NARRATOR: They're watching you.
More than 5,000 satellites circle the Earth.
Every day, they uncover new mysterious phenomena
that defy explanation.
The Big Evil -- death and terror in the Australian desert.
CAVANOUGH: Wow, this is insane.
It's wiped all of the life off the face of the Earth.
NARRATOR: Discovered from the skies --
Braveheart's secret hideout.
KOUROUNIS: This would make it one of the most
important archaeological sites in all the British Isles.
NARRATOR: And inside the Montauk Project.
MAN: What is that?
They found this bizarre creature unlike any other
animal that they have ever seen before.
NARRATOR: Baffling phenomena. Mysteries from space.
What on Earth are they?
[theme music playing]
Australia's Great Victoria Desert --
A featureless expanse of sand hills
and scrub the size of California.
Ed Cavanough is heading deep into this vast wilderness,
drawn by something weird revealed from space.
I've lived in Australia my whole life
and never seen anything quite like this before.
NARRATOR: An image taken over the region on April 8, 2021,
has captured this pattern in the red sands below.
SZULGIT: Out in the middle of nowhere is this giant carving
on the earth -- looks like kind of wedges of a pizza.
MUNOZ: It's very strange.
The middle of it has been cleared
in a way that it forms almost like a bulls-eye.
NARRATOR: The mystery symbol covers an area equivalent to
600 football fields
and has spokes up to 1,400 feet in length.
The shape itself has been created with precision,
which can only mean that some sort of government or military
operation has taken place here.
NARRATOR: What's more, the remains of
an identical shape sit nearby.
Great effort appears to have been made
to erase evidence of it.
As a journalist,
when I see something clandestine in my own backyard,
I feel compelled to go and investigate it.
NARRATOR: Officially, there are no towns near the site,
but evidence on the ground suggests otherwise.
CAVANOUGH: Wow, this is insane.
I mean, it's a completely deserted ghost town.
This can't just be a coincidence.
♪
NARRATOR: Just 15 miles from
the mystery symbols sits this ghost town.
♪
Dozens of its buildings have been razed to the ground.
This clearly would have been a very sizable community here.
Looks like it's been abandoned for decades.
NARRATOR: Whatever forced this town to flee,
it appears to have happened almost overnight.
Oh, this is amazing.
All the chairs and equipment are left exactly
in place as they would have been decades ago.
Everyone's just got up and left.
NARRATOR: In each room, Cavanough finds evidence of
government activity.
This vehicle was completely out of place here.
It's clearly been modified for some purpose.
It's got a completely enclosed cabin to separate this
part of the vehicle from those who are driving it.
NARRATOR: The vehicle appears to be
designed to contain something extremely hazardous.
Satellite images of another ghost town in Australia
could offer a clue.
What we do know is that a town in Australia
did have to evacuate because of a toxic asbestos mine.
Could this have been the same case
in the town we're looking at here?
NARRATOR: Between the 1940s and the 1960s, miners in the town of
Wittenoom excavate around 165,000 tons of blue asbestos
from the desert.
Over the years,
2,000 people die from unwittingly inhaling
the cancerous fibers before
the government shuts down the mine and wipes the town off
the map.
It's actually the largest contaminated
site in the entire Southern Hemisphere.
That's big.
NARRATOR: The nightmare scenario is that the ghost town
and the shapes in the image
may be evidence of another equally deadly disaster
on Australian soil,
one that authorities are trying to cover up.
Something bad has happened here
to make people abandon this town,
and I'm certain it's got something to do with
those wagon wheel shapes I've seen in the desert.
[car engine starts]
NARRATOR: The indigenous people here
call this area the Big Evil.
And the journalist soon learns why.
CAVANOUGH: The closer I get to the wagon wheel shapes,
the vegetation is getting thinner and thinner.
It's almost as if some sort of event has taken place here that
has just wiped all of the life off the face of the earth.
NARRATOR: Arriving at the coordinates,
Cavanough discovers a vast flat area.
First thing I've noticed is these
strange hooks that are embedded into this concrete slab.
I'm not sure at all what these will be pinning to the ground,
but it certainly adds to the mystery here.
NARRATOR: Nearby, Cavanough finds more objects
not visible in the satellite image.
Wow, look at this!
These look like some sort of
rocket launching devices.
They're incredibly old and brittle,
all rusted out.
NARRATOR: The rocket launchers are weird enough,
but what really intrigues Cavanough
is what surrounds them.
CAVANOUGH: There's this field of green glass.
It almost looks like a green jade
all across the ground out here.
NARRATOR: Millions of square feet of desert around
the mystery shapes shimmer with the deformed beads
of glass.
Cavanough believes this is trinitite,
a substance formed when sand is subjected to temperatures in
excess of 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
This suggests to me that this has to
have been made from a nuclear weapons test.
I'm actually -- I'm completely speechless
discovering this here.
NARRATOR: What's concerning is that there are only
nine countries with known nuclear weapons capabilities,
and Australia isn't one of them.
CAVANOUGH: The idea is just unfathomable,
but there's just no other explanation,
and it's just completely shocking.
NARRATOR: Coming up, lies and deadly government deception.
What happened here was secret.
No one knew anything about it.
NARRATOR: And the $9 trillion treasure hunt.
HYMEL: It's only by looking down from
space that we really appreciate its enormity.
NARRATOR: Hooked by a giant symbol revealed from space,
Ed Cavanough is in Australia's Great Victoria Desert.
I'm arriving at the coordinates now.
This area is not at all what I was expecting.
NARRATOR: Evidence on the ground has revealed these sands were
once ground zero for a series of nuclear explosions.
But to the journalist, that doesn't make sense.
CAVANOUGH: Australia isn't a nuclear country, so
I just can't believe that this would be happening here.
Hi, it's -- It's Edward Cavanough.
NARRATOR: Cavanough turns to his newspaper contacts
to track down someone
who might be able to shed some light.
All right. Thanks.
NARRATOR: Jeremy LeBois is a member of
the Maralinga Tjarutja,
a council of local Aboriginal peoples.
Hey, Jeremy. How are you?
- How you goin'? - Good to see you.
NARRATOR: He confirms that 60 years ago
atomic testing did take place in this desert,
but not ones conducted by the Australian government.
Where we are today is where the British
tested seven atomic bombs that were
bigger than what they dropped on Japan.
NARRATOR: In 1952, the British become
the world's third nuclear power
and are desperate to play catch up with the U.S.
and Soviet Union.
[speaking indistinctly]
NARRATOR: To do that,
the small, densely populated nation needs to
persuade another country to host their nuclear tests.
The British government looked for testing sites
in the U.S. and Canada but were turned down.
And then Britain knocks on the door
of Australia, part of the old empire,
and the Aussies go, "You know what?
"Yeah, we'll have your nukes.
Let's blow up some nukes in our deserts."
NARRATOR: In exchange for sharing nuclear secrets,
the Australian government grants the British vast swaths
of land for their tests.
But it's land that belongs to LeBois and his people
Jeremy, how much notice were
the traditional owners of this land
given about the nuclear tests?
Absolutely nothing. Not one of them ever, ever sat
down with the traditional owners and asked them
for permission, not one of them.
♪
NARRATOR: The deserts here are of deep
spiritual significance to the Aboriginal people.
Yet the British immediately begin to remove them from
the place they had held sacred for 2,000 generations.
LeBOIS: The connection to this land,
you know, it goes back thousands of years, and, uh,
they forced the people, my people, away from
this country.
NARRATOR: The British build a town to the south of
the site and prepare the area for both air-
and ground-based tests.
On September 27, 1956,
they detonate the first of
seven devices in the desert. - Three, two, one.
Such is its power that those watching report being able to
see their own bones through their hands.
MUNOZ: British soldiers were ordered to observe
the mushroom clouds during the tests, and all they
would go out there wearing is pretty much shirts and shorts.
NARRATOR: But the troops weren't the only ones
close to the blast.
Many Aboriginal people remain in the desert.
[explosion blasting]
They later described how a black mist
of radioactive dust rains down on them.
But it gets worse.
Some even seek shelter in the craters formed by
the explosions.
They were still living nomadic lifestyle.
They didn't understand the actual soil
was contaminated.
SZULGIT: The people who stayed behind
began to suffer immediate effects of nuclear fallout,
having their skin peel and several of them dying
within only a few days.
[coughing]
NARRATOR: It's estimated that around a third of the British
and Australian servicemen exposed to the blasts later die
of cancer.
The figure among the Aboriginal population was
never recorded, but it's likely much higher.
LeBOIS: A lot of the indigenous people are
dying of heart failure, cancer.
What happened here was all a secret.
No one knew anything about it.
NARRATOR: Recent investigations have revealed that many
casualties of these tests
gained no peace even after death.
A program code-named Project Sunshine sees authorities
exhume dead children
and study them for radiation poisoning without
their parents' consent.
They don't tell the families, the people that conduct
the autopsies are bribed
to keep their mouths shut, and all evidence is basically swept
under the carpet.
NARRATOR: In 1963, the British depart.
What they leave behind is a toxic landscape that
has a catastrophic effect on those survivors
still living here.
SZULGIT: The cleanup consisted of just sweeping all of
this debris into shallow holes in the ground,
which really didn't get rid of the problem.
We're still finding stuff that's been blown up
in the blast miles and miles away from the test site.
NARRATOR: Today, the scars created by
the nuclear tests run deep,
both on the land and on the few people left here.
It's appalling what I've seen out here,
an entire community dispossessed of their land.
Even though these events happened some 70 years ago,
the community is still reeling with the aftermath.
NARRATOR: Coming up, a legend rises from the earth.
He has this wonderful sword called Freedom's Blade.
NARRATOR: And the monster of Montauk.
MOSHER: You can see why people might
associate it with some secret government project.
NARRATOR: May 2020.
Archaeologists deploy drones to scan
an isolated area of Dumfriesshire,
southwest Scotland.
By combining data captured from dozens of aerial images,
they create a three-dimensional model of an unusual
feature hidden between two ravines.
It definitely looks like it's not
a natural part of the landscape.
WALTERS: We've got this kind of V-shape of high ground
and maybe the vestige of a wall going all the way around.
NARRATOR: The aerial data has uncovered
the remains of a fort swallowed by time.
When historians cross-reference the ruined structure
with historic maps of the area,
what they discover stuns them.
In the First Ordnance Map of Scotland done in 1857,
we see this exact image, the exact topography.
What's so fascinating is that it's got a label on it.
It says Wallace's House.
NARRATOR: The document fuels speculation
that the drones have uncovered the long
lost hideout of one of the most extraordinary figures
in European history.
KOUROUNIS: If this is true,
this is the William Wallace, made famous as Braveheart,
of course.
NARRATOR: Despite a campaign of bloody insurrection against
the English overlords,
which reverberates to this day,
Wallace's life and exploits are shrouded in mystery.
We don't know where he was born or where he received
his military training,
but he emerges as the freedom fighter
for the Scots during the occupation of Scotland
by Edward I in the late 13th century.
NARRATOR: In 1296 AD, King Edward deposes
and imprisons the Scottish monarch
and claims the country as his own.
Spurred by this,
a year later, Wallace launches his first act of
revenge by slaying an English sheriff and his men.
Word of his attack soon spreads across
the beleaguered nation.
Wallace is seen as this great folk hero.
He's what everyone wants him to be -- a figure
of resistance against the English
coming from the south.
NARRATOR: Over the following months, Wallace gathers a band
of rebels who launch
increasingly audacious raids against their oppressors,
infuriating the English king.
He has this wonderful sword he carries
around with him that severs English heads.
It's called Freedom's Blade.
For the English, William Wallace was
public enemy number one.
He had to be caught.
NARRATOR: In September 1297,
King Edward dispatches 9,000 troops
north to quell the insurrection.
Despite being vastly outnumbered,
Wallace meets them head on, defeating the invaders
and massacring 5,000 at the Battle of Stirling Bridge.
CADDICK-ADAMS: This is an overwhelming victory,
and it's all down to Wallace,
his tactical genius, and his leadership.
NARRATOR: The remains of the structure
discovered from the skies
offers new insight into Wallace's historic victories
against the English.
CADDICK-ADAMS: From what we know of where he operated,
he has to have had a sort of base from which to operate,
And the English never discovered it.
NARRATOR: Archaeologists have yet to excavate the site,
and much remains to be learned,
but they believe it likely contained barracks
and wall defenses.
Its remote location also seems perfectly suited to Wallace's
use of ambush tactics before melting back
into Scotland's vast forests.
Like any successful guerilla fighter,
you've got to know the land well.
CADDICK-ADAMS: This seems to be somewhere where he can hide,
attack, and then retreat back.
[shouting and battle noises]
NARRATOR: Despite being revered by many Scots,
Wallace had his share of adversaries.
The secluded structure suggests he may have also used
this location as a refuge with his few trusted accomplices.
HORTON: This was an enormous advantage to Wallace,
because they were high in the woods
and very difficult to locate.
They were secure from attack.
NARRATOR: Yet by 1305,
Wallace's enemies are closing in, and he is given up to
the English.
Taken to London,
he is sentenced to an unimaginably horrific form
of execution.
HORTON: He was given the death of a traitor,
which involved hanging, drawing, and quartering.
CADDICK-ADAMS: He's hung till nearly dead but still conscious.
His internal organs are drawn out of his body.
Then his body is divided into
several pieces and scattered around the kingdom.
His head is severed and stuck at the entrance to
London Bridge.
NARRATOR: King Edward hopes Wallace's death will serve as
a warning to all those who dare defy him.
But his plan backfires.
Wallace becomes a Scottish hero.
A year later, in 1306, Robert the Bruce
raises the rebellion for the independence war that
ultimately is successful.
NARRATOR: Two decades after his death,
Scotland gains the freedom Wallace gave his life for.
150 years after it disappeared from the historical record,
the site that may have played a key role in those momentous
events is rediscovered once more by eyes in the sky.
HORTON: What's so exciting about the discovery of
this stronghold
is that at last we've got a place that
we can associate with his campaigns against the English.
And if so, this would make it one of
the most important archaeological sites
in all the British Isles.
NARRATOR: Coming up, the 1,300-square-mile
wound in the ground.
This is the biggest industrial project on planet Earth.
NARRATOR: And the CIA's psychic spies.
SZULGIT: Thoughts could be projected into a target's head
to control their minds.
NARRATOR: August 13, 2019, a satellite passing over
Canada scans Alberta's vast expanses of boreal forest
and captures this among the trees below.
KOUROUNIS: It looks like a vast industrial wasteland.
Whatever is going on here, it's being done
on a huge scale.
NARRATOR: A 1,300-square-mile wound punctures
the pristine wilderness.
Analysts dial up the magnification.
PEPPER: The first thing my eye is immediately drawn to
are these giant rectangles of yellow.
Looking closer, we can see what looks like
blood spreading over the corners of these blocks.
NARRATOR: For Martin Pepper, these red veins are a clue.
PEPPER: We're looking at sulfur.
Liquid sulfur is often red before it dries.
These blood rivers that we're seeing in
these images are liquid sulfur before it
cools and turns into these yellow piles.
NARRATOR: Scale analysis reveals the mammoth blocks of sulfur
each cover an area greater than 12 football fields
and are six stories high.
PEPPER: Sulfur naturally comes from volcanoes,
but most of the sulfur that we use is actually extracted from
fossil fuel refinement.
So maybe that's what we're seeing here.
NARRATOR: Geological records confirm the city-sized scar
sits on top of the largest reserve
of crude bitumen on Earth,
an underground deposit of primordial
ooze covering 54,000 square miles.
KOUROUNIS: Millennia ago, this part of Alberta
was lush marshlands
and all of that organic material decayed,
got buried underground, and eventually transformed
into bitumen-soaked sand.
NARRATOR: Europeans first noticed the potential industrial
use of these tarry sands as long ago as 1717,
when indigenous peoples bring samples to a Hudson Bay Company
trading post.
Raw bitumen from this area was used by
the indigenous Cree and Dene peoples to waterproof
their canoes, but when 18th century fur traders moved in,
and they noticed the amount of bitumen in this area,
they thought perhaps they could turn it into an industry.
NARRATOR: Yet it's not until the 20th century that
large-scale efforts to tap into North America's bitumen
reserves begin.
Between 1900 and 1925,
the number of vehicles in the U.S. alone jumps
from 8,000 to over 20 million.
Across the continent,
thousands of miles of rutted, muddy horse tracks are replaced
with hard, flat, asphalt-covered roads.
They want to industrialize it and use it on a large scale.
These mining companies strip-mined the landscape by
basically using absolutely
massive steam shovels to scoop up tons of
this tar-soaked sand.
NARRATOR: The miners soon exhaust
the region's surface reserves of bitumen.
As the years pass, they move underground where, trapped
in the tarry sands, are 140 billion barrels of oil,
more than has been used across
the world since the start of the Industrial Revolution,
and the destruction of Canada's forests moves up a gear.
PEPPER: The mining of tar sands is labor- and energy-intensive,
because you have to get it extremely hot
so it'll flow, and then that's what you can actually
separate into your oil and your asphalt.
NARRATOR: However, the Canadian government
denies plans to excavate
the oil-rich sands by detonating 100 nuclear
warheads underground.
In the 1960s, mining companies devise
new ways to reach their bounty.
When this mining gets too deep to just shovel off the surface,
they actually have to inject steam to melt it enough that
they can actually pump it out.
NARRATOR: In 1973, Arab nations impose
a global embargo on the export of oil.
With North America
now reliant on homegrown sources,
production at the Athabasca Mine explodes.
KOUROUNIS: Unfortunately, the processing injects
these chemicals into the nearby lakes
and streams well beyond where the extraction is
actually occurring.
NARRATOR: Over the following years, as more mining companies
flock to Canada,
the already massive industrial landscape grows
to an area the size of New York.
The tar sands are being mined on just an epic,
unthinkable scale.
This is the biggest ongoing industrial project on
planet Earth.
NARRATOR: Such is the scale of the Athabasca oil sands that
the mines create more sulfur than they sell to the industry.
As the site grows, the monster piles of sulfur,
a by-product of the refinement, rise from the ground.
It's kind of rare in industry that supply
vastly outstrips demand.
KOUROUNIS: There are stockpiles of sulfur,
millions of tons of it, just sitting around.
NARRATOR: Tens of millions of years after it was formed,
the oil of the Athabasca sands is now being pulled from
the ground at the rate of up to 2.6 million barrels per day.
We can see how the Earth's surface has
changed, and this image really brings that home.
PEPPER: And it's only by looking down from
space that we really appreciate its enormity.
NARRATOR: Coming up,
mind control and mutants on Long Island.
SZULGIT: Could it be that the U.S. military is
using this site for something they have not revealed?
NARRATOR: And 55 tons of Nazi terror.
MUNOZ: The tank was taking out 11
Allied tanks for every one of theirs.
NARRATOR: March 14, 2020.
Orbiting 380 miles above New York State,
a satellite scans a neighborhood on Long Island
and captures something that doesn't belong in suburbia.
MORAN: This is kind of crazy.
Right on the tip of Long Island, in the middle of
a clearing, you see this huge, weird structure.
It's this immense kind of industrial box.
On top of this building is this strange curved structure.
It almost looks like a drive-in movie screen.
NARRATOR: The mystery rooftop feature is over
120 feet in diameter.
Whatever this is, it must be there for some important,
unknown purpose.
NARRATOR: Newspaper reports reveal that the isolated
facility has attracted suspicion for many years.
What we're looking at has a pretty sinister reputation.
People who live in the area have all these rumors
and tales of it being some kind of secret
government laboratory.
NARRATOR: According to reports, the site was the location
for a series of highly clandestine
Cold War experiments.
The authorities, however, claim it
is a decommissioned early warning system.
Military records say this facility was designed for
no other purpose than to defend
against threats posed by the Soviet Union.
NARRATOR: The files say the site is one of several set up
along the East Coast during the 1950s and '60s
to scan the Atlantic Ocean for incoming aerial threats.
Yet what puzzles some analysts is that while the rest of
the radar networks were destroyed many years ago,
this one remained untouched.
This one was left because, ostensibly,
it's a good landmark for boaters and fishermen.
At least that's what the authorities claim.
NARRATOR: A terrifying discovery near the site fuels
fears that the government isn't telling the truth.
MORGAN: Somebody was out walking, and they found
this bizarre, hairless creature with
a beak that looks unlike any other animal that they have
ever seen before.
MOSHER: It is a very ghastly, strange-looking corpse,
and you can see why people might associate it with some
secret government project.
NARRATOR: In 2019, urban explorers
gain access to the facility.
MAN: Whoa.
Look at that.
All this stuff.
What is that?
NARRATOR: Their footage suggests that the structure in the image
is just one part of a much larger hidden facility.
MAN: That's the elevator.
It has long been rumored that beneath this giant box of
a building, there's an extensive series
of tunnels and underground labs.
It's alleged to be the home of the Montauk Project.
NARRATOR: The Montauk Project is said to be a series of
CIA-backed programs, which involve highly classified
experiments on animals and children.
The stories are actually the inspiration
for the TV series "Stranger Things."
It was thought to have included the development of
an electromagnetic ray that
could control thought, and if you can control thought,
you can control behavior.
NARRATOR: Authorities dismiss these claims.
Yet recently declassified files reveal that
beginning in the 1970s, the U.S. government
invests $20 million in a series of paranormal experiments,
code-named Project Star Gate.
Over a period of two decades, the military tries to weaponize
psychic abilities by training subjects to predict
global and domestic threats.
SZULGIT: Neuroscience was just being explored, and it was
thought that maybe thoughts
and ideas could be projected into a target's head to control
their minds.
ANNOUNCER: Modern technology placed today's scientists within
striking distance of achieving
total control of the human brain.
MORGAN: During the Cold War, the U.S. government
spent so much money and investigated so many
ridiculous things that ideas like the Montauk Project just
really don't seem that far-fetched.
NARRATOR: The documents reveal that the government's programs
also included experiments with hallucinogens and UFOs.
Some people say the Montauk Project actually went further.
MORGAN: It's believed that the U.S. government
at Montauk may have developed
a technology that allows for teleportation.
NARRATOR: Teleportation has long been dismissed as existing
only in the realms of science fiction.
Yet in 2020, NASA reveals that it has successfully teleported
quantum information over a distance of more than
25 miles.
If this is a technology that could be developed,
imagine the advantage that it would give a nation.
NARRATOR: Despite intense interest in the site
revealed from space
and the weird creature found nearby, evidence to support
rumors of clandestine experiments
there remains elusive.
Yet a recent sighting suggests the final chapter
in its story has yet to be written.
Residents woke up and said they
saw this thing move, this radar dish.
They were so freaked out that they
called the police to come investigate it.
[indistinct radio chatter]
SZULGIT: Could it be that the U.S. military
is using this site again
for something they have not revealed?
NARRATOR: Coming up, the forest of horrors.
This is the site of a terrible war crime.
NARRATOR: May 9, 2018.
The GeoEye-1 satellite passing over a densely
wooded area of southern Norway captures this image.
It kind of looked like the spine of something.
We've got eight of these shapes, and they're all
perfectly aligned in a remote area,
which doesn't really make any sense.
NARRATOR: Analysis of the image shows each arch of this
bridge to nowhere is 70 feet wide and evenly spaced.
It seems like this is some kind of military test range,
and looking at the condition of it, it looks fairly old,
so I would assume this is something that had to be
tied to the Nazi occupation of Norway during World War II.
NARRATOR: Wartime records confirm
the structure was once used by
perhaps the most feared machines in the Nazi arsenal.
What we're looking at is actually a tank shooting range.
They had to shoot through the arches to be able
to hit the embankment about 1000 feet at the other end.
NARRATOR: Much like the rest of mainland Europe,
the Nazis defeat of Norway had been spearheaded
by the tactic of blitzkrieg, or Lightning War.
800 aircraft and 120,000 troops
quickly overwhelm local resistance.
They really just couldn't withstand the speed
and the strength of the German attack.
Central to the idea of blitzkrieg is the German tank,
and German tanks are recognized
as being some of the best of the Second World War.
NARRATOR: The success of German tanks
on the battlefields of Europe has
its genesis in the 1930s.
As Germany secretly re-arms, Hitler instructs veteran
World War I tank commander, Ernst Volckheim,
to revolutionize the design and use of these war machines.
He bucked the international trend of trying to make lighter
and faster tanks and went the other way.
Volckheim suggests that the tank with the heaviest gun is,
in the end, going to win the battle.
NARRATOR: During World War II,
the Germans' deployment of big heavy Panzer tanks forces
the Americans to upgrade the Sherman's 37-millimeter main
weapon and armor.
But in 1942, the Nazis dramatically upped the ante.
MORGAN: They then work toward designing an 88-millimeter,
long-barreled, high velocity gun, and they design
a turret that can accommodate it and then a chassis, and that
eventually becomes what we call the Tiger.
The Tiger tank is one of the most iconic tanks
ever built -- It was a real beast.
NARRATOR: Armed with its monster 88-millimeter cannon
tested at the range
in the satellite image, the Tiger can penetrate
four inches of armor
at a range of 3,000 feet.
MORGAN: When the Tiger was on the battlefield,
my God, it terrified everybody that confronted it.
It could easily zap holes through just about
anything else.
MUNOZ: At the height of the war,
the Tiger tank was taking out 11 Allied tanks for every one
of theirs.
NARRATOR: For all the shock and awe of the Nazi's tanks,
in the end, they are overwhelmed by numbers.
During the conflict,
German war factories can only
produce around 50,000 war machines.
The Allies, some 210,000.
As defeat looms for Hitler,
the story of the structure seen from space
takes a dark twist.
MORGAN: This is not just a tank firing range.
This is the site of a terrible war crime.
It's here, during the war, that Germans will
enforce Hitler's sinister Commando Order.
On October 18, 1942,
the fuhrer issues in order that all captured Allied
commandos should be executed on sight and without trial.
MORAN: The devastating upshot of this was that almost 200
Allied military personnel were actually executed
at this very site.
[indistinct orders called]
[gunshot blasts]
They marched them into the forest, and while the tank
testing is going on, under the cover of all that noise,
they gunned them down and tip their bodies into mass graves.
WALTERS: What's really chilling is that when autopsies
were later carried out, they found that they were
still alive and breathing when they were buried.
NARRATOR: When the war ends,
many of those responsible for these atrocities evade justice.
Yet the site of their despicable crimes
remains a monument to the fallen, visible from space.
To me, these arches symbolize the tombstones of the people
that were murdered there during the Second World War.