Original subtitles

Tom ward (narrates) An industrial powerhouse

that transformed the American skyline.

There's a kind of futuristic look to this place

but it's all old, it's all rusted.

A holy relic that helped shape modern england.

It has all the hallmarks of a monastic complex

and for many today remains a mecca of Christian history in britain.

A gothic building in Poland that leaves few clues to its past.

These walls hide an incredibly dark history,

one that is still shrouded in mystery to this day.

And ancient ruins in Israel caught in the crossfire

of a modern conflict.

You see this immense contrast

between the ancient and the modern

but here the ancient is deserted.

(Theme music)

Decaying relics.

Ruins of lost worlds.

Sites haunted by the past,

their secrets waiting to be revealed.

Near the quiet town of Bethlehem usa,

industrial remains punch out of the landscape.

There's a kind of futuristic look to this place

like something out of 'bladerunner' has been dropped out of the sky.

This isn't just one set of pipes or one set of chimneys,

it's row upon row of decaying structures.

It feels like it stretches on for a mile.

You enter one of these buildings

and inside is this bizarre spaghetti of chains,

suspending metal boxes from the ceiling.

I mean, what could this all be for?

It's really strange.

When you came through the gate

it's like you were coming in to another world,

another town, another era.

A key development forged here

paved the way for the construction

of one of america's most iconic creations.

This was a revolution in structural engineering.

It's in many regards responsible for so much

of New York City's skyline it makes New York City in a way.

But this site wouldn't just build the nation.

It would help save it.

Bethlehem steel,

once a giant of American manufacturing

that employed 30,000 men and women.

Charlene donchez mowers is a historian who is well aware

of the hazards workers faced on a daily basis.

Everything was so dangerous

you couldn't wear a wedding ring, anything could get caught,

all your clothing had to be natural fibres

because synthetic would melt if a spark hit it.

The strange overhanging objects offered security as well as safety.

These baskets that you see hanging

from ceiling have chains on them,

the chain would come down and get attached

to these pipe like things

and they would put their own lock on it

and then no-one could touch their things.

This steel works had long been the life blood of the community.

So, these were really the kind of, you know,

blue collar workers of the usa.

Salt of the earth type people.

A lot of the workers are European immigrants

especially eastern European immigrants and latino workers,

you also have black workers like my grandfather

who came from in many cases from the south

so, they actually had a fairly diverse work force

and that spilled over in to steel towns

where you would have people living side by side going to school

with each other, not always comfortably

but living side by side.

Dating back to 1857,

the Bethlehem steel company was founded to help build america.

This place was started by people

who wanted to make iron railroad tracks,

this was when america still had a frontier

and the iron horses connected

these disparate parts of the country.

With Bethlehem it was its position geographically,

being able to get ore, being able to get coal,

made it just in the right place at the right time.

This is like baking a cake,

you have to have the key ingredients,

iron ore, coke and limestone.

Situated in so called carbon county,

they had everything they needed close by

and the infrastructure put in place

to exploit these resources was of epic proportions.

This blast furnace is from the early 1900s,

right in front of us is an incline plane

and there are two what are called skip cars

and a skip car is about the size of a Van.

The cars took the raw materials up the tracks to be weighed

and tipped in to the furnace

which reached temperatures of over 1,600 degrees c.

The ultimate goal is to create your iron

as pure as possible

and then it's in its liquid form

you can literally open the gate of the furnace

and this stuff pours out but what's great about steel

in its molten form is you can mould it.

Soon their ambitions extended well beyond railroad tracks.

In 1907 an invention made here

radically transformed the American skyline.

The Bethlehem beam is also known as a wide flange beam

and it was enabled

from a really important revolution in rolling steel.

The new rolling process produced h shaped beams

that were light, wide and cheap.

So, these big pieces of molten metal, red hot metal

would go between rollers that would shoot back and forth

and it would get thinner in the middle and then the sides

would get taller and so you ended up

with this incredible long piece of Bethlehem beam.

This was a revolution in structural engineering

and it could be used vertically

as a column allowing structures to be built taller than ever before.

We know what the us is famed for, its skyscrapers

and it was exactly this engineering phenomenon

that rocketed Bethlehem in terms of its supply

to places like New York.

Some of the buildings that they help make

included 40 wall street,

the Manhattan bank

and the Chrysler building to name a few.

In fact in the 1920s

they provided steel for around 80% of the city's skyline

leading the company's chief engineer to claim

that Bethlehem steel owned New York.

But they didn't stop there.

Not only skyscrapers

but it's these wonderful suspension Bridges,

something like the golden gate bridge

which has this beautiful orange colour.

83,000 tonnes of steel were used in the construction of this bridge.

Bethlehem the major contractor will build the steel towers

and suspended span of the bridge.

The sections are loaded aboard ships and finally through the golden gate

in to San Francisco bay.

This was boom time for Bethlehem steel

but it was nothing compared with what was to come.

In 1939 the president of Bethlehem steel,

Eugene grace was out golfing

when a caddy ran up to him with a message.

The story goes that grace turned to his colleagues and said,

"gentlemen, we're about to make a lot of money."

When the second world war broke out,

orders began flooding in from Europe.

Everything from tanks to even big warships

were being ordered by the British and the French

and at one stage the machine shop number 2

was the biggest factory floor going in the whole world at the time.

I heard that they could produce

one of those big ship guns a day,

at one point there were 800 men over three shifts a day.

And this was a very dangerous smoky smelly place,

there were machines up and down these aisles,

you can see there are railroad tracks,

there were overhead cranes.

Production was ramped up even further

when the war came to america's shores.

Once Pearl harbour is attacked,

the United States starts to feel like

it has stakes in this war and so the threat became real.

I guess you can imagine that the ethos of the workplace

will have dramatically shifted,

you've gone from essentially creating arms

to sell abroad to actually creating

something to be part of saving your nation.

It was said that an American could be on a destroyer built

at the Bethlehem steel yard firing guns built

at Bethlehem steel

shooting Bethlehem steel shells whilst being protected

by Bethlehem steel armoured plates.

Bethlehem steel built

over 1,100 ships during world war ii,

it was the largest ship builder in the world

and having these structures survive really gives a sense of scale

of what the industry is like.

I don't want to say that it's responsible

for the allied victory

but it's critical to the allied victory

and to the United States success in the war.

While Bethlehem steel corporation continues to operate

elsewhere in the world,

like many manufacturing plants in the so called rust belt

its days in post-war america were numbered.

Though unlike some it was a slow gradual decline

that ended in the early 2000s.

(Soft music)

The children of workers that filled these factory floors

have not forgotten the opportunities it has afforded them.

I think 13 members of my family worked

at Bethlehem steel

and then my generation we are teachers,

and doctors and lawyers

but that gave our families the opportunity

from being immigrant families in 1899

when my grandfather came here and got a job at Bethlehem steel

to my generation,

it's not just true for my family

but for many families throughout the United States.

Off the coast of north east england

is a ruin cloaked in mystery.

This road leads you out seemingly

to this vast expanse of sand and nothing else.

In the right weather going down this road feels like

you're driving in to the north sea

because sometimes the mists obscure the way forward.

But as the mist clears it becomes apparent

that this is a causeway that takes you to a tiny outcrop

with a castle towering over its surroundings.

The castle appears to be organically growing

out of the rock

and in its shadow are the remains of what looked like

a cathedral like structure.

It's right next to a church and surrounded by a cemetery

with an intriguing mix of gravestones.

So, this place has a real spiritual feel to it.

The layout of the stone remains

are telling and hint at Christian roots.

When you look at it from above you can see

that it's been constructed in the shape of a cross,

it feels monastic in its design.

There are elaborate stone arches,

one of them almost floating in the air.

Ornate masonry, sculpture,

this all points to a place of considerable opulence and wealth.

Yet it was the victim of an attack

that shook this land to its core

and sent shockwaves out across the Christian world.

Doctor Frances McIntosh specialises in the archaeology

of this region

and is an expert on this celebrated ruin.

So, we're here in the top end of the church

in the apps which is the top of the cross.

The position of this new construction completed

around 1150 was all important.

And only exists because of a even older structure

that lies at its feet.

They picked this spot for the church because we think

this is where the seventh century church was,

this is a real kind of centre of christianity

and it was the centre of the cult.

The high altar of that seventh century church held

the body of the man behind this cult.

And yet this tomb contains neither a body nor a coffin.

And that is what we see now, a 12th century priory

with a cenotaph meaning an empty tomb.

So, who was this cenotaph dedicated to

and why is the body no longer here.

This rocky outcrop is the holy island of lindisfarne,

barely connected to the mainland by a causeway.

The tide rises so quickly here that on average

one car per month still gets stranded.

But you can imagine how 1,000 years ago

this natural feature would have given the place

a real mystical charm,

created a real sense of wonder.

It was this sense of wonder along with its isolation

that attracted the attention

of king oswald in the seventh century.

The era between the romans leaving

and the Norman conquest has really captured

the imagination of people in recent years.

I mean, you've got series such as the 'vikings'

and the 'last kingdom'

and in fact king oswald is said to have been the inspiration

for the character Oregon in 'lord of the rings'.

Oswald's northumberland covered a vast amount of land

making it the northern powerhouse of england

which at the time was made up of a small handful

of warring anglo Saxon kingdoms.

He's going to let all of the other rulers

on the isle of Great Britain

and on the continent of Europe know

that he is a holy king and a wealthy king.

Oswald gifted lindisfarne to monks

in order to establish a monastery

at the heart of his political kingdom.

And he was driven like all rulers

by the desire to have monks praying for his soul

and praying for the health and welfare of his lands,

christianity was a political act.

In the 670s, a monk named cuthbert joined the monastery.

Cuthbert is himself a very holy man

who likes a life of spiritual contemplation,

he prefers to live as a hermit

and yet he's willing to act as a spiritual guide to kings.

News of cuthbert's holiness spread

and in 685 the king appointed him bishop

so, he was dragged back in to the world of politics,

the court, nobles, religion but yet he still retained

a reputation as a holy man, as a seer, as a healer, as a pastor.

But just a few years later cuthbert died.

It's believed his body was placed in a stone coffin at the eastern end

of the original building.

When his tomb was opened 11 years later,

to everyone's astonishment his body was found to be intact,

uncorrupted and it was a message to everyone

that cuthbert was truly divinely favoured.

And that's when the cult really starts, people start coming

to pray to ask for miracles, we hear of a paralysed boy

who wore the shoes of cuthbert who was healed, a monk came here

and fell seriously ill, he prayed by cuthbert's grave

and was miraculously cured.

This is where the pilgrims would come to that high altar

to see cuthbert's grave.

As a result powerful kings and rulers donated lands to it,

making lindisfarne one of the most important monastic sites in britain.

And the ruins that extend off to the side

of the original cross shaped church reflect

its increasing wealth.

All of these buildings were once filled

with monks hard at work, tilling the land,

receiving donations, writing out manuscripts,

preserving knowledge, praying for the souls of their benefactors.

It was here in this prestigious seat

of knowledge and learning

that the lindisfarne monks produced something extraordinary.

The lindisfarne gospels are one of the undoubted treasures

of the world.

It shows influences from the Celtic world,

from the anglo Saxon world

and even the mediterranean world showing just how international

a place lindisfarne was.

And not only are they one of the most beautiful Latin bibles

ever produced in england

but also ascribe has written translations of the gospels

in old English underneath making them

one of the earliest sources of the Bible

in old English long before the reaffirmation.

But the monastery's geographical position

once seen as a strength would soon become its weakness.

You put this monastery on a holy island

because it would protect them from armies coming from land,

they didn't think for a moment

that they would have to worry about an army coming from the sea.

June 8, 793 ad.

A sizeable force of norse vikings come from the sea.

So, the sea's quite far away now

but we know it was much closer in that eighth century

so, when the vikings pulled up on the beach in their long ship

they would have been much closer to the monastery,

really quite a quick, you know, sprint up the beach

to come and attack so the monks would not have had much warning.

According to one of the chroniclers

they came in like fierce wolves

and they murdered the monks

and they carried others off in chains.

When word of this bloody assault got out its impact was far reaching.

It's the first attack on a Christian settlement,

it's not the first attack by the vikings in britain

but it's really quite shocking, it shakes the church.

And it was on such a horrific scale

that the news spread like wildfire across Western Europe.

Gravestones found on the ground show that some believe

this was divine vengeance.

Why did st cuthbert not intervene

and prevent such barbaric slaughter and protect the monks?

For many this was a sign that doomsday was coming.

In fact, it was the start of the viking age.

The monks fled taking cuthbert's remains with them.

This wandering community of monks carried cuthbert's coffin

with them until it was enshrined at durham cathedral.

Centuries later when they felt it safe,

they returned to the holy island.

12th century monks wanted lindisfarne

to be a place of pilgrimage

and they didn't have st cuthbert's body anymore

so, they built an empty tomb

where st cuthbert had been buried

and they succeeded in making that a place of pilgrimage.

It's believed stone from the original church was reused

in the building of this later incarnation

and its layout reflects the strength of cuthbert's cult

in the middle ages.

The church that's built here

seems to be mirrored or trying to copy durham

and it becomes almost a second centre

of the cult of cuthbert.

Corner turrets, battlements and cross shaped arrow loops reflect

the later fortification of the church.

But they could only protect the monks for so long.

Lindisfarne continued as an active religious community

until Henry viii dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s

when he crushed the catholic church,

shut down all the abbeys and monasteries

and murdered the monks.

In the 1820s the central tower collapsed

but miraculously not everything was destroyed.

Well, the tower is gone

but almost magically one arch remains.

It is as though god has made a promise

that this kind of ruination won't come again.

Today, st cuthbert holds an important place in the story

of early christianity in britain.

Cuthbert is somebody who turns christianity

from the religion of britain's elites

in to the religion of britain's people.

And more than 1,000 years later the ruins on this windswept island

still draw the faithful.

People still come,

the pilgrims come in their thousands.

Lindisfarne is one of the earliest sites

of Christian pilgrimage in britain

and for many today remains a mecca of Christian history in britain.

In a rural Polish village

is a conspicuous building with a secret past.

It looks like something from afar almost out of a fairytale.

It's incredibly ornate, it's got these beautiful windows.

If you look at this building from above

you can actually see that it's laid out like a cross.

Is that a coincidence

or does it have a deeply symbolic religious meaning?

As you walk along these corridors

and you peer into the doors you realise

it looks more like a school or an infirmary, a hospital.

What its original purpose was a far cry from what it became.

This place has a really twisted history,

its roots are grounded in charity and kindness

but the ultimate application of this place

was positively diabolical.

These walls hide an incredibly dark history,

one that is still shrouded in mystery to this day.

This is mokrzeszow palace,

built in the 1880s it was designed as a hospital and sanatorium.

It was commissioned by the order of the knights of Malta

and this is a catholic organisation that is dedicated

to providing humanitarian aid to those in need.

Little remains from those early days

although not everything has gone.

Deep in the basement stowed far away

from sight there's an object that is sort of innocuous.

This item offers a vital clue to what transpired at this site.

This baby carriage holds the truth

of what this place really was.

The order of the knights of Malta kept working

in this place doing charitable work

until about 1926 when funding ran dry,

they couldn't afford to maintain the facility so they sold it

to a wealthy Jewish merchant from the area.

But his control of this building would not last for long.

In an atmosphere

of increasingly violent anti semitism,

this Jewish merchant chose to pack up his belongings and flee.

As local historian jan niewczas recalls

the merchant got out just in time.

What they used it for however was a mystery

but in 2010 a discovery was made in the cemetery across the road.

It proved something that until then had only been a terrible rumour.

Interviews with the locals also added to this evidence,

residents recalled seeing German men and women in Nazi uniforms walking

around as couples on the property and others remember children

being born here but not staying for long.

The evidence was mounting.

Everything pointed towards the theory that this site was used

by one of Hitler's top secret societies.

In the run up to the war, Hitler had multiple concerns.

He didn't just want to consolidate power

he also wanted to purify the German community.

This was all about having a pure germanic Aryan race.

And producing more and more pure aryans

to occupy this expanding German third reich.

To achieve this, Hitler set about ridding society

of those he deemed undesirable

while also increasing the birth rate.

In terms of filling that void,

Hitler turned to the nation's women, the nations Aryan women.

For starters Hitler basically had incentives for German couples

to have more kids, cash incentives, medals for having lots of children,

mothers who had a bunch of kids would get a medal from their fuhrer.

They bought together large groups of young men

and young girls for human breeding.

The next step was the lebensborn project created

in December 1935 by Hitler's right hand man henrich himmler.

It's believed this building was one of those secret locations

and the women bought here

were selected by a special medical committee.

But it wasn't just the women that had to pass tests.

For women, their life here was of a high standard

but their every move was controlled.

Once the children were born,

they were kept here for as little as two weeks.

And after that they would be sent out

to German families so they would be taken away

from their birth mothers.

The ss was responsible for the adoption and education

of the children that were bred through this program

and they were bought up with strict Nazi ideology.

Hitler believed that if you got children early

and we're talking before Hitler youth,

we're talking in the crib as infants,

if you could get control of their hearts and minds

then that was important to nazification,

to the Nazi future.

But the Nazis didn't stop at breeding Aryan children.

They went a step further.

The lebensborn program was also involved in the kidnapping

of foreign children.

The children who were kidnapped

really fit a certain phenotypical mould

win terms of hair colour, eye colour, skin colour,

it's about how people look and whether or not

they can pass as Aryan.

It is estimated that some 400,000 children

were kidnapped from across Europe

and were placed in the custody of German families.

Dozens of similar structures across Europe were exploited

for this germanisation program.

Yet most of the evidence of what went on

within these palace walls has long vanished,

until more discoveries are made the details of what happened here

will remain a mystery.

While mokrzeszow palace is now abandoned,

the lebensborn project isn't just a distant memory,

many of the children it produced are still alive today.

Probably one of the most famous

lebensborn children was one of the female singers in abba,

Freda lyngstad, her mother was mated with an ss officer.

Freda is just one of thousands

and although some may know their past,

many grew up unaware that they were the product

of a horrifying eugenics experiment.

In Israel

on the edge of the historic city of Jerusalem lies a haunting ruin.

Where the judian hills

instantly turn in to a bustling modern city,

there's an odd collection of beautiful old stone houses

clinging to a hillside.

Some of the pathways are almost obscured by vegetation,

roofs have collapsed.

It's not clear why this village is completely empty

when the land around it is quite densely settled.

This village should be a desirable place to live.

You see a water source right in the middle of the village,

something rare in this part of the world,

it's a very arid environment.

Jerusalem is such a highly developed city

because property there is so expensive.

This place would be worth loads.

Dig deeper and some aspects of these ruins don't make sense.

In the roofs that are still intact,

there are these strange holes

almost looks like someone did them intentionally.

Yacoub odeh used to live in this village

and fondly remembers the time he spent here.

This is lifta

a once idealic village built around a very precious resource.

There's actually only two year round Springs

near Jerusalem, here in these two valleys,

these are the places that you can grow fruits

and vegetables and this was actually known

as the garden of Jerusalem.

And it was this spring that bought the first settlers here

more than 2,000 years ago.

Avi mashiah of the Israel antiquities authority

has carried out a detailed investigation

of the villages past.

The first phase of the village that we can see

is from the Roman period.

You can see a big stone building like a stone watchtower

at the entrance to Jerusalem.

As the years went on lifta grew to become

an important agricultural centre for nearby Jerusalem.

You can see here the industrial passage.

This is a long corridor of 500 meters with many oil press

and dozens of service rooms and storage.

You can see here a big stone that was the base of the oil press

and the huge stone was bought

with donkey or other animal to turn it around.

Life in lifta continued relatively unchanged

as great empires Rose and fell around it.

But as the 20th century came into view, everything would change.

After thousands of years of occupation lifta

was caught in the crossfire of a modern conflict

and was struck by a great tragedy.

At the end of the first world war, britain took control of this area,

then known as mandatory Palestine.

When the British assumed stewardship of the region

after the first world war,

they in effect promised to create an arab and Jewish state

that would be self-governing.

But they were confronting a serious issue

which is that you did have a split population.

The same time there was a growing movement

among Jews in Europe to leave Europe

where they often faced various kinds of persecution

and move to Israel and build a new homeland there.

This was a source of some tension.

In the horrific aftermath of world war

two these tensions came to a head.

After the holocaust,

a lot of Jews want to move to the Palestine mandate,

they want to establish the Jewish state

that they'd been promised

by the British government way back in 1917.

And the arab population

were energised by new ideas

about arab liberation and Jewish nationalism

and arab nationalism clash.

In 1947,

as a war weary britain prepared to leave the region,

large scale violence erupted.

And lifta was caught in the middle.

This little village of lifta is right

on the road between

the mixed arab and Jewish city of Jerusalem

and the largely Jewish city of Tel Aviv on the coast.

And once fighting started in earnest between the Jewish militias

and the arab militias, this was a war zone.

(Gunfire)

Yacoub witnessed the violent conflict

that escalated here.

As the fighting continued getting ever more violent,

yacoub and his family fled the village.

Like much of Israel's recent past,

the story here is very complicated

and what actually happened depends upon

which side you're talking to.

So, the Israeli history books say the occupants of lifta fled

whereas when you talk to arabs,

they say that they were intimidated

in to leaving because of the threat of violence.

By February 1948, lifta was empty,

shortly after Israel declared its independence

and took control of this land.

The occupants were never permitted to return.

You can see these holes in the roof,

they were put there intentionally to make the buildings uninhabitable.

Today lifta faces an uncertain future.

After centuries of existence this historic village faces

a new threat,

there are plans in the works to build luxurious accommodations

but it's not a done deal yet.

The Israeli antiquities bureau has also explored this area

and documented how old some of these structures really are

and so now they're involved in helping make that decision

but it looks like there is a pretty strong movement

against doing anything that would radically change

this little historic piece of the past of this region.

And yacoub and the other former residents

of lifta haven't given up hope of one day returning.

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