Original subtitles

In Panama, a jungle stronghold

built to defend a prized American possession.

The Nazis knew that if they destroyed what this protected,

they could potentially defeat the Allies.

In Italy, the hilltop haunt of a mad scientist.

There's grates to an underground dungeon and shackles on a wall

as if you're in a torture chamber.

A remote Bulgarian facility that brought hope to its occupants.

At a time when the rest of Eastern Europe was suffering

under an oppressive communist system,

this complex was in its golden age.

And in Germany, a ghostly railway

divides a city, fractured by conflict.

Families were torn apart and this became

a staging post to fight back.

Decaying relics.

Ruins of lost worlds.

Sites haunted by the past.

Their secrets, waiting to be revealed.

In northern Panama,

dense rainforest hides remnants of an imperial age.

We're in the muggy, steamy jungle

and in between the trees, you see these buildings

that, from a distance, you might almost think were Mayan ruins.

But these are clearly modern, man-made structures.

These are very solid, lots of reinforced concrete.

The thing's built to last.

Exploring deeper, there are few clues to its original function.

There really isn't anything left. It's dark and it's dingy.

But you can imagine this was once bustling and filled with people,

whose job was to man the facilities here.

A distinctive, rectangular structure

suggests this was once a defensive stronghold.

One of the buildings is red and white.

It's got these, kind of, porthole-like windows

and on the side it says Battery Baird.

It's facing the sea,

so it's clearly some kind of a military fortification.

Today, this is just a crumbling outpost in the jungle.

But there was a time when this place was pivotal to the defence

of one of the most important pieces of infrastructure in the world.

Joe Berger lives in the nearby city of Colon.

When he was growing up, this was his playground.

My parents were working here from the '80s and in the '90s

and the guys would dress me up with military fatigues

and they'd put all the military makeup on your face so you could,

like, blend into the jungle and all that.

It was towards the end of the American presence here.

Joe's ancestors first came to Panama from Pennsylvania

more than a century ago.

Not as part of the military, but to help construct

one of the world's most ambitious engineering projects.

My family came down in 1907

to work on the Panama Canal, to build the Panama Canal.

It really is impossible to overstate how significant

this was to global history.

For as long as Europeans have been colonising the Americas,

they have been looking for a shortcut to connect

the Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific Ocean.

In the late 19th century,

the French were the first to try and cut through Panama.

They discovered an area that was full of mosquito-borne diseases,

especially yellow fever and malaria.

It's estimated the French lost about 20,000 people in their effort

to dig the canal. By 1899, they'd given up.

But then along comes the United States and says,

"We need a Panama Canal to connect our east coast and west coast

and unite the continent and to give us ready access

to Asia and Europe from either coast."

The American government purchased the abandoned French assets

and the rights to the canal for $40 million.

Construction began in 1904,

but only after US engineers figured out how to succeed,

where the French had run into trouble.

There is a big river called the Chagres River

that runs from the Panama highlands down to the Atlantic

and sometimes it floods. It caused a lot of problems for the French.

So the Americans, they build this huge dam called the Gatun Dam

and formed a giant reservoir in the middle of Panama

that feeds the canal.

Without that water, the Panama Canal cannot operate.

By 1914, the 50-mile long waterway was opened for business.

Effectively, the Panama Canal project

cost about $375 million.

And obviously, when you spend that much money,

you want to protect your investment.

So they decide, "All right, we need to put fortifications around

the canal to be able to protect that from any outside attack."

This is Fort Sherman.

It was made up of seven defence batteries

intended to protect the Atlantic entrance

to the canal and the Gatun Dam.

You've got, like, 14-inch guns, ten-inch guns,

all these battery positions ready to absolutely pummel

any adversary that closes up on the canal.

This is Battery Baird and over there, that's Battery Howard.

In order to triangulate the place where they're going to hit,

they'd have a viewing point over on one side

and a viewing point over on the other.

And with their calculations, they would be able to triangulate

where the ship was heading.

And then, right here is where those calculations, those coordinations,

would pop up for the people down there operating the mortars

to be able to line it up accordingly.

Altogether, Fort Sherman was really this formidable ring

of concrete and firepower.

In the decades to come, it would be put to the test.

In 1939, Europe went to war

and from the start, Americans feared that

the canal could potentially be a German target.

It was absolutely vital to be able to move forces and trade

between the two oceans, and if an enemy could take it out,

that could be their path to victory.

The US had to do everything they could

to keep enemy aircraft from ever reaching it.

As the United States got involved in the Second World War,

they saw the necessity for more troops.

These are where the soldiers would be stationed.

The perceived threat was all too real.

Fort Sherman was well prepared,

so in order for an attack to be successful,

the Nazis knew they would have to use a different approach.

Under the code name Operation Pelikan,

the Germans made an audacious plan.

They have this idea. "We're going to put a couple of

Ju 87 Stuka dive-bombers in pieces on U-boats

and we're going to, like, sail them to this little island

just off the coast from Panama."

And then we're going to, like, put 'em together,

load 'em up with, like, a dam-busting type bomb

and then we're going to bomb the Gatun Dam."

A successful strike may have altered the course of the war.

If you could knock out that dam, it would take years

for the Americans to rebuild and reopen the canal.

Ultimately, what happened to that plan? We don't really know.

I mean, the Stukas never appeared over Panama,

never dropped bombs on the Gatun Dam.

Fortunately, the canal was never attacked.

And eventually, the army came up with another use

for this outpost in the jungle.

Many of the soldiers who were destined to go to the Vietnam War

did their jungle training here.

So there was even a mock-up Vietnam village

that was set here for them to train in.

Former Lieutenant Colonel Dan Smith served in the US Special Forces

for almost 20 years.

When I came here, I was 23 years old.

First, they would give you basic living,

plants that were poisonous, things you could eat,

poisonous snakes and non-poisonous snakes

and then they would teach you how to build a jungle refuge.

Learning to survive in the jungle was the easy part.

Soldiers were also trained to withstand potential enemy torture.

This area, I can remember

because they had a different torture in every room.

We were brought here blindfolded

and immediately stripped of all of our clothing

and they would send you in for an interrogation

and if you refused to answer,

they would send you out and you could go into the birdcage,

which was about that high. It was made of barbed wire.

They put it down over you and then you couldn't move.

And if it was on an ant nest, better.

Only the toughest went the distance.

I had one classmate and they put him in a box with water up to here

and every 60 seconds, they would pound on it with a heavy log.

And he came out of there screaming. He got claustrophobia.

They said, "All right, you're out." That was it.

I went to Vietnam in 1967

and it was challenging, but I think my training was good.

After the Vietnam War, this facility was still used for jungle training,

but Fort Sherman's end was in sight.

On the 31st of December 1999,

the US surrendered control of the canal to Panama,

ending its 150-year presence in the country.

The American government tried to retain Fort Sherman,

but the Panamanians, like, held firm and they said,

"No Yankees on Panamanian soil." So the Americans handed it back.

But it just, sort of, fell into disuse.

And so it's been taken back by the jungle in the years since.

My grandfather helped build the canal.

So I've been steeped in the lure of the canal since I was a little kid.

Going back and seeing a fort like this,

all the work that went into protecting that canal,

to save it from being attacked or destroyed,

it's a reminder to us of how crucial this kind of infrastructure

can be in our civilisation.

On the outskirts of Bologna, Italy,

an eclectic structure defies explanation.

There's gold leaf onion domes,

minarets, towers and turrets.

It looks like it was built one wing at a time,

each one in its own style.

There are endless medieval, Arab, Moorish decorations

in a labyrinth of towers, staircases and courtyards.

It's clear this is the creation of a very wealthy individual,

one whose face is immortalised in the stained glass.

Here, he came up with his greatest invention.

He set out to cure cancer

and the famous and the desperate made pilgrimages to the sanctuary.

The creator of this peculiar world won international acclaim,

but his monumental legacy would become his prison.

At the heart of it all is a drawbridge,

not at the front of the building, but inside it.

You must have a certain frame of mind

to build a drawbridge on the outside of your private quarters.

He descended into paranoia.

He felt like everyone was out to get him.

Carlotta Rubini grew up in the shadow of this looming mansion.

We always got used to this mysterious castle on top of the hill

that we didn't know much about.

But I could never see the castle from the inside

because it closed before I was born.

For decades, rumours circulated in the local area

about the eccentric man who once lived here.

In August 2015, Carlotta got to find out the truth.

I remember the first time I walked in here,

I was, like, pinching myself

because I couldn't believe I finally got to set foot

inside this castle.

We were able to learn the real story of the Count Cesare Mattei.

By most measures, Cesare Mattei led an enviable life,

but it wasn't without hardship.

Born to a wealthy Bologna family in 1809,

illness influenced his life from an early age.

He was just 21 when his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer,

which she fought for 15 years before it eventually killed her.

Disappointed by incompetent doctors,

he decided to take matters into his own hands.

His purpose was to find a new medicine

that could cure everything from a simple cold to cancer.

In 1850, he acquired this hillside to build a residence

that would house his growing obsession.

Cesare didn't trust anyone else with the design

and was the architect of his own outlandish vision.

It became known as Rocchetta Mattei.

The count loved the Moorish style,

which is prominent inside the castle.

Eccentric is a good word to describe it, I think.

It's very peculiar.

But it was more than just Cesare's folly.

Here, he would atone for his mother's drawn-out death.

He came up with an alternative form of medicine

called electro-homeopathy.

This is the room of the visions, where the count claims

to have had the original idea for his medicine,

which he then had painted on the wall there.

Cesare believed his unique, plant-based method

could cure diseases by balancing electrical charges

and chemicals inside the body.

He turned to grinding various plants into pulps

and mixing them in vials.

It was made of 33 types of granules and five liquids

that, mixed together in different dosages,

were supposed to cure everything.

He administered his herbal concoctions

to the sick of Bologna without charge.

Word spread and patients soon came from all over the world

to take the supposedly magical medicine.

And as Cesare's empire expanded, he won approval

from the very highest authority.

So this room is the Pope's room

and it was originally built by Mattei to host Pope Pius IX.

But all of a sudden, the good friendship

between the Pope and the count stopped. We don't know why.

And it was a big blow to the count,

for the Pope to ignore him and never come to the castle

after he built all of this for him.

Despite the high-profile snub,

electro homeopathy continued to go from strength to strength.

At the height of his empire,

there were some 107 distribution centres throughout the world,

from the UK to America and China.

There's even mention of the remedies in a novel

by the famous author, Dostoevsky.

But in 1873, after surviving a horrifying train crash,

Cesare became increasingly reclusive

and gradually withdrew into his house on the hill,

where he lived, childless, single and alone.

But Cesare was getting older and he had no named heir.

Increasingly aware of his legacy,

Cesare turned to his closest family to maintain his empire.

But a betrayal would threaten to destroy everything he'd built.

The count's mental health had deteriorated

and he made the fateful decision

to allow his nephew, Luigi, to run the business.

His nephew was originally supposed to inherit everything,

but his nephew liked to gamble and he had embezzled a lot of money.

Luigi brought Cesare to the edge of bankruptcy

and the count had to rely on a long-time collaborator,

Mario Venturoli, to save him from ruin.

He was able to make the count get back most of the money he had lost.

As a thank you, the count adopted him and made him his heir.

He brought Mario to live with him in his castle

and gave him his own private quarters in a separate wing.

But Cesare was growing increasingly deluded

and became convinced that Mario and his wife were trying to kill him.

Cesare Mattei did not like her

and accused her of trying to poison him through coffee.

The claim was never proven, but whether it was true or not,

the story says much about the state of Cesare's mental health.

It got worse and it got to the point where he trusted no-one,

except for his maid.

Cesare's paranoia was most evident in his castle's innermost sanctum.

This was the entrance to the private quarters of the count.

There's a drawbridge here, in the middle of the stairwell,

which is a bit bizarre,

but he built this so that he could isolate himself

from the rest of the castle.

He actually passed away on his own, inside his quarters

and he was found a few days later,

after they pulled down the drawbridge.

Mario inherited Rocchetta Mattei in 1904,

but one crucial piece of information was missing.

Mario Venturoli could never replicate the same medicine.

The count never shared his recipe with anyone.

He and the maid were the only people who made the medicine in here.

She survived the count.

She never shared the medicine with Venturoli or anyone else.

Even so, Mario managed to keep the practice

of electro homeopathy going

until the mid-20th century, using his own method.

As modern science develops, the appetite for homeopathy

and pseudoscientific remedies waned.

Mario stayed in Rocchetta Mattei until his death in 1937.

Over the following years, the building changed hands several times.

It briefly opened as a tourist attraction.

They branded it as a medieval castle

and they brought in torture chambers and these unsettling statues.

In the late 1980s, it was deemed unsafe and forced to close.

In 2015, after almost a decade of restoration,

the castle was opened to the public once again.

It provided an opportunity for people to learn

about this eccentric count.

There's still an air of mystery

and so much that we don't know about him or his life.

The interest in the tourists' faces

and people coming from completely different cultures,

they have no idea what went on in Italy.

I feel, like, a lot of pride in my hometown.

In the breathtaking sierras of central Bulgaria,

the sharp lines of a brutalist structure

slice through the fresh mountain air.

All you can see for miles around

is the rolling landscape and thick forests.

This is a place of calm and tranquillity

and then, you see it.

This strange, long straight line poking out

from the top of the treetops. It's, like, dagger shaped.

And it goes on and on and on and on.

It's curious to have a building of this size

just plonked down in the middle of nowhere.

The remote location holds the key to this structure's function.

We are as far away as you can get

from the smog and smut of a big city.

It could be a hotel, like an outdoor resort,

but inside it has more of an institutional feel.

There are what appear to be lots of dormitories.

The distinctive design hints at its origin.

You've got rooms with books just falling off the walls.

There's what looks like a cinema and a gymnasium

and then you see things that give the game away,

surgical rooms, X-ray machines, lab equipment.

This was clearly some kind of medical facility.

The unlikely visionaries behind this complex

were ahead of their time.

This place was built by not one, but two enterprising women.

At a time when the rest of Eastern Europe was suffering

under an oppressive communist system,

this complex was in its golden age.

But when seismic change rocked Bulgaria,

this all came to an abrupt and chaotic end.

It's clear that whoever left here, left in a hurry.

Valentin Nedkov grew up near this groundbreaking facility.

Today, he's on a mission to save it from destruction.

The story of this innovative sanctuary

started almost a century ago.

In 1930, Tsar Boris of Bulgaria

marries an Italian princess, Joanna.

She was known as a very charitable woman.

She funded many, many charitable organisations,

including a children's hospital in the capital of Sofia.

When Giovanna took the throne,

the country was in the grips of a deadly epidemic.

Bulgaria has one of the highest death rates

from tuberculosis in Europe.

Tuberculosis, or TB as it became known,

is a bacterial infection that mostly affects the lungs.

Over 20,000 people died of the disease every year.

And so there was a feeling inside Bulgaria

that, "We have to confront this. We have to come up with strategies

to solve the problem of tuberculosis in Bulgarian society."

Tsarina Giovanna took a personal interest in the project

and championed the construction of a specialised hospital.

The Bulgarian government commissioned a team

to find the ideal location to build it.

The air is clean and fresh and dry, so they choose this place

for a state-of-the-art Bulgarian sanatorium.

A competition was launched to find the best architect

to bring Giovanna's vision to life.

It was won by another groundbreaking woman of the age.

Victoria Angelova Vinarova

was one of the first, famous, female architects in Bulgaria.

She was awarded the contract for the construction

of what would be her most significant architectural project.

Within the year, Victoria Vinarova had created

a state-of-the-art brutalist design.

They break ground in 1939, but the construction

almost immediately has to be halted because of the outbreak

of World War II.

The Bulgarian tsar opportunistically allies with the Germans,

but when the Soviet Red Army crosses the border

to liberate Bulgaria in 1944,

the communist partisans quickly take over power in Bulgaria

and they make Bulgaria a satellite state of Stalin's Soviet Union.

By 1946, the Bulgarian monarchy had been overthrown

and a new Soviet-style government installed in the country.

Luckily, the new communist rulers placed an enormous importance

on public health.

So construction continues

and the hospital is eventually finished in 1955.

When the doors of the Raduntsi Specialised Hospital for prolonged

treatment of lung diseases finally opened,

its visionary architect was missing.

What's really sad is Angelova built a hospital for tuberculosis patients

and ended up dying of tuberculosis before the hospital opened.

Her creation, unrivalled in its time, lived on.

The hospital at Raduntsi was the longest hospital in the Balkans.

It housed 200 male patients, 100 female patients and 100 children.

Valentin's mother came to work here as a specialised nurse.

They also had the latest, cutting-edge medical equipment

and everything they needed to get their patients

back in working order.

The Raduntsi Hospital had a golden age, when, you know,

not only Bulgarians but people from all over the Soviet Bloc

came to this hospital to be treated for tuberculosis

and other lung ailments.

But when Soviet communism collapsed in 1991,

Bulgaria had to rebuild its government,

putting the hospital in jeopardy.

The Bulgarian transition to a capitalist democracy

had been marked by corruption, cronyism and depression.

All of the state-owned enterprises

that were effectively, property of the people

were sold off at bargain prices.

In 2015, things really came to a head when the hospital

had its electricity cut, with patients still in it

because of unpaid bills.

The Raduntsi Hospital went without power for 30 days

and was reaching a crisis point.

Its last hope lay in the hands

of controversial politician, Petar Moskov.

He once, reportedly, during a TV interview,

got the location of the hospital completely wrong.

He was out by 100 miles,

so you can tell that he really wasn't

on top of what was going on here.

Moskov then went on to blow the national health budget

on divisive and costly projects, like biometric technology.

And he spent so much money on all this data collection,

he had to close this hospital and others like it

with nothing to show for it.

In August 2015, the last patient left

and the hospital was abandoned.

Raduntsi Hospital has become a symbol

of the country's complicated relationship with its past.

This place is a perfect example of the red nostalgia

that still exists in countries like Bulgaria today.

There's the sense that, well, as bad as communism was,

things like Raduntsi Hospital worked quite well

and if you went there, they would cure you and you'd actually enjoy

the experience and were treated like a human being.

Now, there are plans in progress

to bring the once-innovative treatment centre back to life.

With the hope it can again serve its original function

as a sanatorium.

As of April 2023, the complex has new owners.

It feels like the history of this building

has not yet finished.

In north-west Berlin, a rusting relic

is a chilling reminder of the city's turbulent past.

There are long, straight lines of trees reaching into the distance,

splitting the neighbourhood in two.

In the midst of this, is an isolated viaduct

that seems stark and sharply out of place.

Along its length are a series of battered buildings.

All of a sudden, you realise you're at a railway platform.

There are structures that might have been

waiting rooms or ticket offices.

The windows are smashed, the doorways are boarded up

and there's debris covering the floor.

But the real question is why isn't it still in use?

Further down the line, a disturbing clue emerges.

A bridge leads out to the river, but it's been cut off

and is left marooned on the bank.

Its destruction marked the start of an oppressive new era.

Families were torn apart and this railway became a symbol

of the brutal division.

Historian Mathias Hiller sifts through the remnants

of a desolate station.

Mathias specialises in the capital's city-wide

railway network known as the S-Bahn.

The abandoned track dates back to the 19th century,

when electrical engineer, Werner von Siemens was looking for somewhere

to base his revolutionary enterprise.

The company we know today as Siemens was founded in 1847

and they started out producing telegraph technology.

By 1890, it's this huge engineering conglomerate

and it has thousands of employees

and they need a space for all of their factories.

They found the ideal place in Berlin in 1897

and the area was officially renamed Siemens City in January 1914.

This is the Siemensbahn.

A little-known branch of Berlin's S-Bahn.

It started close to the River Spree

and transformed the lives of thousands of workers,

carrying commuters from all over the city

into the factories of Siemensstadt.

When it began operating, the Siemens railway

is thought to have carried up to 17,000 passengers a day.

But this boom time would last for less than a decade.

At the height of World War II, the electronics factories of Siemensstadt

and the railway that served them

became a prized target for Allied bombers.

However, Siemensstadt is lucky.

Despite ferocious bombardment,

most of the Siemensbahn infrastructure survives.

But it was the Germans themselves,

who destroyed the Siemensbahn bridge across the River Spree.

When the war ended, the victorious Allies dismantled Hitler's Reich

and redrew the map of Germany, including Berlin.

The city was divided up between the Allies

into shared zones of control

and the East German State Railway Company,

which was run from the Russian zone,

is picked to run the S-Bahn, which included the Siemensbahn.

Most of the railway workers were West Berliners,

who now found themselves working for the East German-controlled company.

It was a logistical nightmare, but as long as they were still allies,

it wasn't a problem.

But with their ideological differences,

it didn't take long for relations

between some of the Allied powers to cool.

This was a division between two different worlds.

In the East, we had Soviet-style communism, socialist societies.

In the West, we had a capitalist democratic society.

Despite this, the agreement that the East German Railway Company

would keep operating the S-Bahn,

even though it was in West Berlin, remained in place.

Railway police employed by East Germany controlled the stations.

The West Berlin police also have their own patrols here,

so in short, it's a total mess.

The tense situation escalated at the start of the 1960s,

when the East German authorities took a drastic step

to prevent citizens from escaping their draconian regime.

On August 13th, 1961, the Berlin Wall rises

and it completely separates families. It separates friends.

It's a true tragedy.

The residents of West Berlin were quick to vent their anger

on the Communist-controlled S-Bahn,

which encompassed the Siemensbahn branch line.

The railways became a symbol of East German authority,

a symbol of the oddity of the division of Germany.

Even though the boycott caused chaos for commuters across the city,

West Berliners continued to protest.

The network lost up to 80% of its passengers,

which really just put this already-struggling railway,

kind of, further into the red.

They were desperate to cut costs

and eventually, the only costs that were left to cut were staff.

So in January 1980, they fired 78 railway workers

and reduced the service and people were furious.

The cutting of hours

and the firing of a pregnant woman is the final straw.

This was when the workers decided to strike.

They occupied signal towers,

ensuring that trains couldn't run without effective signals.

The network was brought to a halt.

They abandoned the trains, blocked the tracks.

I mean, they wanted it shut down.

Many businesses were brought to a standstill

as thousands of commuters struggled to get to work.

East Berliners could not risk taking part in the protest

and the communist authorities were quick to act

against the striking West Berliners.

The East German Railway Police stormed the signal towers

and dragged out the occupiers,

and so basically, the strikes were broken.

But the cost of these delays

and the whole breakdown of the system,

meant that it was not economically viable to keep the network running.

Over 40 miles of lines were closed. That's almost half of the S-Bahn.

Four years after the strike,

West Berlin finally negotiated control of its section of the S-Bahn.

But by now, a new underground line had been built

along the route of the Siemens branch,

which had never recovered from the strike and remained abandoned.

Today, there's a project to bring the Siemensbahn back to life,

just in time for its 100th birthday.

Project engineer Dorothee Blendin understands that for Berliners,

this railway is more than just a means of transportation.

The people in this area are really connected to the Siemensbahn.

It's, like, their track and I think in reactivating it,

we're giving back something to the people.

It's important for getting this area of the city

connected to the train again.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media