Forbidden History - The Nazi Blueprint: Building Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich

Episode Date: July 28, 2026

In this episode, we explore the ruins of Nazi Germany’s failed building projects and the remnants of its various schemes and ambitions. Cast List: Eric Meyers: Host Dr Marcus Meyer: Historian Guy Walters: Author and Journalist Geoffroy Wawro: Military Historian, University of North Texas Katherine Sharp Landdeck: Author and Historian, Texas Woman’s University Nigel Jones: Author and Historian Peter Caddick Adams: Author and Historian James Corum: Military Historian Robert M. Citino: Senior Historian, National WW2 Museum Christel Focken: Author and WW2 Researcher Wolf-Dieter Holz: Author and Historian Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. Be sure to catch our Patreon exclusive Inner Circle series, featuring live expert interviews and deep dives into your favorite topics. Thanks for supporting the show. Germany is still littered with physical reminders of the Third Reich. Some are hidden away, buried in dense forests and remote locations. Others remain in plain sight, looming over the landscape. They're grandiose, they're pompous, they're intended to kind of reflect the greatness of Nazi Germany.

It's one of these kind of forgotten sights of Nazi Germany, but it's absolutely essential that we know more about it. Listen in, as we investigate the lost factories, forgotten structures, and hidden military headquarters that once formed Hitler's Nazi war machine. In northwestern Germany, on the banks of the Vesa River, running through the city of Bremen, a monumental structure stands as testament to the scale of Nazi Germany's ability to produce weapons of war. At approximately 1,400 feet long, 300 feet wide, and at its tallest 90 feet high, it's an immense piece of wartime engineering. From above, its 14-foot thick concrete roof concealed the top-secret industrial facility being constructed inside this gargantuan building, known as Bunker Valentin. Historian Dr. Marcus Mayer has been researching and studying this enormous structure

and the role it played in the Nazi war effort. The largest armament projects of the Navy in the last two years of the war, Construction work began at the site in March, 1943. The bunker was designed to be bomb-proof and to withstand the largest bombs available at the time. That is why the ceiling was planned at 7 meters. In principle, this was one of the most modern construction sites in Europe at the time. This secret Nazi facility was designed for one single purpose, to build hunter-killer submarines for the German Navy.

This would have been the beginning of the submarine production. Through this gate, the individual segments of the submarine were brought into the bunker. The segments were to be prefabricated at shipyards in Bremen and Hamburg, before being transported along the Vesa River, and delivered to Valentin to start the assembly process. Then, where Rainwater now stands, they would have aligned it on a large turntable and then placed it on a system of carriages and rails, welded the boat together, and then started to push it through the bunker. Valentin would have had 13 assembly bays in total. Once the structure had been welded together, it was to be moved on to the following bay for the next set of parts to be added. Once assembly of the U-boat was complete, it would then be taken to the launch area for final testing.

This is in principle the last station of the submarine production. The finished submarine would have come to a halt on the destroyed key facility. The last bays, 12 and 13, were separated from the others, with high walls and would be closed using watertight floodgates. The chamber would have been flooded, the boat would have been pulled in the water, so to speak. Then the boat would have been dipped briefly to test whether the engines would work. the engines would work underwater and whether the seals hold. From there, the U-boats that passed the final testing and were deemed seaworthy would be launched. So that in the end it could actually run into the Vesser as a finished submarine.

Sailing from here, the U-boat would follow the river north to the port city of Bremerhaven, and then out to the North Sea to be deployed into active service against Allied military and merchant shipping. Germany raced to finish the construction of this monolithic facility, and with good reason. Once completed, it would have the capacity to supply the German navy with 12 U-boats a month for the war in the Atlantic. The Valentin submarine pen was just one of the many projects developed by the Nazis to feed their ever-increasing demand for supplies and armaments. But how did a nation still recovering from their loss in World War I just 21 years? just 21 years prior, managed to prepare itself for conflict on a global scale.

The Germans had been denied a big military by the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I. The Treaty of Versailles signed after their defeat ended the state of war between Germany and the Allies at the end of World War I. It required, among other things, for Germany to accept responsibility for all loss and damage during the war. Pay huge amount of of money in reparations and concede large portions of its territories. It also required Germany to disarm, placing severe restrictions of German ownership of arms and munitions. It was designed as a punishment and to prevent further conflict, but within Germany it caused

a growing resentment. Germany was hamstrung by the Treaty of Versailles. They've been basically told, your military cannot total more than 100,000 people. You can't have an Air Force, you can't have tanks, you can't have heavy artillery, you can't have chemical weapons, you can't have big surface ships, you can't have submarines. Publicly, Germany complied with the terms of the treaty. But before long, the nation's once proud and powerful military began to rebuild itself again in secret.

At first, this clandestine rearmament was kept to relatively small-scale operations, until 1933 when a new political party seized control of the state. By the time that Hitler came to power, Germany had already started to rearm ignoring the restrictions of Versailles. Hitler made no secret that he was going to tear up the Versailles Treaty. This had been one of the founding principles of the Nazi Party, and he'd said, we are going to put Germany on the map again, we are going to regain the lands populated by Germans that would strip from the country. after the First World War, we are going to become a great power once again. So when Hitler reintroduces conscription, almost as soon as he comes into office in 1933,

that's still in defiance of the Treaty after the First World War. What's far more sinister is the German Air Force, and that is developed in secret in the first few years of the Third Reich and not unveiled publicly until 1935. And by the time everything is unveiled, it's too late for the international community to put the brakes on and say, hey, you shouldn't be doing that. Hitler continued to rebuild Germany's military might, increasing the supplies and armaments in preparation for all-out war. But Germany had one significant problem to solve. Germany's not a country rich in mineral resources, hasn't got things like oil in great quantities. The Nazis knew that they were going to be on their own when it came to supplies.

They were going to be surrounded, they were going to be blockaded, they were going to have to depend on no one but themselves until they could take other countries, until they could spread and use others to supply them. The Nazis knew that one of warfare's most important commodities is fuel, yet they had few resources to make their own, peering above the forest canopy just outside the town, of Perlitz, located in modern-day Poland, is the Nazis' answer to their fuel shortage problem. The abandoned facility was built with the aim of keeping the regime powered

throughout the war. Germany is forced to essentially try to supply itself with synthetic industries. We're talking about, you know, trying to make gasoline from coal. While Germany was limited in many natural resources, the material it did have in abundance was coal. coal. In 1937, the synthetic fuel plant Hydrieverker-Purlitz AG was founded. Utilizing a revolutionary process called hydrogenation, Germany began to turn its coal into fuel.

So in those early years and as they're preparing for the war, the Nazis did everything they could to fight the war all by themselves. Within these now crumbling ruins, Germany employed the latest science and techniques by treating coal under immense pressure and temperature with hydrogen gas to convert it into liquid fuel for the Nazi war effort. This single factory alone was responsible for 15% of Germany's total synthetic fuel consumption. In total, Hitler approved 12 of these factories to be built around Germany, which would go on to produce nearly 3 million gallons of synthetic fuel per day. You will soon see the Germans producing 200,000 tons of oil a month from the refineries in Eastern Germany. These plants would play a vital role in the upcoming war, supplying more than 92% of Germany's aviation fuel and approximately 50% of its total petroleum.

Hitler was going to need to supply his armies with more than just fuel. Hidden in the forests in the far west of Poland, huge industrial silos, strange corroded pools, networks of trenches, and many lengths of train track littered the landscape. This enormous factory was built in a forested area of what was then southeast Germany, masked by forests so that it wasn't observable from the air. Because what the Nazis were hiding here was extremely violent. The site was expansive. Spreading out over 21 square miles, it would be larger than 1,000 football fields.

It housed its own power plant, apartment blocks, and a fire station. The buildings were kept at a distance from each other. This was to limit the damage from any potential explosions that might happen in the process of making these vital war supplies. Of course, along with the weapons like warplanes and tanks, planes and tanks. They needed munitions. So they built the Dark Alphra Noble factory. It's more like a munition city, really, where all sorts of explosives, from gunpowder to TNT were developed, were produced. Sites like these were to be instrumental in keeping German

troops supplied with ammunition. At its peak, this single factory alone would produce over 13,000 tons of gunpowder a year. All of it destined for the bullets, shells and artillery used in Hitler's fight against the Allies. This is where weapons were made, were stockpiled, and it was Germany's arsenal for the Second World War. Hitler had also paid no less attention to another vital asset needed for the war effort. He was going to need a constant supply of military personnel and willing civilians to maintain the Home Front, and for that he would need to win the hearts and minds of the German people. His plan was to create what he believed would be a proud and superior German race,

fully compliant with Nazi doctrine and willing to carry out their orders. To accomplish this, he would need to present the Nazi regime as a superpower on the world's stage. In the German city of Nuremberg, an example of one of the ways he chose to do this remains to this day, towering over the landscape. Hitler was kind of a failed artist and a failed architect and thought of himself as having this kind of great artistic mind and intervened directly in decisions about big monuments, rebuilt cities, rally grounds, stadiums,

and he tried to link this German present to ancient past like the Romans. And at the sites of the original Nazi rally grounds in Nuremberg, this giant structure striking resemblance to the Colosseum of Rome was no accident. Hitler notoriously said that he wanted the Reich to last for a thousand years. What he set about trying to achieve was this incredibly ambitious building program of massive buildings that owed their style to Greek and Roman buildings, but also were just epic in scale.

But in the main, Hitler's trying to strike a kind of new-looker. for Nazi Germany that will set it apart from the more classical look of Vilhelmine Germany, the old German Empire that came before. With the help of his chief architect, Albert Speer, the Nazi regime began building projects on an epic scale, with buildings and monuments designed to look impressive, not just when they were built, but as incredible ruins in a thousand years' time. The site contains several deployment areas for troops and tanks, a land-earned for Zeppelin airships to dock,

and the Nazi Congress Hall. The hall was modeled on the Coliseum of Rome. Designed to hold 50,000 spectators for Nazi Party rallies, work began in 1935, and it is just one example of the importance placed by Hitler on the public image of the Nazis. People are awed by these new Nazi construction projects. They're grandiose, they're pompous, pompous, they're intended to kind of reflect the greatness of Nazi Germany.

And so Nazi architecture becomes an absolutely critical piece of Nazi propaganda. But everything created to this point would pale in comparison to what was planned next, a building project on a scale the likes of which the world had never seen. Today, Berlin is a modern capital city, with many iconic landmarks. such as the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, and the Berlin Television Tower. But Hitler had even bigger plans for it. Berlin was to be the jewel in the Nazi crown, and remodeled as the new world capital known as Germania.

You can see they're using the ancient classical word and therefore giving a kind of ancient legitimacy to what he was trying to achieve. Now, what he was trying to achieve at Germania, and also in places like Nuremberg, were building projects that mankind had never seen before. Towering above Berlin's iconic Brandenburg gate was to be the so-called Triumphal Arch, inspired by the Arcter Triumph in Paris,

which would have comfortably sat inside Hitler's version six times over. But by far the largest of these structures was the Grand Hall. At 950 feet, it would have been over six times the height of the Statue of Liberty. Inspired by the opulent dome buildings of Rome, such as the Parthenon and St. Peter's Basilica, it was so unimaginably large, the architects theorized it would have its own microclimate. Albert Scher came to Hitler and said, Myn Fuhrer, there's a problem with the dome. And Hitler said what?

And Scher said, there'll be weather inside of it. It would be so big, so tall, there'd be enough humidity to actually begin raining. Again, these are buildings that simply don't work on a human level. They depersonalize you. They are there to show you that you're always going to be smaller than the state itself. These would have been some of the largest man-made structures found anywhere on Earth, dwarfing all other buildings and monuments around it. They were designed to both impress and intimidate.

It made Germans feel that they were part of some higher project. And so I think this sense of larger than life, it had an impact on a people who had been traumatized by the defeat in World War I, the inflation of the early 20s, and the depression of the late 20s and 30s. But Hitler didn't just use architecture to exhibit the might and superiority of the Nazis to the common people. He also used it to show how the regime could benefit them in a way they had never known before. Hitler was trying to win over the working classes who had not voted for him in the 1932 elections. These programs that offered the German worker vacation opportunities and the kind of things the German middle class enjoyed, he wanted to make sure that the German factory workers and their families

could enjoy the summer at the beach. On the island of Rugen, on Germany's Baltic coast, A sprawling complex of buildings, stretching nearly three miles covers the beachfront. Built between 1936 and 1939, it now stands as a monument to an early Nazi social program called Strength Through Joy. So Prora on the island of Rougan in the Baltic Sea is the quintessential Strength Through Joy resort. And it's this really huge structure, very, very long, because every one of these rooms was supposed to have a beachfront Ocean View Room.

It's three miles long. And you know, you look at it and it just stretches away all the way down the coastline into the horizon. It's sort of epic and it's also just absurd. And of course, you're building these big complexes and putting investment there. But that was essentially political and it was propaganda. Germany wanted also to showcase the importance of Nazi ideology. and how pro-worker the Nazi ideology was. The crumbling labyrinth of rooms and hallways

is a far cry from its intended splendor. The complex is vast and was designed to have a capacity of 20,000. Each family would have their own room and shared facilities. Only state-approved activities would be made available, consisting of health and fitness programs or Nazi propaganda films. Uganda films. Everything at Prora was designed with the aim of indoctrinating the guests, even in their leisure time. Through going to a nice holiday camp like Prora, it was felt that the public would all be brought together and there'd all be good little Nazis. So this was the

ultimate aim of it. But as with everything in Nazi Germany, the state was always watching. And of course, at Prora, unlike most traditional holiday camps today, you also had informers there. And so if you started saying things that were against the regime, you might find yourself going to the local Praora-Ga-Ga-Ga-Kastapo office. So, you know, it's not your typical holiday camp, not just because it's incredibly large, but also because it's another form of state control. The strength through joy movement may have started out as a social scheme to better the lives of the common German workers. But in reality, Prora was less a holiday camp and more a training camp, to prepare the German population for an inevitable war.

And this soon spilled over into other aspects of their everyday life. The German people are slowly militarized, whether it's the Hitler youth that replaces the Boy Scouts, it's female equivalents, whether it's the German Labor Service or the German armed forces. Everybody is adjusted to wearing uniform. That's really the first step for war. Construction began in 1936, but with war looming, workers were diverted to weapons factories before the complex could be completed, and not a single German ever set foot in Prora for their vacation.

To this day, it's there sitting out there on the island of Rougan to be the kind of crown jewel of the strength through joy movement, but was never completed because of the outbreak of World War II. With the advent of war, the Nazis diverted war. resources away from projects like Pröhr, and put them into making sure Germany was ready to fight a conflict on a global scale. By the middle of 1939, Hitler's plans for an expanded Third Reich had seen Germany annex Austria and occupy Czechoslovakia. But it was the speed, efficiency, and ferocity with which Germany invaded Poland that shocked the world, and sparked

what many considered to be the official start of the Second World War. And within months, more countries around Europe would soon fall under the Nazi regime. The early Nazi conquests with the lightning conquest, the Blitzkrieg conquest of Poland and France, enthusiasm for Hitler reached new heights. These countries were stripped of their resources, and people were happy that Hitler seemed to have achieved almost bloodless victories. But these victories were anything but bloodless, and this was merely the beginnings of the Nazi plan. Hitler believed that the survival of the German people came from taking the Western Soviet Union.

What do you feel about yourselves as a nation? We're invincible. We're completely unconquerable. If we can take on France, we can take on any other country. Five miles east of the town of Ketrazine in modern-day Poland, a sprawling, complex of ruined structures appear through the forest. Security at this top-secret site was a paramount importance, because this would become known as the Wolfslair, Adolf Hitler's headquarters for the Eastern Front. German military commanders and even Hitler perceived his attacks in the Second World War would be. Over very quickly. War with France. Over in a few weeks. They expected a quick victory, but the Soviet Union refused to fall.

Over the duration of the war, Hitler would spend over 800 days here, overseeing the war on the Eastern Front. And as the conflict in the East progressed, it proved more and more costly for Hitler, straining Germany's resources and weakening their positions in the other theaters. Once the tide of war began to turn against Germany, once Russia was invaded and not conquered, the feelings of Germans began to change. Once the Russian front starts to erode manpower in 1941, and everybody starts to lose relatives, once the Americans come into the war and the American bombers start blitzing German cities,

then everything changes for Germany. With vital supplies and resources rapidly dwindling, Germany's position in the war was becoming increasingly unstable. In an attempt to level the playing field, they focused on cutting off Britain's much-needed supply route across the Atlantic. Unable to achieve this with brute force, they concentrated their efforts on using stealth and surprise. Less than 20 miles from central Berlin lies the remains of one of the last active operational sites of the OKM, the high command of the Navy in Nazi Germany. It is one of these kind of forgotten sites of Nazi Germany, but it's absolutely essential

that we know more about it. Originally built as a school for radio communications, work began on the site in 1939. As the Allies increased their aerial bombardment of Berlin, Nazi High Command decided to move the headquarters of the OKM. The site in the countryside, just outside of Bernal, was an obvious choice. As the bombing campaign increased, as the naval losses increased, the headquarters of the Navy were shifted out of Berlin to be a safe location. A heavily forested area, already having military infrastructure,

would be the perfect place to camouflage such an important command. Fortunately for them, they had already been constructing a backup for the past three years. It was designated by the code name Lager-Corps. It was here that the central command for the U-boat fleet was located. This is the place that is sending out orders to all those U-boat wolf packs, as they were known, in order to get them to destroy allied shipping that was making its way across the North Atlantic to Great Britain. And so there can't be anywhere more important in the Third Reich than Lager Corral in some

ways, because if that gives the right orders, if that fights the war properly, if the If Ubers are successful, Germany may well win the war. The BDU, those in Command HQ and U-boat arm of the German Navy, established their main radio station at Laga Corolla under the supervision of the OKM. Most communications for the submarine war would come through the site, and submarine warfare was to become a priority for Nazi Germany. If all that shipping is destroyed and effectively sent to the bottom of the ocean, that's going to strangle Britain.

It's going to deprive her of essential supplies, food, ammunition, you name it. Hitler knows that if he can basically cut off all that shipping, Britain will have to give up. Until 1943, the Germans had been concentrating their naval effort on surface vessels, but these were extremely costly to build and man. The Americans, British, have such a large fleet, the Germans can't compete in surface warfare. It cost a gigantic amount of money to build battleships. With the same steel and the same number of personnel, you can man 50 to 100 submarines. The task of ushering in this new era of naval submarine warfare fell to Carl Durnets, who in 1943 was made Supreme Commander of the Navy.

The German surface fleet is essentially gone by 1943 and is irrelevant as far as Dunitz is concerned. So the fleet will be concentrating on submarines. And it's easy to sum up his impact on the Battle of the Atlantic. He was the first to see that submarines, as effective as they were as kind of lone wolves, preying out there on stragglers from the convoys, would be even more effective as a pack. He's the one who's responsible for building out these wolf packs of German submarines to try to isolate the United Kingdom and prevent an allied onslaught on German-occupied Europe. Christel Falkin and Wolf Dieter Holtz are authors and experts on World War II.

They have researched the Lager-Koralla, gathering information on Admiral Dernets, and how the bunker operated. Grand Admiral Dernets was in charge of the hospital. whole site. It was there that the general decisions about naval war were made, directly across the Pacific and Atlantic and U.S. coast, and indirectly for the subordinate levels, Black Sea, Crimea, and so on. The U-boats would patrol separately, on strung out lines across convoy routes. Stealthily they'd hunt, waiting for their opportunity to pick off allied vessels crossing the Atlantic.

From the isolation of his secret headquarters, Dernitz would coordinate the operations at sea. The bunkers were of course there to protect the people themselves, but also to keep operations because an interruption due to an air raid would have disrupted communications and perhaps delayed important decisions. And so it was possible to continue working and communicating while an air raid was going on. That was the most important. thing. The U-boats in the Atlantic Ocean on the U.S. coast and in the Pacific Ocean were partially commanded

directly from here and given their specific tasks, such as who should attack the convoy, who should go to the U.S. coast and what was their orders. These tasks were all distributed by radio. Key to their success was clear and secure communications. Inside these crumbling ruins, Durnitz employed the help of one of the most famous and top secret codes ever created. Within the now ruined secret command bunker of the German Navy, Admiral Karl Dernets once kept one of Nazi Germany's most secret items.

The Enigma was a prototype computer, if you like, in which signals could be encoded, encrypted on a rotary machine. It looked rather like a typewriter. The machine would encrypt orders being sent out by scrambling the tech. into random cipher text. In order to de-scramble it, the receiver would need a machine and the latest codes that were kept under lock and key at Lager-Kerala. The Enigma Code was important because it was the code that would be used in the days, weeks and months to come.

If you had had this code in advance on the Allies side, you could have listened in on all of the orders, as well as other things. But unknown to the Nazis, even though, Nazis, even before the war, the Allies had been making top-secret efforts to crack the German Enigma Code. The Germans made the mistake of thinking that the machine was so advanced that it was impenetrable. It couldn't possibly be broken. But in fact, before the war, the Poles got hold of a copy of a prototype Enigma machine, which was smuggled into Britain. Another one was recovered from a ship as it was sinking.

And with these machines, Britain recruited a team of brilliant scientists, led by Alan Turing. The team based themselves at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, in the United Kingdom. There, using the captured machines, they began the arduous task of deciphering the German communications. And with an increasingly large staff, they managed to break

most of the German codes. This was deadly secret. This was absolutely top secret, so secret that the full details of it were not revealed for decades after the war into the 1970s. And this was one of the great unsung war-winning weapons. Particularly in the Battle of the Atlantic, was a vital importance to the Allies in winning the war. The Battle of the Atlantic was the longest continuous military campaign

of the Second World War. Ultimately, Germany failed to stop the flow of supplies to Britain. Meanwhile, at Lagerkerala, Dernets continued his command of the German fleet, but by April 1945 the war was all but lost for Hitler and the Nazis. The Soviet Red Army was closing in on Berlin, and the order was given by Dernets to abandon post. Using explosives, they destroyed what they could before the retreat, and the East. invading Soviets helped with the rest. Back in Bremen, by March 1945, the Valentin's submarine pens were 90% complete and only a few months away from starting to assemble its U-boats, but the Allies had been watching and waiting. But of course the construction site

was huge, and of course the Allied planes always flew over the Vessa when they attacked inland. This construction site was under surveillance from day one. Instead of launching an immediate air attack at the start of the construction, the Allies waited for the Nazis to expend their much-needed money, materials, and manpower on this colossal project before giving the order to bomb it. Despite their best efforts to protect the building against aerial attack, it was unable to withstand the latest in Allied weapons technology. Valentin was bombed beyond repair, but it wasn't just the bunker itself that fell victim to the Allied weapons.

bombs. Like any construction site, it had people working on it. There is of course an air raid alert and the German workers had the opportunity to seek refuge in an air raid shelter. While the German workers had been able to seek refuge from the air attack, others were not so lucky. Of the estimated 10,000 people who built the Valentin submarine pens, the majority were slated labor. Between 8,000 and 10,000 forced laborers from all over Europe worked on the construction site. Concentration camp prisoners, civilian forced laborers, but above all prisoners of war, mainly from the Soviet Union. And the site at

Valentin was not unique. In fact, Hitler's vision for a Nazi Third Reich was designed and built around enslaved people. The Nazi war system was enormously reliant on forced labor. It was in fact a gigantic slave labor system. They take the populations from conquered countries in Europe, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Poland, Soviet Union, and they make them labor in German factories under brutal conditions. Almost all of the vast factories, bunkers, plants, and facilities constructed during the period of the Nazi regime were built and often operated by slave labor. labor.

And an awful lot of the assembly and manufacture of German equipment is done by concentration camp victims. So Germany, ironically, is completely reliant on the race and people it is sworn to destroy. And they work these people literally to death. As a result, some forced laborers die in the bombing. When Berlin fell in May 1945, the rest of Hitler's empire soon followed. Although the remnants can still be seen to this day, Hitler's grand plan of a thousand-year Reich lasted just 12. But within that short period of time, he used Germany and the countries he

had conquered to create a Nazi war machine on an unprecedented scale and at a cost of unprecedented suffering. Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you like this episode, don't forget to leave a comment below, and feel free to leave us a rating or review. Your feedback helps us reach more listeners like you. Thanks for listening.