitical foe.

In 1949, the Soviet union shocked the world

when it detonated it's first atomic bomb

at a test site in Kazakhstan,

a Soviet nuclear attack was now a very real possibility.

In the 1950s the nuclear arms race

between the Soviet union

and the United States was ramping up.

Local resident Richard beneville remembers this time well.

I knew every night I went to bed

that the planes on the flight line

had the bombs in them 24/7

ready to go in about a five minute notice.

That was the cold war that this 18 year old kid.

The problem in Alaska

was how to communicate an incoming threat

and respond accordingly.

If your radar detected

Soviet bombers on their way

to bomb america you'd want to tell somebody right away.

And the problem here was that

all they had was old fashioned copper wire telephone technology.

There's no roads around most of the state,

there's no telegraph wires, there's no telephone wires.

At one point from nome

they could only send one telephone call at a time.

Huge distances made communication difficult

even high frequency signals

would fizzle out

when the northern lights appeared.

Telecommunications functioned strictly by line of site

so the rapid transmission of information

over long distances was impossible.

A new communications infrastructure was imperative

but what technology could effectively deal

with this latest threat.

Alaska has a really interesting place

in the history of the cold war

because it is so close to Russia

and it is so close to the north pole.

At the end of world war two,

Alaska's defences were focused

on fighting a southern foe

not one that was coming over the north pole.

If Soviet bombers came over the horizon

there was no effective warning system in place,

a solution was found with this.

White Alice.

A radio station

with an extensive air force telecommunications network.

They were part of the do line,

the do line which collected information

actually from the top of Scotland all the way

across north Atlantic, Iceland, Greenland, Canada,

keeping track, keeping a radar net over the north pole.

Their name is widely believed to be an acronym.

White for the snow covered location

and Alice which stands

for Alaska integrated communication and electronics.

Typical white Alice site consists of four dishes

grouped in pairs to receive and transmit signals

to and from neighbouring stations.

Since they couldn't just send radio signal

in a straight line to the next receiver

it was too far away,

they would aim it up at an angle in to the sky

where would bounce off a layer of the atmosphere,

it would bounce off the troposphere

and then come back down hundreds of miles away

and be received at the other end.

The system is called forward propagating tropospheric scatter.

Tropospheric scattering

has many advantages over other technologies

because bouncing signals off the atmosphere

means that the hubs don't need a clear line of sight

which is particularly advantageous in mountainous regions of Alaska.

This process meant that white Alice sites

could be 200 miles apart,

they could also handle multiple phone calls

at the same time

and crucially for the military they were secure.

A transmission beamed from one spot

could only be received at another precise spot

and that made it virtually impossible to intercept.

This network of linked sites would be crucial

against the various cold war threats.

Across northern Alaska

there were a whole range of stations

designed to detect first incoming bombers

and then later as missiles became a bigger threat

radar systems er, to detect

whether missiles had been launched

and were headed to the heartland of the us.

The 31 original white Alice sites took three years to build...

With the first station operational in 1956.

But constructing these vast antennas was no easy task.

We're about 700 miles to the nearest highway,

we're about 750 miles from Anchorage

so we are way out there

right where the baring strait and Russia almost meet.

So, to build these installations

they had to not just fly in equipment,

they used dog sleds,

they were really out there in primitive brutal conditions.

The enemy was time and weather,

hundreds of tonnes of metal had to be bought in by air.

This was a steel Jigsaw puzzle

that had to be assembled quickly and effectively

and had to be strong enough

to withstand the extremes of Alaskan storms.

It was the latest and most sophisticated

telecommunications technology in the world.

The us even connected Hawaii and the Philippines

through the pacific scatter system

but the biggest impact was on Alaska itself.

It unified the region in ways

that no other technology could have done.

However construction was extremely expensive.

The total bill came to a staggering $300 million.

Initially they thought they needed six people

and 25 kilowatts to operate the site

but actually in the end they needed 20 people

and about 120 to 180 kilowatts of electrical power

just to operate the system.

Before white Alice was even complete

a new technology arrived which would come to replace it.

It's a bit ironic

that by the time white Alice

was becoming operational in 1957-1958

sputnik was up in the sky.

Satellite communications came in

and that wound up being a much more reliable system

that didn't depend on these remote installations

of antennas you know, manned by these small groups of guys

freezing their butts off on the tundra,

you know for year in and year out.

Was it successful?

I think you'd have to say yes.

Because it, it has allowed us to get

to where we are today which is a lot.

White Alice remained in use

until the 1970s as a civilian phone network.

And in some cases due to their security

the military still uses tropos scattering networks even today.

At the northern most limits of South Korea

is a troubled region

littered with the ruins of a conflicted past.

The demilitarised zone

between North Korea and South Korea is actively dangerous.

This is not some historic relic,

there is almost a war going on

across this piece of ground today.

From up on top of a hill you can see in to North Korea

and this place is right in the shadow of that.

Gutted and scared this shell of a structure

has a clear story to tell.

The building's not just derelict, it's been completely devastated.

You can see that the only thing that's holding it in place

is these modern reinforcement bars.

This isn't a place that was slowly left to decay,

it feels like this was a target.

Just south of the demilitarised zone

between north and South Korea

a devastated structure dominates it's surroundings.

Yet it appears to be out of place.

Someone has taken

some stalinist architecture

and dropped it right here on the korean border

and because of that stalinist architecture

you can tell

that this is

a communist North Korean edifice.

Why is it ruined?

And why is it here in South Korea?

Following years of Japanese occupation

at the end of the second world war,

authority over the korean peninsula was split in two.

Military the Soviets grabbed the northern half

and the Americans who were in the process

of occupying Japan grabbed the southern half.

They divided the country up on the 38th parallel,

a line of latitude

and this created a very crude

north south border on the map.

This building sits in the area of cheorwon.

Positioned just 40 miles above that line of demarcation.

Local resident mr Kim grew up in this area,

his family having lived through the unrest

that soon followed the construction of this building.

(Speaks korean)

Translation: "This is the labour party building,

"it's actually the cheorwon county branch of the labour party.

"When this area came under communist rule in 1946

"this was built as the local headquarters

"for the communist government."

Dominating the area,

this structure clearly set out the parties aim

of commanding over the local people.

"Now, this is a three storey building

"while all the other buildings in the area

"were single storey wooden structures.

"And it sits on top of a high platform,

"the building was actually built upon a raised level

"so it must have looked very daunting for the locals here.

"This building epitomised the authority of communism."

But the north weren't only interested

in ruling over the local population

they had ambitious plans for this place.

"Cheorwon was the largest city near to the 38th parallel

"that's why they built the party headquarters here.

"North Korea ruled the surrounding area from here

"but they also used it to help

"prepare for the attack on the south."

Their ultimate aim

was to take control of the entire korean peninsula.

Cheorwon was an incredibly tense border town

for the simple reason

that it was a staging post for the North Korean troops

so here there would have been massed a vast number of forces

and that made this a very tense place.

Backed by Stalin

at the head of this North Korean communist regime

was Kim El sun.

Kim El sun tries to replicate

Stalin's dictatorship in North Korea

and that means that the North Korean dictatorship

is centralised, is brutal

and is ready to repress the individual

in the interests of the state and the ruling party.

With the arrival of Kim El sun

who served in the Soviet army in the war

things really began to change

and the peninsula went on to effectively a war footing.

For those living in cheorwon

having the local party headquarters on their doorstep

could be a terrifying prospect.

And old rumours about what happened inside

still persist to this day.

"Back then for the people here this was a very mysterious place.

"It's said that those people who opposed communism

"or the rules of the land were dragged in here

"to be tortured and killed.

"But the problem we face looking at this today

"is that the people who were responsible

"for the atrocities here have all returned to the north.

"And there are no records left to confirm these stories."

Outside of this building

Kim El sun soon saw an opportunity

to assert his dominance over the whole peninsula.

In 1950 on the 25th of June

the North Korean army

rolls across the 38th parallel

knocks the South Korean army almost out of the way.

The northerners blazed their way down the peninsula

in the end cornering the southern forces

in to just one small pocket.

The South Korean army,

the American occupation force they're all in one town, in...

In the south.

It looks like it's all over for South Korea.

With their backs against the wall

and a communist victory looking likely,

us forces led by general mcarthur

set about turning the tables

with an invasion deep behind enemy lines.

The other thing the United States does,

the United States internationalises the korean war.

The Americans get the UN to come in on the American

and South Korean side

and they undo the successful North Korean invasion of the south.

Quickly southern forces regained control

and moved rapidly north.

Soon pushing past cheorwon

but for those held prisoner here it was too late.

Nearby the ruins of a water treatment facility

now stand as a marker

to how those individuals met a tragic end.

(Speaks korean)

Translation: "So, after the war the

"bodies of many people were found here

"and this has become a very harrowing place

"in cheorwon.

The North Korea leadership were very concerned

that in their retreat

they did not want enemies of the people

as they called them to survive.

"In cheorwon there are a lot of scars left from the war

"but this is the place where numerous prisoners

"and civilians were killed before the communist army were driven out

"and fled the area.

"This is a heart breaking place

"which will never be forgotten by the people of cheorwon.

The people they had been holding prisoner

down in the building in town

were bought to this other site where they were murdered.

In total around 300 people were killed in this massacre.

With the war raging on the destruction of cheorwon

crept ever closer

and as the largest structure in the area

this building would soon become a key target.

In 1950 as the southern forces advanced

the old communist party headquarters

became firmly fixed in the crosshairs.

The violence of that time

is clearly written all across what remains.

"These marks are from the tracks of a us army tank

"which came up here to destroy the building.

"I think destroying the labour party building

"was intended as a show of strength,

"this was the local headquarters of the North Korean army

"who were the enemy."

While it remained standing

this structure and the surrounding town

was soon facing an end game,

just a few months after taking the area,

the southern forces were being pushed back

out of cheorwon.

The one thing that you can't allow

is this politically important symbol

to fall in to enemy hands.

So, you burn the place to the ground,

the whole town burns except for one thing.

That building that looms over the town.

In 1953, an armistice was signed

ending the fighting

and a new border was drawn up

just a few miles to the north of this building.

The ruins now serve as a reminder of the past

and a symbol of hope for the future.

"We must not forget what needs to be remembered.

"Also it's a crucial task for the two Korea's

"as one people to reunify and achieve prosperity together."

In the northern Czech Republic

just six miles from the German border,

a rural scene hides

a sordid history.

Here is a lovely valley

with well maintained woodlands,

no doubt a clean stream running through it

and pretty towns at suitable intervals.

This is very much a Czech valley

with all the signs of decades of happiness.

A complex of empty buildings stands amongst the trees.

Rooms take up entire floors

and there are hundreds of metal columns

keeping the ceilings up,

something very heavy used to be kept on these floors.

These were once grand efficient factories

of some kind and, and now they're abandoned,

they're over grown.

Why would you build something this expensive

and walk away from it?

Behind the buildings

are clues to a history

that the locals would rather forget.

You can see the remains of a camp

and you can see a big chimney next to that camp

and that's never going to be good news.

And at the centre of it all is a gateway

that guards a terrible secret.

You arrive at this rock face

and you see this huge metal door.

Hiding something inside this rock face

and you wonder well that looks like a lot of security.

What happened in this remote outpost?

And what is behind that big metal door?

In the 19th century a building was put here

to take advantage of a new wonder material.

Petr joza has explored this site extensively.

(Speaks foreign language)

Translation: "We are in one of the halls of company frans pridall,

"the building was constructed in 1867

"as one of three in rabstejn valley to produce cotton.

"In this building there were 16,000 spindles,

"individual spinning machines stood in between these pillars,

"it was one of the biggest factories in this area."

This is rabstejn, janska

a factory that produced cotton on an vast scale

but this was more than a business,

it was the bread basket of a community.

"There were several generations working in this factory.

"The factory was hugely beneficial for the local economy

"because the company used the money they made to finance several things,

"they had schools built in the area,

"had a chapel restored

"and that's all thanks to the profit from these factories."

But the factories benign appearance

is betrayed by an ominous feature within it's grounds.

Then you see the big metal door.

And you have to ask what did you build here?

What are you trying to keep in the ground

or what are you trying to keep out?

Inside this building when you look closely

you start to see clues

that this place might not have been

so friendly after all.

Although the early 1900s saw business booming here,

in 1929 the market collapsed.

In the late 1920s

a depression begins

all across central and Eastern Europe

which has devastating effects on manufacturing

and, erm, on the economies of Eastern Europe in general.

Hundreds of workers

who relied on their jobs here for their livelihood,

they're all out of work.

The old factory is shut down

and for over a decade the buildings lay dormant...

But in 1942 the factory came under new management.

The Nazi's.

And the Germans had always looked

kind of hungrily at bohemia.

The Germans you know, first nibbled at that land

and then they take all of czechoslovakia

in the course of 1938, 1939.

The Nazi's occupy rabstejn janska

but they had a new plan for the old factory.

Cotton production was low on the list of Nazi priorities.

What they really needed more than anything was aircraft.

Half a mile from the factory

is what remains of the Nazi's strategy

to massively expand their aircraft production.

The German economy has to be kept going

and the German war machine has to be supplied

and one of the ways the Nazi's do this

is by conscripting people in to labour.

They constructed a labour camp.

(Speaks foreign language)

Translation: "We are at rabstejn concentration camp

"which was established in 1944

"for approximately 690 to 700 prisoners.

"Because they couldn't find enough workers,

"prisoners were bought here

"and the buildings were surrounded

"by barbed electric wire."

By exploiting labour,

by making slaves labour in their factories.

The Nazi regime is based not only on military power

and not only on their twisted idea of racial superiority

it is also based on slavery.

But those interned here were not all treated equally.

"There was even a decree from ss-reichsfuhrer himmler

"which clearly specified

"what people of each nationality can and cannot get.

"So, the Dutch who the Germans considered Aryan

"and basically German were not guarded at all,

"they were living privately, renting from private persons.

"On the other hand the Poles, Russians and French

"were doing poorly,

"the French were relatively fine

"because they were still considered Aryan

"but the eastern nations were housed in camps behind barbed wire.

"They could only eat what they were given in the camp,

"they couldn't even pick an apple somewhere on the street

"or they'd be strictly punished."

The ultimate result

that Hitler and the Nazi's want

is for all of the people

they consider subhuman

to be first slaves and then dead slaves.

Working conditions for Nazi slave labourers

are designed to be able to get work out of them

but ultimately they are going to be worked to death.

Prisoners were marched

from the camp to the factory and back

in an unending brutal cycle

but events hundreds of miles away

would soon make life here even harder.

Between the 20th and the 25th of February 1944

the allies bombed the hell

out of Nazi fighter plane production.

"Germany definitely lost control over it's own airspace

"so they established jagerstab.

"It was a task force

"designed to decentralise fighter aircraft production

"and move it underground."

The manpower required was huge.

Digging those holes was nasty work,

they used dynamite and pick axes.

You wouldn't want that assignment.

The Nazi's ordered four tunnels to be dug in to the rock face.

They plast almost 83,000 square metres of space...

Carved out of the rock

underneath these old 19th century textile mills.

They were so desperate to start production of these aircraft

that they moved the machinery in

before the prisoners had even finished digging the tunnels.

The noise, the fumes, the lack of daylight

it would have been like digging your own hell.

"So, here we are at a shafts crossing

"where during excavation part of the ceiling collapsed.

"Three prisoners from the concentration camp died

"when the ceiling fell on them."

They were essentially worked to death

in these underground factories.

By January 1945,

Germany was months away from losing the war.

But the prisoners underground didn't know it.

People kept working, suffering, dying,

not just for an evil cause but for a lost cause.

But just weeks before allied tanks rolled in to Berlin

the prisoners at rabstejn janska got a glimmer of hope from above.

The first news they have that the war is almost over

and that they would probably survive the war

is in march of 1945

when a Soviet plane flies overhead

and five paratroopers jump out

and land without any German resistance.

Then on the eight of may without warning

or announcement the prison guards began to disappear.

The first they knew

that the Germans who were holding them captive...

Had lost the war was when the German guards

just didn't turn up for work that day.

The army was on it's way to liberate them,

the Nazi's had taken off to avoid being captured.

Translation: "We're at the end of the shaft

"where you can see rows of drilling for dynamite.

"The demolition charges were placed in these and blasted.

"They did not do it here

"because this is the place where excavating stopped

"at the end of world war two

"because the second Polish army arrived

"and the construction of the underground factory

"was stopped.

And all the labourers at rabstejn could do

was put down their pickaxes

and start trying to figure out how to get home.

Today, the factory buildings

have been reclaimed by the community.

The camp and the tunnels stand as an important reminder

of the brutality endured here.

Abandoned, disintegrating, reclaimed by nature,

structures once at the cutting edge

bearing witness to the forces,

pioneers and villains that define the world today.

Emblems of a shared past still standing in our present.

Captioned by ai-media ai-media. TV