Original subtitles

In Poland, a fairy-tale castle

at the heart of a modern-day treasure hunt.

The world's media descended on what brought them all here -

it was the promise of Nazi gold.

An American millionaire's mansion, caught in a web of controversy.

We're talking about insurance claims and alcoholism.

Murder.

A ghostly shell in Lebanon with an influential past.

A group met here that would shape the modern Middle East.

And an Irish country estate drawn into a brutal fight for freedom.

Owned by one of the most hated men in Ireland,

some say that this house was cursed.

Decaying relics...

...ruins of lost worlds...

...sights haunted by the past...

...their secrets waiting to be revealed.

In southern Poland is a commanding residence

rumoured to harbour a precious secret.

Up on the hilltop, kind of above the tree line,

is this grand, majestic structure.

Inside, that splendour continues.

Red carpeted staircases lead up to huge hallways

with marble floors.

Yet this opulent citadel has hidden depths.

Behind an ordinary-looking door is a secret subterranean world.

As your eyes adjust, you start to get a sense of

just how large this space is.

It's like you're walking through a railway tunnel.

Some of the tunnels even seem to have collapsed

or have been deliberately destroyed, perhaps to hide something.

For decades, tales were told

of a brutal regime's riches that went missing in this exact area.

In 2016, it appeared the truth would finally be revealed.

And everybody's waiting for the moment

when we finally get to see the thing we're looking for -

Nazi gold.

There's been some sort of fortification here

since the late 1200s,

but over time, it's been destroyed and rebuilt.

In the early 1500s, the Hoberg family took control,

and their descendants owned it right up into the 20th century.

But in 1941, the Nazi regime

confiscated the castle from its owners.

When the Germans invaded and occupied Poland

during the Second World War,

they seized many lavish residences.

This one is called Ksiaz Castle, and it was intended to serve as

the Fuhrer's imperial headquarters in this region.

They wanted to make it a palace fit for Hitler himself, and in 1943,

work began on remodelling the interiors to fit his tastes.

The Nazis are going to rip out everything they think of

as decadent or over-decorative.

But it was below ground that the biggest changes were made.

To ensure his safety, a private escape elevator was installed

just opposite Hitler's bedroom door.

The elevator led to a vast underground network,

excavated at great human cost by inmates

from a nearby concentration camp.

The sheer scale of the tunnel system

suggests it was much more than just a place for Hitler to hide.

Germany is under immense stress, by this point, in the war.

Scarce war materials like concrete, reinforcing bar, all of these things

which could be used anywhere in the German Reich,

are being used here.

What is it that justifies their use in this place?

Historians have theorised that they could have been anything,

from bomb proof underground factories to chemical,

or even nuclear research labs.

There is another theory that might explain what these tunnels

were used for.

Ksiaz Castle has long been linked to a legend

forged in the dying days of the Second World War.

It began when the Soviet Red Army

approached the Nazi-occupied city of Breslau, 60 miles from here.

It's said that during the chaos of the evacuation,

an armoured train was loaded up with more than 330 tonnes of gold,

a vast array of jewels, weaponry and priceless works of art.

So the train supposedly left the city just before the attack

and started heading down the line nearby, that ran to the castle.

The legend has it that this armoured train rattled through one station,

but never came to the next station.

But huge armoured trains don't just disappear.

The story goes that there was a railway line

leading into these tunnel networks,

and that once the train had passed through,

the entrance to the tunnel was blown up,

hiding the train inside.

Piotr Koper is a treasure hunter who has spent over a decade

searching for Hitler's lost gold.

He suspects the tunnels below Ksiaz Castle

were a secret underground train line,

once connected to the main railway line,

only two miles from here.

Is.

In August 2015, Piotr and his business partner

made an exciting discovery under an earthen embankment

next to the main railway line.

The fortune hunters used ground-penetrating radar

to build up an image of what was hidden below ground.

Pyotr applied for permission to start digging,

and the next year, access was granted,

but the local authorities gave him just seven days

to complete his investigation,

because the train line running next to the excavation site

had to be shut down during this time.

On August 16th, 2016, work began.

The world's media descended.

I mean, they were following every moment.

It's so exciting the idea that at long last,

after decades of tales of Nazi gold,

we're finally going to find some.

There was a lot on the line for Piotr and his partner.

Not only had they invested a reported $131,000 in the dig,

their reputations were also at stake.

The clock was ticking.

So after seven days of digging, they found nothing.

No tunnel, no gold, no train.

In the spotlight of the world's media,

Pyotr and his team were forced to give up.

Although Peter's hunt for the Nazi gold train didn't go as planned,

the media attention did provide an unexpected boost

to the region's economy.

An official from a nearby town actually admitted

that during the year of the dig, tourism was up 44%.

And who knows, perhaps the Nazi gold train is still out there

waiting to be found.

In Atlanta, Georgia, is an extravagant home

built from the riches of one of the world's

most famous business empires.

We are in the leafy suburban neighbourhood of Druid Hills,

and if you go about 500ft back from the road,

there is this enormous mansion.

It sits on Briarcliff Road in an area known as Briarcliff Village.

I'm guessing that Briarcliff has something important

in the history of this region, but what does it mean?

Inside are these huge rooms with carved wood panelling,

a grand, like, Gothic ballroom,

numerous bedrooms.

And on the top floor, there seems to be a hidden door

in one of the wall panels.

The curiosities of this mansion can only be explained

by the eccentricities of its owner, the heir to a vast fortune.

He was often at the centre of a lot of different controversy.

He did whatever he wanted and he didn't care.

This story's sort of like a real life version of Succession.

I'm talking powerful people, narcissism...

Greed, sibling rivalry and abuses of power, all of which left

a permanent legacy in the city of Atlanta.

I moved to Atlanta in 2000, and I lived here for about 15 years

before I read about this abandoned mansion in the suburbs and thought,

I've got to go out and see it.

Sarah Butler is an author and expert on the history

of this century-old property.

Her first visit inspired a five-year journey of discovery.

I found all of these stories about the man who built it,

and the stories were kind of wild.

Everything in this house was designed to impress.

In order to understand the man, you have to understand the house.

This is the home of Asa Griggs Candler Jr.

Or, as his friends and family

referred to him, as Buddy.

He had a life of immense privilege, given that he was the second son

and namesake of Coca-Cola founder Asa Griggs Candler.

But the journey that motivated Buddy to build such a sprawling estate

was not as simple as it might appear.

As the story goes, Buddy was a troubled kid.

He was mischievous, according to everyone.

He was just really difficult to discipline.

Around the time that he turned eight was when his father closed the deal

to take full ownership of Coca-Cola and really take it on.

And that's where he needed his attention to be.

The only solution, they felt, was to send him away

to an all-girls school.

The reason for that is, Asa Sr, his sister, ran the school.

His status as the black sheep of the family

only got worse as time went on.

During college, Buddy moved in with his older brother, Charles Howard.

Buddy soon developed a reputation for bad behaviour.

He made so much trouble that his brother,

whose grades were great during his freshman year, started going down,

so he was kind of dragging his brother down with him.

His father wrote a letter that said,

"I don't know what I'm going to do with Buddy,

"but I got to find something to do with him."

And they shipped him off to California for a year.

Fresh out of college, Buddy was given a shot

at running the family business on the West Coast,

overseeing manufacturing, orders and fulfilment.

It didn't go well.

It probably didn't help that he spent most of his time

drinking and partying.

Asa Candler Sr never let him have a part of Coca-Cola

as a business ever again.

His older brother was always the son who did things right,

and Buddy was sort of the son who did things wrong.

And that put Buddy in a position of always trying to outshine him.

That motivation prompted Buddy to build

an attention-grabbing property just to compete with his brother.

But he'd made so many failed investments

that he didn't have the money to buy the land

to build his new house on.

Yet Buddy always found a way.

So in 1911, a big fire broke out in his garage

and destroyed all of his very valuable cars,

all insured and conveniently, within about a month,

he's moving his family out to this property

that he couldn't quite afford to close on until that moment.

Buddy may have owned the land, but he still didn't have the funds

to build his dream house.

He would have to wait until the Coca-Cola company was sold in 1919,

when each of the Candler siblings was paid out handsomely.

Buddy finally got the cash he needed to start building the house

that would put his siblings in the shade.

It was called Briarcliff Mansion.

By 1922, when Buddy was 42 years old,

it was ready for he and his family to move into.

One of the things that I love

is that his brother already lived on this road.

He built this house and renamed the road,

so he renamed his brother's address Briarcliff.

It was a nice little kind of... finger to his brother.

The name Briarcliff actually comes from

Buddy's most beloved sports car, the Lozier Briarcliff.

This, surprisingly, was one of the few cars to survive

the mysterious fire in his garage.

In 1925,

Buddy was still not content with his home,

and so he decided to build a music hall

that included an in-home organ.

The organ, for me, is a really key part of the story

to understand Buddy.

It was a little bit bigger than his brother's,

which was a little bit bigger than their father's.

So I like to say, in this family,

there was an organ-measuring contest,

but the organs were actually organs.

But Buddy was never satisfied for long,

and always needed something else to occupy his time.

One of the things that sort of marked out Buddy's life

was his obsessions.

You know, he always had to have the latest, shiniest toy.

He always needed an exciting new hobby,

and in this case, that exciting new hobby was magic.

He filled a room with his magic tricks,

and he would regularly take an aeroplane to New York City

just to buy more.

In one instance, instead of going to the magic store in New York,

he simply wrote out a $10,000 cheque

and asked for one item of everything in the catalogue.

His devotion didn't stop there.

On a family holiday to the Philippines,

he met a local magician named Jose Cruz.

Buddy was so impressed

that he actually took him back with him to America.

Cruz was officially employed as a butler, but his real job

was as Buddy's personal magic tutor.

But soon, a terrible scandal was going to engulf Briarcliff Mansion,

and Buddy's love of magic would be the least of the casualties.

On the 18th of January 1931,

Buddy was woken with the news

that Cruz had been found dead on the grounds of his property.

But this wasn't an ordinary death.

Jose's body was found next to a young woman named Gladys,

and Gladys was also his lover,

and at first, it appeared that the two

had died in what appeared to be a double suicide.

Gladys's parents disapproved of the relationship

because Cruz was Filipino.

The suicide note suggested that the couple felt death

was the only way they could be together forever.

But things didn't quite add up.

Ultimately, what was determined by a jury pulled together very quickly

was that it was a murder suicide.

Jose Cruz was very troubled,

and he killed her and killed himself.

It made national news.

For Buddy, the press attention was a major embarrassment.

He went to great lengths to try and bury the story,

leveraging his many family connections

to try to make the story go away.

The whole affair kind of left a bitter taste in Buddy's mouth,

so he gave up magic completely.

The one thing, though, he did not give up, was the bottle.

It's even rumoured that the start of his next adventure came

because he was drunk and at a circus in Europe,

and bought a bunch of animals.

In order to fund his newest hobby, he began charging admission

for people to come visit his private zoo.

We're not just talking elephants, we're talking lions, tigers,

black panthers, Shetland ponies, a whole pack of bears.

But like many of his other projects, this one was doomed from the start.

What he didn't anticipate was how expensive it was

to run a zoo on your own lawn.

A dime a person was never going to make him enough money

to make this viable.

So within a year, he was already running in the red.

Within two years, he was starting to lose his temper with people -

this was heavy in the drinking years.

Buddy was so disheartened, he gave away many of the animals

to what would later become Atlanta City Zoo.

His life was spiralling out of control

and something had to give.

At some point, late '30s, early 1940s,

he has this realisation that he is an alcoholic

and he can't live like this anymore,

and he decides to get right with God.

All evidence points to him

successfully giving up alcohol completely,

so he spent that latter part of his life completely sober.

But by then, much of the damage had already been done to his health

and his finances.

In 1947,

he was, by his standards, short of cash,

and so he was forced to sell off Briarcliff.

Now, according to those who knew him, it was a pretty crushing blow

for him to give up his beloved mansion.

Six years later, in 1953, Buddy died from liver cancer at the age of 72.

He may not have left the legacy that he hoped for,

but he definitely left his impact on the city.

Nobody is black and white, good or bad.

He loved his family and friends.

His family and friends loved him.

He really did care about Atlanta,

but he also cared about himself more.

The irony is that Buddy's mansion ended up turning into

Georgia's first alcohol addiction treatment centre,

and it functions in that capacity through the 1980s.

After that, it was abandoned.

In 1998, Emory University purchased the 42-acre estate

that included Buddy's mansion from the Atlanta government.

Now, a multi-million dollar renovation is in the works.

Gary Hauk is Emory University's historian.

I'm sure Buddy would have been heartbroken to see

what had been done to the building

over the 100 years since the building was finished.

Given the importance of the Candler family

to the development of modern Atlanta,

I think it's really vital to preserve the building as it is

and to restore it, perhaps as it once was.

In County Limerick, Ireland, stands a fallen symbol

of the nation's troubled history.

What we see is a patchwork of fields with cattle grazing.

It's quiet, idyllic, a picturesque part of the Irish countryside.

But right at the centre of it all is an unusual, imposing structure.

It could be a ruined Roman temple, abandoned for 2000 years,

but the Romans never made it to Ireland.

Whoever built this, at tremendous expense by the look of it,

didn't expect it to end up in the middle of a cow pasture.

Yet the sparse interiors retain a glimmer of faded prosperity.

You can still make out the outlines of big baronial fireplaces,

big heroic staircases winding up to a second storey.

It's got corridors and doorways everywhere, with countless rooms

and underground vaults.

So this was clearly a stately home of wealth and distinction.

The actions of its influential owner

made him one of the most hated figures in Ireland.

He did everything in his power to prevent

the emancipation of Catholics.

Inside this building, policies were formulated.

Decisions were taken that would lead to, you know,

an absolute bloodletting across the country of Ireland.

Little did he know, but he would end up sowing the seeds

for the destruction of his own home.

I visited this house over ten years ago.

It's in a derelict state at the moment,

and this has probably advanced in the intervening years.

David Hicks is an architectural historian with a passion

for large country homes like this one.

They were said to be 22 bedrooms, five reception rooms,

a six-acre walled garden.

And what is very interesting is the people inside this house

had a huge influence on the wider community, a huge influence

on the Catholic population nationally.

This is Mountshannon House.

It was bought and expanded in the 1760s by John Fitzgibbon,

an affluent lawyer and politician from nearby Limerick.

The origin of his fortune dates back to a time when Ireland

was a country under siege.

In the mid 1600s, the English leader Oliver Cromwell

led a brutal crackdown on Catholics in Ireland

after they had rebelled

against the British crown.

As punishment for the uprising,

vast tracts of land were confiscated

and given to British Protestant settlers.

It also ushered in an era of strong penal laws against Catholics,

designed to maintain the power of the Protestant elite.

There was huge restriction placed on Catholics

in terms of land ownership, education,

even the type of career they could pursue.

John Fitzgibbon was raised Catholic,

and the only way he could have owned an estate of this size

was by making a great sacrifice.

John changed his religion in order that he could pursue a law career

and also practice in the courts, as Catholics were banned

from practising law in the courts at that time.

He was very successful and he died a very wealthy man by 1780.

He never forgot his roots, though, and often defended Catholics

for fighting the Penal Laws.

But Fitzgibbon's son and heir, also named John,

was cut from a different cloth.

Being born and raised in the elite class of the Protestant Ascendancy

seemed to go straight to his head.

And curious thing about him,

he saw the dilemmas his father had wrestled with being a Catholic,

and instead of that filling him with a kind of compassion

and understanding for the plight of Catholics in their own land,

it made him even more bigoted, even more oppressive

than the English themselves.

Fitzgibbon Jr rose to become a powerful politician

and enforced his beliefs without mercy.

He did everything he could to ally himself to the Crown,

always desperate to fit in with the English aristocracy,

and spent his life opposing Catholic emancipation.

By the late 1700s, trouble was brewing.

Irish Catholics, increasingly frustrated by the injustice

of the Penal Laws, were beginning to organise.

There's Irish nationalist groups like the Society For United Irishmen

who form and say, look, we need to, like, unite together

and take our land back from these British interlopers.

Unsurprisingly, Fitzgibbon threw everything he could at them,

outlawing the group and forcing its members underground.

The United Irishmen didn't give up so easily.

Inspired by the successes of the American and French revolutions,

they resorted to an armed rebellion across Ireland in 1798.

But after a few months, British troops had defeated the rebels

in battles around the country.

Fitzgibbon authorised the arrest and imprisonment of the Irish

without trial, and resorted to the most brutal torture

as forms of intimidation.

Hundreds were executed and many deported to Australia.

Fitzgibbon's greatest betrayal of his fellow countrymen

was still to come.

The rebellion prompted the Prime Minister to pass the Act Of Union,

which formally incorporated Ireland

into the Union Of Great Britain And Ireland.

Under the terms of the act, Ireland's parliament

was to be abolished.

Yet many British politicians felt the time had come to grant

Irish Catholics more freedom.

But fearing that more Catholic power would ruin the country,

Fitzgibbon convinced King George III

not to give his royal assent, saying it would violate his coronation oath

to maintain Protestantism.

And he is famous for saying that the Act Of Union

would make Ireland as tame as a mutilated cat.

The bitter irony was that Fitzgibbon's fanaticism would lead

to his own downfall.

His rule in Ireland was so harsh that he alienated even the British,

who said, you know, this is no way to knit together

Ireland and the United Kingdom, with these kind of policies.

So he wasn't kept on in the government.

He returned to Mountshannon deeply depressed.

Call it karma,

but the next year he died after falling off his horse

when he was riding around his estate.

The people of Limerick thought it would be a suitable memorial to him

to deposit a number of dead cats, not only on his coffin

but on his grave.

And this, I think, illustrates how much this man was disliked

in the locality.

Over the next century, the Irish nationalist movement gathered pace,

fuelled in part by the actions of men like John Fitzgibbon.

But ultimately, it would take a global conflict to pave the road

for lasting change in Ireland.

The First World War halted the passage of a new law

known as Home Rule, which was meant to give Ireland more local control.

In 1916, militant republicans staged an uprising in Dublin.

It became known as the Easter Rebellion or the Easter Uprising.

The rebels were surrounded and bombarded.

Thousands were sent to internment camps

and 16 of their leaders were executed.

With this violent repression, mainstream Irish opinion

turned strongly against the British.

In 1919, the War of Independence broke out.

The Irish forces united under the banner of the Irish Republican Army,

more commonly known by its initials, the IRA.

The IRA only had a few thousand men and limited supplies,

so were forced to fight a guerrilla campaign.

Their tactics included ambush, bombings,

espionage, and assassinations.

The Irish feel that they've been kept down for centuries

by the English, so it becomes a really nasty war.

The southwestern city of Limerick was an IRA stronghold,

which made it a target for British forces.

Mountshannon house would be caught in the crossfire.

The one thing to understand

in the political upheaval of Ireland in the 1920s

was that a house like this could be used as a barracks.

It sat within a demesne of 900 acres,

so therefore from the surrounding area, if anyone was approaching,

it could easily be defended.

As well as seen as being an asset to some,

it was also seen as a threat if your enemy took control of it.

With forewarning that thousands of British troops

were about to arrive in Ireland,

The IRA set out on a campaign to destroy structures

that might be used as barracks to house these troops.

On the 14th of June, 1920, John Fitzgibbon's once lavish estate

was razed to the ground.

A band of IRA volunteers snuck into Mountshannon.

They planted paper and hay around the building

and covered it in oil.

The house burned for three days, and a massive fire

could be seen from Limerick.

There's a real circular aspect to the story,

because Mountshannon House is burned to the ground

by the very Irish nationalists that are basically fanned into life

by the repressive policies of this guy Fitzgibbon

back in the early 19th century.

In 1921, a year after Mountshannon was destroyed,

a peace treaty was agreed.

The terms of the deal divided the country into Ireland,

which was independent, and Northern Ireland,

which remained part of the United Kingdom.

Mountshannon stands as a haunting symbol

of the turbulent history of Ireland

and its long struggle to achieve autonomy.

I think this house needs to be opened up, conserved,

studied and just another element of our history

that maybe we need to become more familiar with.

In the mountainous region of Sofar, Lebanon,

an eerie ruin dominates the landscape.

Up here, there's a blizzard raging.

As you make your way up the road,

the outline of this palatial building comes into focus.

The roof is entirely missing

and snow is just piling up on the top floor.

You can see how well built it is,

that even though it's been empty for many decades, it still stands.

Inside, little remains of the structure's glorious past.

In one room, there's a plush, red sofa and a mirrored table.

There's no doubt, this was a room for entertaining.

In this lobby, you see these two grand, curving staircases.

Clearly in its day, it was a place to make an entrance.

In the beginning, this was a beacon for the rich and famous.

In the end, it became a tragic victim of circumstance.

The history here wasn't all happy.

These holes in the walls look a lot like bullet holes.

Carlos Haber's family has been the caretakers of this site

for almost a century.

Today, he continues that legacy.

The family that Carlos and his ancestors worked for

were one of the wealthiest in Lebanon.

The Sursocks are a Greek Orthodox Christian family

that have lived in Beirut since the 18th century.

They became powerful bankers, traders, importers,

all sorts of businesses,

and of course, along the way,

they acquired a great amount of power and influence

in the political system.

But this was not the Sursocks private home.

It was an ambitious business venture,

intended to serve society's upper echelons.

This is the Grand Sofar Hotel.

It first welcomed guests in 1892.

Alfred and Michel Sursock

had a vision for a lavish getaway

catering to the rich and famous of the Arab world.

Their timing could not have been better.

A few years after the hotel opened,

the first railroad running from the coast in Beirut

to Damascus in Syria opened.

Passengers could step right off the train and through the doors

of one of the most luxurious destinations in the Middle East.

You know, you think of the Middle East as being

quite culturally conservative, and much of it, of course, was.

But Lebanon was always different,

and this hotel really exemplified it.

You had gambling, you had drinking.

Lord knows what else was going on behind those walls.

The hedonistic mountain retreat became the place to be

for fun-loving celebrities.

The hotel was a destination for big names across the Arab world,

including the actor Omar Sharif and the Lebanese singer Sabah.

The hotel wasn't just a place for nightlife

and for the rich and famous to blow off steam.

It was also a meeting place for political leaders.

In the late 1940s, the luxury resort hosted a gathering

of presidents and kings.

The powerful group would come to shape the modern Middle East

and trigger a series of events that led to disaster

at the Grand Sofar Hotel.

After World War II, the whole world was, in a way reorganising itself.

Borders that had been established by European powers

were being renegotiated.

This was especially true in the Middle East.

The Arab League was formed in 1945 as a way for the Arab states

to develop their economies and coordinate their political aims.

In October 1947, leaders from Syria, Jerusalem, Lebanon

and Saudi Arabia all met here at the Grand Sofar Hotel.

There was a lot happening in the region

that concerned them greatly.

In particular, there was the move to create the State Of Israel

in a portion of Palestine.

In the smoky rooms of the hotel,

they drafted an agreement for an Arab army,

discussed a United Arab currency,

and, most importantly, pledged support for Palestine.

In 1948, Israel declared its independence.

In response, the Arab League countries

launched a synchronised attack.

After almost a year of fighting, a fragile armistice was reached.

But over the next 25 years, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees

sought shelter in Lebanon.

Tension between the Muslim and Christian populations grew

until it finally boiled over.

When the civil war erupted in the 1970s,

every aspect of life in Lebanon was upended.

Even here in Sofar,

warring militias battled throughout the town.

As the casualties mounted, they needed somewhere

to house their wounded.

But the Grand Sofar Hotel

would soon be taken over by another invading force.

In 1976, Syrian leader Hafez al-Assad

ordered his army to move in to neighbouring Lebanon

in a supposed Arab League effort to try to restore order.

The Syrians set up their headquarters

in the abandoned hotel, and as troops so often do,

they wrecked the place.

They even stripped tiles to line and reinforce their trenches.

The Lebanese Civil War raged on until 1990.

Syria didn't withdraw their troops from the country until 2005.

By that time, the Grand Sofar Hotel had been destroyed

beyond all recognition.

The hotel is still in the hands of the Sursock family.

Of course, it's a magnificent ruin,

but a grandson of the family, in recent years,

has tried to restore it as a site for artistic exhibitions.

Carlos is optimistic about what the future holds.

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