Nazi Megastructures

They were the most sinister force in Nazi Germany.

Along with the swastika,

the SS runes were synonymous

with evil all around the globe.

A notorious cult, built to oppress a state.

There's never been a structure,

huge organization on that level

which just infiltrates every aspect of life.

To construct Hitler's empire.

It's a villain's hideout extraordinaire.

And dominates the Third Reich.

The scale of its ambition,

the extent of its reach,

the vastness of its crimes are unprecedented in history.

This is the story of the Nazi's deadliest human mega-structure...

...the SS.

The biggest construction project of World War II

ordered by Hitler to secure world domination.

Now they survive as dark reminders

of the Führer's fanatical military ambition.

These are the secrets of the Nazi mega-structures.

Summer 1940,

Nazi armies are sweeping west across France

and driving the Allies out of Europe.

At its heart is an elite force trained in terror...

...the SS.

Combat units of SS soldiers lead the assault on Germany's enemies.

Inside the Third Reich,

it runs the dreaded concentration camps...

...and controls all of Nazi Germany's police

and internal security.

Led by Heinrich Himmler, the SS infiltrates

every corner of the German state...

...even constructing the Nazi's most secretive installations.

The remains of SS engineering litter the European landscape even today.

Battlefield archaeologist Dr. Tony Pollard

is deep in the forests of western Poland...

...exploring one of the largest structures ever built by the SS

and known as Project Giant.

This looks like an archaeological site.

It's almost like a lost city in the jungle.

But it's not, it's all concrete and steel

and the foundations go really deep.

There are chambers and rooms underneath.

And the scale of the project is phenomenal.

It was gonna cover around 35 square kilometers.

So it's an incredibly ambitious construction

which was never finished.

The SS set up a dedicated concentration camp nearby

to supply the slave labor needed for the project.

A black ops site so top secret

that today its true purpose is a mystery.

You can imagine what lies inside.

It's a villain's hideout extraordinaire.

The size of these rocks, this is all very precarious.

Eight and a half kilometers of tunnel are known to exist down here,

and there might be another eight and a half

still waiting to be discovered.

This is just one of thousands of installations

created by the SS,

an elite human structure that formed

one of the cornerstones of Nazi Germany.

The origins of the SS lie nearly 20 years earlier

at the very beginning of Hitler's rise to power.

1925...

...Germany is in a state of collapse following its defeat in World War I.

Public anger is at fever pitch.

A young Adolf Hitler leads an ultra-nationalist political movement...

...the Nazi party.

There's massive unemployment,

there's economic meltdown, there's hyperinflation,

and that is a fertile breeding ground

for violence, thuggery,

and all sorts of bad elements.

They're offering an outlet for your own individual anger.

As support grows,

Hitler becomes a target for political opponents.

He creates his own personal bodyguard to protect himself.

Its name is the Schutzstaffel or protection squad,

known simply as the SS.

While he's on his soap box, while he's making his speeches,

they need to make sure that he's safe to deliver what he needs to deliver.

One disillusioned young man inspired by Hitler

is 25-year-old clerical assistant Heinrich Himmler.

Himmler blames the Jews for Germany's defeat

in the First World War.

He's spurred by a desire to eradicate non-German ethnic groups.

He joins the SS, now nearly 200 strong

and quickly rises through its ranks.

He thinks, oh, these guys are for me.

This is where I can put on a uniform, I can play at being a soldier,

and I can do something about the plight of Germany.

By 1929, he is its leader

and Hitler's right hand man.

Himmler decides to evolve the SS into a huge paramilitary organization

with undying loyalty to the Führer.

In an intensive recruitment drive,

he swells its numbers to 50,000 in just three years.

In 1933, Hitler and the Nazis take control of Germany.

Sieg... Heil.

Sieg... Heil.

Suddenly when Hitler takes power, it's not about securing Hitler,

it's about securing the state as well,

and that means police.

And suddenly your, your net is just spreading wider and wider.

Himmler becomes police chief of Munich.

As his power grows,

thousands more recruits flock to the SS.

Membership rockets to around 200,000,

giving Himmler the power to make his next move.

One of the ways where the SS can exert itself

is by helping to get rid of a lot

of Hitler's political opponents,

and so Himmler develops the idea of the concentration camp.

So basically you just create this huge, great cordon

and you round up your political prisoners and you put them there

and that keeps them out of society,

out of your way, no longer a problem.

Himmler builds his first concentration camp

on the outskirts of Munich in the town of Dachau.

The SS will run the camp.

Professor Steven Remy, an expert on the SS, is exploring the ruins.

I'm at the oldest part of the site.

It was an abandoned munitions factory,

and Heinrich Himmler decided in March 1933

to convert the site into a concentration camp,

Germany's first concentration camp.

These basic buildings are initially filled with around 200 people,

all political prisoners.

The prototype concentration camp consists of 11 barracks buildings

surrounded by a barbed wire fence

and three guard towers.

Himmler decides to use Dachau to accomplish his next goal.

He wants to expand the SS into an organization

that polices the entire German nation.

Dachau was going to become a complex for training the SS,

not just prison guards for this camp and for other camps,

but for this infrastructure of terror

that would be ruled by the SS.

Himmler needs a commander for the camp

who can strike fear into the prisoners

and also deliver deadly battalions of SS guards.

He chooses former soldier and convicted terrorist

Theodor Eicke.

Theodor Eicke, the first important commandant of Dachau,

he is the man that Himmler entrusts

with laying the groundwork for the re-engineering

of German society using the concentration camps

as the anchor, as the basis.

Himmler sees in him the potential as somebody

who can create this infrastructure of terror.

Eicke's new regime begins with the SS guards themselves.

He calls them Totenkopfverbände

or Death's Head unit.

Their insignia is the skull and crossbones.

Eicke insists that camp guards be brutal,

that tolerance means weakness.

I can only use hard men

who are determined to do anything.

We have no use for weaklings.

Eicke is turning the SS men from individuals

into a unified terror machine

with power of life and death over Dachau's inmates.

By 1934, over 2,000 political prisoners are locked up

and Himmler sees an opportunity to exploit them.

When he realizes that actually these are able-bodied men,

a lot of them young men as well,

and you can use them for different purposes,

you can use them for labor, you can use them for all sorts of things.

Himmler plans to build more camps

and increase prisoner numbers to provide free labor.

They will be forced to build the Nazi empire.

Now Himmler can accelerate his grand plan

to engineer the SS into an organization that controls every part

of German life.

Himmler's dream is to create a racially pure Germany.

But first, he must engineer the minds of his SS men

to believe in his cause.

He devises a mythology to justify his dark desires.

Himmler is to a large extent a fantasist.

He's remembering the myths and legends that he used to read as a boy,

these ancient tales of Teutonic knights and heroism.

It's kind of sort of King Arthur stuff. It's Knights of the Round Table.

And he sees the SS as being a kind of sort of,

almost like a chivalric order

where, you know, all true Germans are

kind of tall and broad and muscular and blond-haired

and blue-eyed, even though to a person,

almost all the, all the Nazi high command aren't.

Himmler sets out a standard that every SS recruit must meet...

...perfect vision,

at least five feet eleven inches tall

and over a century of pure German ancestry.

In 1934, he acquires a cathedral for his SS knights

to worship at.

The 17th century castle of Wewelsburg.

Eighty years later, former British Army officer Patrick Bury

is exploring what remains of Himmler's vision.

We're outside a guard tower to Wewelsburg here,

and what you can see is the outline