Original subtitles

[music playing]

NARRATOR: On the outskirts of Berlin stand traces

of the Super City that Adolf Hitler planned.

Forgotten and abandoned, they are what remains of his attempt

to build a new world capital.

Hitler may have been responsible for more death and destruction

than any individual in history, but he didn't only

want to destroy.

He wanted to build, to remodel his country according

to his own vision, and this new city would be the project's

showpiece.

ED MCCANN: And there's nothing like this that has ever

been tried or achieved.

Nobody has ever replanned, rebuilt a whole city

in this way.

NARRATOR: Hitler planned to create buildings bigger

and better than anything that had gone before.

A domed hall so large that the Eiffel Tower

could be fitted inside it.

A stadium that would hold 400,000 people,

but his dream was never fully realized,

and it died with him at the end of World War II.

Only now, after six decades of research

and using new computer graphic technology,

is it possible to recreate the city that Hitler had intended

for his people.

This is Hitler's Lost World.

[music playing]

Germany, 1933, a nation made bitter and weak

by the loss of World War I. Its people suffer the hardship

of economic depression, and Adolf Hitler sweeps to power

with the seductive promise of a new future.

A future where Germans will take their rightful

places as the leaders of the world,

as the greatest military power.

Hitler will rebuild their nation.

He will create a new world capital on the side of Berlin.

He will call it Germania.

And throughout his career, Hitler

will use buildings to symbolize Nazi supremacy to stake

a claim on a place in history and as a means of presenting

his carefully created image to the world.

Hitler needed a man to make it happen.

He chose Albert Speer, an architect only 28 years old.

It would be Speer's job to bridge the gap between Hitler's

dreams and the reality of construction.

PAUL JASKOT: His youth was an important factor

because he could, in that sense, become a kind of apprentice

to Hitler, that is he could build what Hitler was

imagining.

NARRATOR: Their partnership would survive until the very

last days of Hitler's life.

Together, they embarked on a campaign

deliberately to create buildings that

would intimidate and overwhelm.

That campaign began not in Berlin but in southern Germany,

the old Nazi heartland.

The city of Nuremberg would become

post for the Nazi party's annual rallies.

Speer designed a venue where the party faithful would celebrate

the cult of their leader.

Today, the site is derelict and overgrown.

A memory of a shameful era.

But Speer's vast, open arena is still here.

It's the size of 12 football fields enclosed by 36 stone

towers.

At one end stands the Zeppelin Tribune, the platform

where Nazi leaders would address uniformed ranks of party

members.

The platform is 1,300 feet long and 65 feet high.

60,000 people sat here to watch parades and military displays

in the field below.

Speer based his design on a stunning piece

of classical Greek architecture, the Pergamon Altar which

had been transported brick by brick in 1913

to Berlin's main museum.

By echoing its construction, Speer

was claiming that the Nazis could rival anything

in history.

PAUL JASKOT: This monument had a series of steps going down it,

and then also a large colonnade behind it.

Originally, there was a very large colonnade behind us here.

NARRATOR: But Speer didn't just copy what he saw.

He set out to improve it and make it appeal in his own time.

By extending the staircase and adding stepped seating,

he made the Tribune much larger than its ancient inspiration.

It took three years to build, and when it was finished,

it was crowned with a 20 foot tall swastika.

Historian Paul Jaskot walks the corridors

beneath the speaker's platform.

PAUL JASKOT: We're standing inside

of one of the only remaining structures built by Albert

Speer, the Zeppelin Tribune.

What you're seeing here is the lobby space that was probably

used as a preparation area for party officials

before they would go up and speak at the Tribune stands

above us.

NARRATOR: Officials would walk out to address tens

even hundreds of thousands of people at the rallies.

[non-english speech]

The surroundings were designed to convince the audience

that they were part of something momentous.

The walls of this lobby are faced with marble.

The floor is polished granite.

The ceiling is covered with a golden swastika design mosaic.

And yet Speer's most imposing work here at the Nuremberg

rally site was a one-off spectacle

created not with stone or metal but with light.

At the 1934 rally, he used light to bind the masses together

by enclosing them inside one huge outside space.

Visible from up to 60 miles away,

lights filled the sky, reaching 25,000 feet.

It was said to be like a religious experience.

The beams created what would become known

as the Cathedral of Light.

This rare footage captures the moment

when the beams of 134 searchlights

converged in the sky above the Zeppelin field.

PAUL JASKOT: Speer used them to create a effect of a community

in the sense that they surrounded the entire Zeppelin

field so thousands of people and then the lights

would form above your head, and it would give you

the sense of being inside although you were outside.

NARRATOR: The success of the Nuremberg rallies

persuaded Hitler that the city needed a new indoor home

for the party's mass conventions.

He decided to build the Congress Hall, where

up to 60,000 followers could gather to hear him

and his henchmen speak.

This would be a completely new type of building.

Again, he took inspiration from the classical world.

This time the Colosseum of ancient Rome.

PAUL JASKOT: Hitler often talked about outdoing

Rome both architecturally and in terms of its military power.

NARRATOR: The Colosseum is 500 feet wide.

Hitler's hall would be 200 feet wider.

The architects were told to mimic its design

and to use not modern concrete but only the finest granite.

Hitler wanted prestige.

He wanted buildings that would last 1,000 years.

We're in the lower arcade of the Kongresshalle.

It has a tier exterior, and it is built out of solid masonry.

What we're seeing here is the facing of that masonry interior

which is made out of very, very hard granite,

and it's also a very fine-grained granite

so it was a very expensive, very high prestigious kind of stone.

NARRATOR: Although the exterior of the Congress Hall

exudes prosperity and success, the interior

was never completed.

The onset of war meant the inner walls and foundations

lay crumbling and neglected.

Paul Jaskot goes in search of what would have been.

I'm standing in the interior of what remains of the Congress

Hall.

There would be bench seating centered on a podium where

the party leaders or Hitler would speak.

At the top of the hall would have been a colonnade.

And then the hall would have been capped by a ceiling which

had a very large skylight bringing the natural world

inside.

NARRATOR: The roof is missing, not collapsed or bombed,

but never built. As war loomed, it became more important

for the German state to deploy its resources elsewhere.

The builders never returned to complete the job.

Now, engineering experts wonder whether Hitler's plans

for this building could ever have been realized.

ED MCCANN: This would have been 200 meter spanning structure.

There was no column support inside,

and it's questionable whether they could have done that

at this time, and we can certainly do it today.

NARRATOR: Now, using computer technology

based on the original plans, we can finally

reveal how the Congress Hall would

have looked if Hitler's engineers had completed

their task.

Here, Hitler would have delivered speeches

from a central pulpit to a crowd of over 50,000.

Speer and Hitler had defined the blueprint

for what they planned to build.

Structures that would not just impress but

overwhelm those who entered them.

The next phase was to demonstrate this power

to a global audience.

Germany would host the Olympic games,

and Hitler would have Speer design a new stadium.

It would be bigger than any built before or since.

In 1934, work began on the largest stadium in Europe.

This stadium hosted the 1936 Olympic games

and marked Hitler's arrival on the international stage.

It was the next step in his plan to rebuild and rebrand Germany.

Located five miles from the center of Berlin,

it would focus the world's attention on Nazi Germany,

and its growing strength.

The stadium would cost the equivalent of one quarter

of a billion dollars.

Two tiers of seating would hold 110,000 spectators,

but Hitler's engineers were given just three years

to complete it.

They fear that the amount of work involved

meant the stadium would not be ready in time for the opening

ceremony.

Hitler would not take no for an answer.

An innovative solution was needed.

The builders decided to sink the floor of the stadium

and place the lower seating tier below ground level.

Concrete construction was only needed for the upper tier not

for the lower tier.

NARRATOR: This would drastically cut the construction time.

But more than that, it appealed to Hitler

because it echoed the design of the arenas of ancient Rome

which also had sunken floors.

He continued to meddle in other aspects of the design.

Werner March, the stadium's architect,

had planned an ultramodern glass facade for the building's

front.

MATTHIAS DONATH: When Hitler saw these drawings, he get angry,

and he forced March to change the plans.

He want no glass elements in the stadium.

NARRATOR: Hitler wanted the building

to have a classical design.

He demanded the facade be covered with stone.

PAUL JASKOT: Stone was really significant

to Hitler because of its prestige,

because of its permanence, and because of its use

by previously powerful regimes.

NARRATOR: This was to be more than just a sports arena.

It's true function was as a monumental advertisement

for Nazism.

An opening was left in the stadium's west end.

It gave a direct line of sight to a bell tower.

The Fuhrer Tower.

It's overshadowing presence would

be a constant forced reminder of Hitler's power.

In fact, throughout the games, his secret police

used it as a vantage point from which to watch the crowd.

When he attended in person, Hitler sat with his men

in a VIP box like a Roman emperor sitting in judgment

over a contest between gladiators.

And he choreographed an opening ceremony.

For the first time, a flaming torch

was carried from Greece's Mount Olympus

to light a beacon in the stadium.

A ritual which continues today.

Few realize that it was a Nazi innovation.

The athlete who carried the torch through Berlin

still remembers the effect this had on the crowds.

[non-english speech]

The mood was fantastic.

I can tell you that much.

There were hundreds of people standing on the streets.

I was thrilled.

It was just an honor to run with this torch.

NARRATOR: The Nazi message was clear.

They were the natural inheritors of history's greatest

civilizations.

But not everything at the games went to Hitler's plan.

Although German athletes topped the medal table,

the star of the 1936 games was Jesse Owens,

an African-American athlete.

[non-english speech]

Well, Jesse Owens was the hero amongst all the participants

and the spectators.

He was a personality who stood out

from all the other athletes.

NARRATOR: Hitler ignored the inconvenient fact

that the hero of the games was a man he thought racially

inferior.

He called the Berlin Olympics a great victory for Nazism.

The international community had threatened to boycott

the games, but they had been won over by the spectacle they

witnessed.

The stadium had done its job.

Hitler was delighted, and his response was immediate.

Work was to start straightaway on another stadium,

the German Stadium.

It was to be even bigger.

The stadium was meant to be an even greater expression

of Hitler's claims for world domination.

Just as the world was going to be dominated

by the political will of Germany,

so too would other aspects of life,

including sports, for example, be also centered

in the new peacetime empire of a German-dominated world.

NARRATOR: Hitler chose to build his new stadium in Nuremberg,

site of his earlier triumphal rallies.

This man-made lake marks the spot he chose.

It is the only trace left of an attempt

to build a stadium for 400,000 people.

Our investigators pieced together

what it would have looked like.

PAUL JASKOT: Behind me was the original location

of the German stadium.

What remains of that is the hole dug for the foundation.

This stadium was a building website

at least up until the early stages of the war.

NARRATOR: Engineer Ed McCann doubts that the building as

planned would have been viable.

There's 400,000 people got to use this thing.

They've got to get in and out.

They've got to be organized so that they can

get to their seats, be served with hot dogs,

use toilets, and all the rest of it.

As the stadium gets bigger and bigger and bigger,

the queue times get longer and longer and longer.

NARRATOR: Architect Speer was aware of the scale

of the challenge.

The highest point of the stadium would be

300 feet above the arena floor.

Although elevators were planned to take spectators 100

at a time to the top three tiers,

engineers were concerned about visibility.

It was important for them to know,

for example, whether you could see so far below from such

a high stadium that had never been tried before.

ED MCCANN: It's the same thing that influences stadium design

today.

I mean, if you get too far away, there's simply no viewing

experience whatsoever.

NARRATOR: Speer's solution was to build a full-scale model

of a section of the seating.

By placing 60 workers in the top tier

and checking their lines of sight,

he could satisfy himself that a stadium of this size

was viable.

Construction could begin.

The stadium would cover 24,000 square feet.

Four times the size of the Olympic stadium,

and it would be finished with red granite personally selected

by Hitler.

His demands went far beyond what the engineers could provide.

The granite itself for the German stadium

required four times the yearly output

of the entire German granite industry

merely to cover its facade.

NARRATOR: Hitler believed that once Germany became

the global power, every Olympic games would

be staged in his new stadium, but it was not to be.

The project was suspended as the country's resources were

diverted to war and weapons production.

The site was abandoned.

The foundations filled with water.

Today, a lake is all that remains of Hitler's scheme

to build the world's largest stadium.

But now, computer-generated imagery

can reveal what the finished stadium would have looked like.

Yet to Hitler, this was just a side project.

His main focus was always a new capital.

He would tear down Berlin and replace it

with an invention of his own.

What he called the world capital, Germania.

In Berlin, Hitler planned his most ambitious project.

He would replace this city with a new capital.

A world capital.

He called it Germania.

He intended it to be the Nazis' greatest achievement,

but Germania was never built. Now,

deep in Berlin's official archives,

our investigators hunt for clues to what Hitler's dream

city would have looked like.

It's the same with all great dictators.

They want to demonstrate their great power with architecture.

And with Hitler, he wanted to show the world.

NARRATOR: Blueprints reveal ambition

on an extraordinary scale.

PAUL JASKOT: It was the visual tip of the iceberg for a very

extensive restructuring of the entire social, political,

and economic order.

NARRATOR: Hitler detested Berlin.

A place he considered decadent and depraved.

PAUL JASKOT: He pointed to Berlin

as a city that was not emblematic of the power

of a real Germany.

Particularly, he talked about, for example, Jewish department

stores as being a sign of sickness.

Architectural sickness, but also,

of course, political sickness of the regime.

NARRATOR: Although Hitler had been elected leader

by the German people, in fact, only one in four Berliners

had voted for him.

Now, he was in control, he would make them pay.

His monuments would be built on the rubble of their homes.

A model from the time reveals Hitler's vast ambition

for the new city's layout.

It would require over 60,000 apartments to be bulldozed

and more than 100,000 people to be made homeless.

Planning started in 1936, and as it moved into construction,

Speer was given unprecedented freedom.

PAUL JASKOT: As inspector general of building,

Speer was not only independent of the state in many ways,

but he was also in charge of huge bureaucracy.

This was dozens, if not thousands of people.

NARRATOR: Central to Hitler's plans

was the building of the Reich Chancellery, part palace, part

administrative center.

A lavish setting where he could impress visitors.

PAUL JASKOT: The Reich Chancellery was all

about showing a very dominant Hitler to foreign dignitaries

and foreign diplomats.

NARRATOR: Speer had 12 months to construct this building.

It would take 4,500 men working around the clock in three

shifts.

They finished with just two days to spare.

Today, nothing remains of Hitler's headquarters.

Allied bombing destroyed all traces of the chancellery.

Modern apartments stand in its place.

Berlin historian, Tony Le Tissier,

takes us to the site of Hitler's former power base.

We're walking westward along Fuhrerstrasse

and we've just come to a bend in the road.

And from this point onwards, extended Hitler's new Third

Reich Chancellery, which was opened in January 1939

having taken only one year to construct.

NARRATOR: To celebrate the chancellery's opening,

Hitler hosted a dinner for foreign ambassadors and VIPs.

Those guests were met by an extraordinary sight.

They found themselves in a stunning reception room

at the end of which stood doors 17 feet high.

These doors opened onto a hall decorated with mosaics.

But even this was not the building's grandest feature.

TONY LE TISSIER: From the end of this building

to the next building we come to, was the center section

of Hitler's Reich Chancellery.

This gallery which confronted it was

based on the idea of the Hall of Mirrors of Versailles.

But Hitler wanted it bigger and better.

So it was nearly 500 feet long.

NARRATOR: Hitler insisted the floors be kept highly polished.

It was said he wanted diplomats to practice

moving on a slippery surface.

The focal point of the building was Hitler's office, adorned

in red leather and swastikas.

The office, indeed the whole building,

was designed to exude Hitler's power,

to be a fitting headquarters from which he could preside

over the German Reich.

Although none of it survives today,

we can use the latest 3D technology

to reveal how the finished chancellery looked.

Although as the administrative center

it was the most important of the buildings in Germania,

the intention was to fill the city with other far more

impressive structures.

And Speer was responsible.

Now, one of Hitler's most trusted men and promoted

to the position of armaments minister,

he found himself presented with ever greater challenges.

Hitler's ambition was only increasing.

And the development of his vision for Germania

reflects that.

On a visit to Paris, he had greatly admired the city's

neoclassical monuments.

He particularly liked the Arc de Triomphe.

And typically, he wanted one for himself.

His triumphal arch, however, would

be twice as high and four times wider than the one in Paris.

It would stand at the center of his city,

and it would weigh 25 times more than the Arc de Triomphe.

A weight of two and a half million tons.

This was the part of the design that most worried Speer.

Berlin, what was to be Germania, stood on swampland.

In central Berlin, his response still stands.

The derelict remains of an experiment

to discover whether Hitler's arch would simply

sink into the ground.

Massive blocks of concrete and steel

were erected where the arch was meant to stand.

Known as the GBK, short for the German for load-bearing body,

they exerted a pressure of around 11,000 pounds

per square foot.

Architect Michael Richter investigates the test site.

We are standing in front of the GBK.

The Schwerbelastungskorper.

An attempt to see if the Triumphal Arch planned by Adolf

Hitler could have stood.

NARRATOR: Speer's engineers worked to a simple formula.

If the block sank no more than 2 and 1/2 inches,

it was safe to build the arch.

Inside lies the forgotten chamber where the experiment

was monitored.

MICHAEL RICHTER: We are now entering the upper measuring

chamber.

Here is where the actual measurements in the GBK

were carried out.

And from this upper chamber, it goes even deeper

into a further room.

NARRATOR: Deep inside the GBK lies a hidden shaft.

Below this hatch are testing rooms

used by Speer's engineers.

This is the central shaft that runs across three levels.

It's 30 feet deep, and at the end,

there are four chambers where the measuring devices used

to be.

NARRATOR: The chambers below contain pressure gauges

to monitor the GBK's sinkage rates.

The engineers monitored the towers subsidence visually.

Here on this pillar there stood an optical measuring

device that was aimed at the point outside the GBK

through this pipe comparing the height of the object

outside with this water level indicator

in the upper measuring chamber to determine

the sinkage of the GBK.

NARRATOR: The ingenious experiment

proved the Berlin soil was too unstable for the arch.

The attempt here showed that it would have been

impossible to build the Triumphal Arch

without fortifying the ground.

The GBK sank by more than seven inches between 1941 and 1944.

NARRATOR: Still, Hitler would not accept his arch could not

be built. He instructed his people

to continue looking for a solution.

The GBK is still sinking today, and although Hitler's engineers

continued with their work, the arch was never built.

Now, by investigating the plans and using state of the art

technology, we can finally reveal

how it would have looked.

Hitler and Speer were not deterred by this failure.

They set about their next project.

The biggest of all Germania's buildings.

The Great Hall.

It would be the city's centerpiece.

It would be crowned with a dome so big some said it would have

its own clouds and rainfall.

Its design would test the bounds of what

was possible in construction, and it

would demand the ruthless brutality which

had become the Nazis' hallmark.

It would use slave labor.

In 1936, Hitler unveiled plans for the most ambitious of all

his building projects.

A vast, domed space called the Great Hall.

The Great Hall was the absolute focal point

of the north-south axis.

It was a gigantic building which had by far the largest

dome in the world at the time.

NARRATOR: It was intended to be the most important

of all of Germania's buildings.

A symbol of greatness.

It was to be Hitler's engineering masterpiece.

Land was cleared, workers hired, digging began.

Unlike most of Germania's buildings

designed by architects, the Great Hall

was designed by Hitler himself.

He looked to one of antiquities most famous monuments,

the Pantheon in Rome.

He had seen it in 1938.

He was impressed, but his own hall would have to be bigger.

What's really important to remember

is that the scale is so much more gargantuan in the Great

Hall.

The Pantheon was already a large, dome space,

but the Great Hall was so much bigger.

NARRATOR: Engineer Ed McCann assesses the plans

for the Great Hall.

ED MCCANN: This isn't just two or three times

bigger than the Pantheon.

This is eight times as wide as the Pantheon.

Two and a half times the length of a football pitch.

You could fit two Saturn V rockets in there

and still fly around the top in a small helicopter.

This is just an enormous space, and nothing like it

had been done before then.

And in fact, nothing like it's been done since.

NARRATOR: The Great Hall was to symbolize Hitler's mastery

of the world.

At its highest point would stand an imperial eagle.

It would hold in its claws not the usual swastika,

but the world.

The dome represented the vault of the sky spanning

Hitler's global empire.

The interior would mimic that of the Pantheon.

There would be a large niche in the main wall.

It would contain a 78-foot statue of the imperial eagle

perched over a pulpit.

Three tiers of seats would surround a central arena.

Around these would be 100 pillars three stories high

reaching to the coffered ceiling.

The building was intended to hold up to 180,000 people.

Looking up, they'd have seen a roof that rose almost 1,000

feet above them.

And the intention was to build it all from granite.

Some experts have questioned whether Speer could have built

a structure of such colossal dimensions.

Engineer Ed McCann has made calculations based

on the existing blueprints.

ED MCCANN: This dome would have weighed

in excess of 200,000 tons.

That's about 500 fully-laden jumbo Jets.

And in order to see whether he was even vaguely right,

we took his drawings and our understanding

of what he tried to do and bunged it

into one of our modern structural engineering

packages.

Rather to our surprise, found out

that it could more or less be made to work as he imagined it.

NARRATOR: Even though technically possible,

the scale of this building would have brought problems.

It was suggested that the condensation from the breath

of 180,000 people would rise to the top of the dome

and then, cooling, fall as rain.

To Ed McCann, the proportions of the dome

would have rendered it not magnificent but ridiculous.

This is an absolute parody of the Pantheon.

I mean, he's taken a very adjusted form and balanced

form, structurally rational diagram,

and turned it into an overblown, top-heavy, inflated

in every sense of the word solution,

and I really don't like it at all.

I think it's irrational in structural terms.

It's hideous in moral terms, and it really

doesn't do any justice to its inspiration

insofar as that was the Pantheon.

NARRATOR: This project would never get beyond the land

clearing phase, and Speer's plans would ultimately

be thwarted by war.

But evidence lies all around Berlin

of how far he would go to make Hitler's vision a reality.

Outside the city lies a center for the production of building

materials.

It reveals the truly brutal nature

of Hitler's quest for glory.

It is part of the concentration camp, Sachsenhausen.

Germania was meant to be built on slave labor.

Sachsenhausen was the prototype concentration camp,

built in the shape of a triangle so it

could be controlled from just one machine gun emplacement.

In 1938, it expanded to incorporate a new brickworks.

A harbor was built so the camp's enormous output could

be carried into the center of the city by canal.

Speer had signed a contract with the SS for all the bricks

that Sachsenhausen could produce.

Given that Sachsenhausen was near Berlin,

it was meant to be a major provider of bricks

for the rebuilding efforts.

NARRATOR: For the camp's inmates,

the brick production line, the Klinkerwerks,

was the most feared assignment of all.

HORST SEFERENS: The brickworks were feared by the prisoners

because it was a punishment unit,

and the conditions here were the worst in all the working units

of the camp.

Single prisoners and groups of prisoners

were sent here to the Klinkerwerk

to be killed by the brutal conditions of working here.

So you can say that the Klinkerwerk was something

like a death camp for the concentration camp

Sachsenhausen.

NARRATOR: Camp survivor, Adam Konig,

recalls the conditions there.

First of all, the winter was very hard, was very cold.

We didn't have appropriate clothing.

There was little food too.

It was a bad job, yes.

And as a young boy at that time, I

thought that must be like hell.

NARRATOR: The slave workforce had to grow to meet demand.

By 1944, 3,500 people were being worked

to death in the brickworks.

The Klinkerwerks were the largest brickworks

in whole Europe at that time, and tens of thousands of bricks

would be produced here every day.

NARRATOR: Hitler and Speer's ambition

depended totally on their willingness

to sacrifice countless lives.

Then the outbreak of war brought them a new challenge.

Allied air raids came to Germany.

They threatened to destroy all Hitler and Speer had built

so far.

So Speer began a new set of tests.

He wanted to make his city bomb proof.

In 1941, Europe was a battlefield.

World War II was raging.

The Third Reich was a military state geared for conquest.

Adolf Hitler and his architect, Albert Speer,

are planning a new world capital to be called Germania.

They had built the Olympic stadium and the Reich

Chancellery.

They planned a Great Hall, another stadium,

and vast Triumphal Arch.

A whole new city.

But allied bombs threatened their dreams.

So they embarked upon a series of experiments

to establish how to make their city indestructible.

Still today, it's possible to find evidence of the tests they

conducted.

In a secret forest location, one hour's drive outside Berlin

lies what was once a restricted test site.

Surrounded by rubble, these four towers

are the last traces of a covert project

to create bomb-proof building materials.

MICHAEL FOEDROWITZ: The local population called this site,

Berlin settlement, but this was a prohibited area,

and nobody had access to this site, nobody.

NARRATOR: So in 1941, Speer and his engineers

started to identify which structures and materials were

most resistant to bombardment.

They had this idea to develop, to design, air raid shelters

integrated in normal dwellings, and they

want to know how they have to build it, if they are bombproof

or not.

NARRATOR: Their experiments were simple.

They built towers then subjected them

to varying types of assault.

MICHAEL FOEDROWITZ: The kind of ammunition which was used here

includes all calibers of bombs and grenades, machine guns

and cannons, and maybe they were checking rockets as well.

NARRATOR: The engineers developed techniques

to reinforce walls.

They braced concrete with steel rods.

500 yards from the towers stands a lonely piece

of wall nearly seven feet thick and 20 feet high.

It still bears the signs of impact from a rocket.

These tests had two purposes.

To determine how thick a wall had

to be to withstand an allied rocket attack,

and to find out how fast a rocket would have to travel

to penetrate such a wall.

No written evidence remains of these tests.

The detailed records of their results

have been lost or destroyed.

But it's clear that the Nazis had the technology

to build structures that could survive a direct hit.

They knew how to build effective bomb shelters.

The only problem was the time it would take,

and the cost in materials and labor.

While Hitler pushed ahead with his dream of creating

the perfect city of Germania, the priority for his engineers

became defense and survival.

The order was given to create over 1,000 bunkers and six

antiaircraft towers for Berlin.

Ultimately, there were only enough spaces in the shelters

for 10% of the population, and yet

200 million cubic meters of reinforced concrete were used.

Today, beneath the streets of Berlin,

are the remains of the vast complex of underground bunkers.

Few of the commuters who use this metro station every day

realize that a perfectly preserved air raid shelter

exists below them.

This shelter was built to accommodate 1,400 people.

But during the bombings, almost 5,000 people

crammed into these rooms.

As you can see, in every room here we have a sign,

and the sign tells us how many people

are allowed to be in the room.

Here is 20 person.

But during the air raids, more and more people

tried to get safe inside of bunkers, and so in here,

in this room, there are sometimes more than 60,

70 people.

NARRATOR: There was no ventilation system, no air

shafts, citizens faced suffocation,

and the threat of gas leaks.

Sometimes they would have to evacuate the bunker

in the middle of an air raid.

The electricity supply was often interrupted

plunging the shelters into pitch darkness.

The engineers used a drastic and toxic solution.

People were meant to find their way by the dim glow emitted

by phosphorus paint.

During the air raid, the light fails often

and so you have to be prepared.

You see, in a dark bunker, you don't see anything,

and therefore, this whole room, and many rooms inside here,

were painted with phosphorus color.

You can see how it works.

NARRATOR: As the people of Berlin

were forced to retreat below ground, so was their Fuhrer.

Hitler's personal bunker was sealed by the Soviet Army that

captured it.

But from blueprints and eyewitness testimony,

we can recreate the place where he spent his last days.

Rochas Misch is one of the last survivors of the Fuhrer bunker.

When he entered it as Hitler's bodyguard,

he was assured that it was impregnable.

The bunker was dead.

Everyone whispered.

I was afraid.

I had a neighbor, and he told me that he was there when

the bunker was built. He told me it had been built

so it could not be blown up.

So afterwards, I was content.

NARRATOR: The bunker was almost bomb proof.

Its walls and ceilings were 13 feet thick.

ROCHAS MISCH: It was not a bunker for a living in.

It was an air raid shelter to protect people during a bombing

raid.

There was no conflict in there.

Nothing.

Such small rooms, just 100 to 130 square feet.

NARRATOR: The occupants were safe from air raids at least,

but conditions were harsh, and they could not escape the fact

that above them the war was being lost.

Hitler's world shrunk to a warren

of chambers, a concrete tomb.

Above him, allied bombs and shells

destroyed Berlin, killing any possibility

that his fantasy city of Germania

would ever be realized.

The Hitler-Speer partnership that had begun 11 years earlier

with such ambitious plans had ended in absolute defeat.

Although it's since been modernized,

the Olympic Stadium in Berlin is the only one

of Hitler's buildings that was completed and survived intact.

The Zeppelin Tribune was all but destroyed by allied bombing

and left to rot.

The Congress Hall was never completed.

Hitler's headquarters, the Reich Chancellery,

was bombed and eventually removed brick by brick.

And the building sites of the German Stadium, the Triumphal

Arch, and the Great Hall were all abandoned.

The architectural dreams for Berlin,

and the ideological dreams of Germania

were, of course, a disaster.

They resulted in the almost total destruction

of many German cities, including Berlin, as well as

the absolute downfall of the state.

NARRATOR: Hitler finally took his own life on 30 April, 1945,

knowing that the war was lost and that Germany was in ruins.

Hitler's architect, Albert Speer,

was arrested, tried, and sentenced

to 20 years in prison.

He died a free man in London in 1981.

Had their dream been realized, the city of Berlin

would be dominated by the grotesque monuments

like the Great Hall and the Triumphal Arch

that they had built to glorify the Nazi regime.

Berlin would have been made the capital

of a Nazi controlled world, and every major city would have

been rebuilt in its likeness.

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