Narrator: Tonight, a closer look inside
the world’s most sinister castles and strongholds...
Larissa Tracy: Nobody can fathom a mind
that would create a place
that seems welcoming, that seems safe,
but was designed to kill.
Narrator: From an iconic torture tower...
Eileen Joy: It must have been terrifying for prisoners
to be led down into the dungeon.
Larissa Tracy: Your hips are being pulled apart.
Your knees, your wrists, everything.
It took some real time to get his head off the body.
Narrator: ...to a hotel of hidden horrors.
Clarence Goodman: They’re going to be murdered
and the skeletons sold for money.
It’s a tomb. It’s a trap.
Narrator: These are the origin stories of true temples of doom.
Not all inventions are made with good intentions.
Unlock the twisted history
behind the world’s darkest marvels.
Looming over the north bank of London’s River Thames
is an imposing stone structure
that has been a fixture on the city skyline
for nearly a 1,000 years-- the Tower of London.
The Tower of London covers about 12 acres,
which is about nine football fields of area.
It’s surrounded by a huge moat.
It dominates with its breadth.
It dominates with its width. It dominates with its walls.
Michael B. Young: The Tower of London is a phenomenal,
spectacular building.
It was in many ways the archetypal medieval castle.
Narrator: This intimidating stronghold
is ordered to be built in the 11th century
by King William I.
In 1066, William the Bastard conquers England
and becomes known forever as William the Conqueror.
Larissa Tracy: Once he takes the reins of power,
the Tower of London is built as his first main fortress.
Rebecca Simon: William the Conqueror orders this tower to be built from stone.
This is very unusual,
because people haven’t really started crafting homes
out of stone yet in England,
and the reason why William the Conqueror
wanted it to be made out of stone
is because the idea was stone would last forever.
Larissa Tracy: The whole point of a castle was to say,
"I am here, this is my land,
and I have now built this structure
that will outlast even me."
Narrator: But construction isn’t complete until 1097,
ten years after William’s death.
Michael B. Young: The Tower of London was originally
what is now just the White Tower.
It was meant to be impregnable.
It was the part of a castle that was then known as a keep,
and the word means that you could keep safe there.
Keep the royal family safe. Keep the royal jewels safe.
Retreat there from an angry mob or an invading enemy.
Over the course of the next three centuries,
the White Tower in the middle was successfully,
as we would say today, militarily hardened
by the construction of two encircling curtain walls,
moats, and drawbridges.
Each of those walls had towers built on them.
Narrator: The tower is considered so safe
it serves as the royal living quarters
throughout times of great upheaval.
Larissa Tracy: In 1348, the first cases of the bubonic plague show up.
Now the bubonic plague of course
decimated the population of medieval Europe,
killing six million people.
There’s a recession, there’s economic depression.
There’s famine.
There’s a drought, which doesn’t help.
And at the same time,
you have the English monarchy
pressing its claim to the French throne
using English resources.
And so that leads to dissent among the English population.
Narrator: On May 30th, 1381,
that dissent turns into an uprising
against the king and his advisors.
King Richard II came into power in 1377 when he was only ten.
So in an England that’s run by a boy king,
that’s still reeling from the bubonic plague
and thirty years of economic upheavals,
1381 marks a watershed moment
in which the peasants, the farmers,
the people who produce the food are fed up.
Rebecca Simon: Richard II wants to appease the peasants,
so he leaves the tower to go to talk to them.
But naively, the gates are left open,
because it’s assumed that no one would ever go into the tower
because it is such a large fortress.
Unfortunately, the peasants see their opportunity,
and over 400 of them storm the tower.
They go in, and they want to get major leaders.
Cord Whitaker: They do get a hold of one of those advisors of the king
who they consider an enemy of the people,
and that is chancellor and archbishop of Canterbury Simon Sudbury.
Along with him and several other royal officials,
they drag them out of the tower across to Tower Hill.
And there they proceed to behead these officials.
The beheading of Simon Sudbury appears to have been done
with, let’s say, a rather blunt axe...
...and it took some real time to get his head off the body.
And they take these heads
and put them on spears
and display them on London Bridge.
Several days later, the revolt would end
with the heads of some of the leading rebellers on pikes
and used to replace the heads on the bridge.
Narrator: King Richard manages to crush the rebellion,
but ultimately meets his own grisly fate.
Larissa Tracy: Even though Richard is only 14 when this happens,
his reign becomes very unstable after the Peasants’ Revolt,
and he is seen as more and more authoritarian as his reign progresses,
until he’s deposed in 1399 and likely starved to death.
Narrator: After the Peasants’ Revolt,
the monarchy stops using the White Tower
as a primary residence.
Larissa Tracy: In the late 15th century, early 16th century,
the center of power shifts.
The monarchy moves around a lot more,
and actually Windsor becomes
one of the primary royal residences.
The Tower of London becomes a seat of government.
Narrator: But it also serves another crucial purpose--
as a prison for people accused of high treason,
including a queen.
Cord Whitaker: Of Henry the VIII’s wives,
Anne Boleyn is perhaps the most famous.
Henry VIII, his main concern
is to produce an heir for the kingdom.
Anne Boleyn was not able to provide him this male heir whom he sought.
He wanted to get her out of the way.
She is accused of incest, adultery,
and she’s even accused of witchcraft--
the idea that she bewitched Henry
into divorcing his first wife, Catherine of Aragon,
so he’d marry her instead.
Ultimately, she is found guilty,
and she’s thrown into the tower and condemned to death.
Cord Whitaker: She is shut up in the same apartments
where she had prepared for her wedding
a mere three years before.
While she’s held there for 17 days,
she can watch the construction of the gallows
on which she is to be beheaded.
Henry wants to orchestrate a spectacle for her execution.
But Anne was very afraid that an English axeman would botch the job.
So Anne Boleyn asked and was granted
the right to have a French swordsman come over from Calais.
French beheadings at this time
were done with a very sharp, very skilled swordsman.
He was paid 23 pounds, 6 shillings,
the equivalent of $10,000 today,
to execute the first queen who’d been executed in English history.
This is unprecedented.
Narrator: Anne Boleyn is led to the site of her beheading,
the Tower Green, cementing its legacy
as a stage for bloody executions,
which includes another of Henry VIII’s wives
just six years later.
Rebecca Simon: Catherine Howard is Henry VIII’s fifth wife.
She’s very young when she marries Henry.
Some historians believe that she’s only 15 years old.
But Catherine is repulsed by him,
and so she starts having an affair
with a young member of court,
and she doesn’t even really hide it.
So Henry VIII orders her to be sent to the tower to be executed.
In comparison to the quite regal death
that attended Anne Boleyn,
Catherine Howard’s was without pageantry.
It was hurried. It was inglorious.
Rebecca Simon: And this is very likely due
to Henry’s extreme humiliation
at not only having been cuckolded after just one year of marriage,
but also having married someone
who so openly was disgusted by him.
Larissa Tracy: Her body is buried beneath the floor of the chapel.
There’s not even a box.
Catherine Howard is buried with lime.
And there’s every suggestion
that he just wanted to dissolve her body and move on.
Narrator: During the course of its bloody history,
many more meet their end beneath the executioner’s axe.
Larissa Tracy: There is currently on display
in the top of the White Tower
one of four axes that was used for executions.
It’s a very distinctive axe because it has a wide blade,
and then it tapers into this almost hooked shape.
And that axe, of course, very notoriously
becomes an emblem of beheading in England specifically.
Narrator: But the tower becomes even more well known
for its brutal methods of torture.
Narrator: Hidden beneath the Tower of London
are several dungeons responsible for its bloody reputation.
Eileen Joy: It must have been terrifying
for prisoners to be led down into the dungeons,
where they would have heard other prisoners screaming,
moaning in agony.
They would have also heard the torturers
and what they were doing.
Rebecca Simon: Torture was extremely prolific
under the reign of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.
And this is because of Henry VIII’s growing paranoia
of people working against him.
And so, anybody who he even suspected
of possibly being treasonous would get thrown into the tower.
Cord Whitaker: In the dungeons at the Tower of London,
you would have had three main forms of torture.
One of them is the rack.
Larissa Tracy: When somebody’s attached to a rack,
they’re stretched, and what you hear is the popping sound
of their joints and the cartilage
as they are slowly dislocated.
Your spine is being pulled apart.
Your hips are being pulled apart,
your knees, your wrists, everything.
It would leave somebody completely and totally incapacitated.
Cord Whitaker: Then you would have also had the manacles
that could be employed when someone was accused of stealing
because one is being hung by the hands.
Larissa Tracy: Manacles were meant for imprisonment
or to suspend somebody in a distended form.
Someone’s hands are tied behind their back and they’re lifted up.
So somebody in manacles could be suspended
at varying angles that cause varying degrees of pain.
And then, of course, you also had the scavenger’s daughter.
Narrator: Like the rack, the scavenger’s daughter
is used to elicit confessions.
But instead of stretching victims, it compresses them.
Larissa Tracy: The idea of the scavenger’s daughter,
it’s a metal frame that holds someone’s hands and their feet
so that they are forced into a stress position for a length of time.
And it is designed specifically
to cause severe pain and cramping.
Narrator: Perhaps even worse is being locked up
in the most fearsome dungeon of all,
a dark four-by-four cell known as the Little Ease.
Cord Whitaker: If you’ve ever had to even bend over
for longer than you’d like, you know how painful it can get.
People would be locked in it for hours or even days.
Eileen Joy: But it’s also solitary confinement.
You cannot see anyone. There is no window.
And in my opinion, except for deaths that happen bit by bit,
nothing is worse than solitary confinement.
Narrator: A horrific fate experienced by its first
unfortunate victim in 1534.
There was a young woman named Alice Tankerville who had been accused of theft,
convicted for it, and imprisoned in the tower.
However, one of the guards of the tower named John Bawd
fell in love with her.
So one night they sought to slip out
of the tower together.
They made their way toward Tower Hill,
when they were caught by one of John’s colleagues,
who of course called other guards in.
Narrator: As punishment, John Bawd is locked
inside Little Ease until he’s almost dead.
Then he’s hung outside until he dies of exposure
and his body is picked apart by ravens.
John Bawd goes from being one of the guards of the tower
to one of the tower’s victims.
Michael Young: Alice, because she had originally committed
a theft on the Thames, was convicted of piracy.
And in keeping with the crime,
she was hanged from the side of the River Thames as were all pirates,
either to die of hanging first
or die as the tide rose over her.
Narrator: In 1640, torture is outlawed in England,
bringing this dark chapter in the tower’s history to a close.
But over two centuries later,
an even more menacing castle emerges.
July 1895, Chicago, Illinois.
While conducting an investigation of a South Side hotel,
police make a shocking discovery.
In the basement, the police find a dissection table.
They find a kiln for burning things,
and they ultimately find evidence of bones and jewelry inside this kiln.
Also, a tub full of quicklime,
which is a classic way to dissolve and dispose of a body.
Larissa Tracy: And they find so many jumbled remains
that it’s impossible for them to determine
exactly how many corpses they’ve found.
Narrator: News headlines dub the hotel "The Murder Castle,"
and investigators start to dig deeper
into the building’s owner, Dr. H.H. Holmes.
Clarence Goodman: Holmes was born in May of 1861
as Herman Webster Mudgett.
And then it is upon his graduation from medical school
that he decides to take on an assumed name.
Ed O’Donnell: Holmes also displays a macabre fascination with cadavers,
with bodies, with dissection,
and some of his earliest known scams
are taking out insurance policies on fictitious people
and presenting a cadaver as the dead person,
collecting the insurance money.
Narrator: After leaving New York and Philadelphia
under suspicious circumstances,
Holmes moves to Chicago in 1886 to work at a pharmacy.
Soon after, he buys the vacant lot across the street
to build a new endeavor-- a hotel.
Ed O’Donnell: Holmes is a guy who wants to keep his business secret.
So no contractor, no carpenter, no bricklayer,
does more than a couple of weeks work before they’re fired,
which means they won’t see the diabolical plan in full.
When this building of Holmes’ springs up
in the middle of the town, it is so singular,
even down to the turrets.
It has the resemblance of a castle,
and it is so tall and takes up so much real estate,
that it is eye-catching.
Narrator: The ground floor of Holmes’ hotel
is built out as a conventional retail space.
But the second level is a maze of hidden passageways,
trap doors, and dead ends.
On the second floor, we’re looking at approximately,
say 8,000 square feet,
and you’ve got roughly 30-some-odd rooms
and about 50-plus doors. That’s a lot.
Clarence Goodman: He folds asbestos into the plans.
This makes everything silent. Why is this important?
Because you can’t hear someone in a muffled room.
Holmes wants to keep you in. So, the hallways are mazes.
The exits are not clear. The windows are boarded over.
So, it’s almost the opposite of what a hotel should be.
It’s a tomb. It’s a trap.
Narrator: In late 1892,
H.H. Holmes’ hotel is open for business.
And his timing is deviously perfect,
because in just a few months
the World’s Fair will open in Chicago
in the spring of 1893.
Clarence Goodman: Holmes put ads in newspapers around the middle-west,
and incredibly, he has women answering his ads
who are planning on coming to Chicago.
These people have no idea what they have walked into.
Larissa Tracy: He would put them in rooms
where he knew that he could either control them entirely,
or he could control their sense of perception.
The hotel itself is set up like a maze.
It’s a labyrinth. There are dead ends.
They’re staircases that lead nowhere.
There are doors that open out onto alleys with a drop.
And if a young woman is disoriented
and tries to leave her room, she’d get lost.
Clarence Goodman: They are put to sleep,
because Holmes has introduced gas
into their sleeping chamber.
And then they sadly wake up in the basement
strapped to a table.
And he might be experimenting on them.
He might be torturing them.
For those unfortunate enough to actually see this basement,
they must have felt like they were seeing some new form
of a medieval torture dungeon.
A rack for stretching human bodies,
a dissection table for experimenting and for torture.
A vat for quicklime, a vat for acid.
A huge furnace that could accommodate a full human body.
And then so many surgical and dissection tools all around the room.
Ultimately, they’re going to be murdered,
the soft tissue disposed of,
and the skeletons sold for money.
Holmes is a spider,
and the Murder Castle itself is the ultimate spider’s web.
He was charming and could convince women to come with him.
Ed O’Donnell: Most of the victims of H.H. Holmes were young women,
many of them who had resources, who had wealth.
The best example of that is the Williams sisters,
Minnie and Nannie Williams.
Minnie comes to Chicago, and she and Holmes
not only take up with one another,
but Minnie begins to work for Holmes as a stenographer.
They become engaged.
Minnie Williams is convinced
to sign over all of her material wealth,
and Holmes does the same thing with young Nannie Williams.
And now he really has no use for the sisters Williams.
Minnie is killed. When Nannie gets there, she is killed.
That’s sort of the distillation of Holmes’ kind of MO,
drawing in young vulnerable women,
ultimately killing them, and acquiring their property.
Narrator: But after a series of suspicious fires,
by the summer of 1893,
his crimes start catching up with him.
Holmes had taken out insurance on the castle,
and so he was trying to collect.
But because of the really, really sketchy nature
of the fires, he was not paid off.
Narrator: Undeterred, Holmes cooks up a new scam
with his business partner Benjamin Pitezel.
Clarence Goodman: Holmes and Benjamin Pitezel have a plan to defraud
an insurance company in Philadelphia,
where they will present a dead body
after taking out an insurance policy
on Benjamin Pitezel.
Pitezel, sadly, he thinks he’s a partner,
but he’s actually going to be the victim,
because Holmes is going to present the real body
of one Ben Pitezel to the insurance company.
Larissa Tracy: Holmes had a tendency to eliminate
anybody who knew his secrets.
Pitezel knew of his fraud.
Ed O’Donnell: He kills his business partner,
and then acquires possession
of Benjamin Pitezel’s three children.
Narrator: Holmes goes on the run
with Pitezel’s children in tow,
ultimately killing them.
After two of the bodies are discovered in Toronto,
police search his Chicago hotel in 1895,
and what they uncover is truly horrific.
When the police arrive, this one-time fortress
is in tremendous disrepair.
And so they’re looking around,
and they see these nefarious and weird rooms.
But it’s when they go to the basement
that they are greeted with the sight of bones and blood and bloody clothing,
and a basement that looks like it had been a medieval torture dungeon.
Larissa Tracy: Nobody can fathom a mind that would create a place
that seems welcoming, that seems safe,
but was designed to kill.
Narrator: Ultimately, Holmes is sentenced to death
for the murder of Benjamin Pitezel.
But before he’s executed, he writes a shockingly detailed confession,
admitting to a total of 27 gruesome murders.
Because the stories of Holmes’ crimes is nationwide news,
the tabloid medium makes him into a celebrity.
Now that he knows he can do no further,
he wants his crimes to be revealed.
Whether or not he reveals accurately
or exaggerates and embellishes his own reputation
is impossible to know.
Narrator: H.H. Holmes hangs on May 7th, 1896.
But the building dubbed the Murder Castle
stands as a grim reminder of his crimes until 1938.
Clarence Goodman: The city of Chicago, they take possession of this building,
they bulldoze it, and they build a brand-new U.S. post office,
using in part the original Murder Castle basement
as the basement for the new post office.
And so in that regard, this hotel, this fortress,
this monster is still there.
Just because this building was torn down
doesn’t mean that whatever happened there didn’t happen there.
The horrors that took place on that ground,
the blood that was shed there, is still there.
Narrator: The Murder Castle might never escape its bloody past,
but about 1,800 miles away, there’s an island where escape
is said to be downright impossible.
Narrator: A mile and a half from San Francisco
stands one of the most notorious
maximum-security prisons in America-- Alcatraz.
Ed O’Donnell: The nickname of Alcatraz was The Rock.
Someone once wrote about Alcatraz
that it was the great garbage can in San Francisco Bay,
into which all the federal penitentiaries sent their most rotten apples,
so it had that reputation of being a terrible place.
Narrator: Ironically, Alcatraz,
a place known for locking people in,
was initially built to keep people out.
Ian Craig: Alcatraz has history going back to the 1850s
as a U.S. Army post, the first fortress built
by the American government on the West Coast.
Narrator: After a major natural disaster in 1906,
the fort gets a new purpose.
Greg Jackson: The thing we need to remember
about the San Francisco earthquake of 1906
is that it wasn’t just an earthquake.
It was also a great fire.
Fire sweeps through and obliterates San Francisco.
Alcatraz is an island just a mile away,
and it becomes the dumping ground for all of the people
who had been incarcerated in San Francisco.
Ian Craig: Ultimately, it would be decided
that building would be torn down,
and rebuilt by a much larger prison building.
When the prison building that we see today was completed,
it was the largest reinforced concrete building
ever built at that time.
Narrator: In 1934, it officially opens.
Ian Craig: Letters were sent out to the wardens
of other federal prisons,
"Make your prison safer.
Send us your worst."
They wanted to round up
all the most troublesome prisoners,
and the most dangerous prisoners,
and put them all in one place.
Ed O’Donnell: Al Capone ended up at Alcatraz.
Machine Gun Kelly as well.
And in a later date, Whitey Bulger.
So lots of well-known criminals who had made headlines
before they ended up getting incarcerated.
Narrator: Most convicts are housed in three blocks,
A, B, and C.
But the worst offenders
are sent to solitary confinement,
the dreaded D block.
Ian Craig: The lower floor of D block contains six dark cells.
The door leading in is a three-inch thick steel door filled with concrete.
And when they closed that cell door,
you were in there in the dark.
The diet was basically bread and water
with a real meal every third day by government order.
Ian Craig: Some prisoners who would be taken to the dark cells,
and they would be complaining, "I have pain.
I think I’m really sick. I should see the doctor."
And on a couple of occasions,
when they were checked on, they had died.
They had six cells that were psychotic cells, you know?
Sort of where you put the guys that are cracking up,
that are uncontrollable.
There’s nothing but a hole in the floor. That’s all they got.
No bed, no sink, no toilet, nothing. Just a hole in the floor.
Rebecca Simon: The solitary confinement wasn’t completely solitary,
because being in the center of the bay and very, very isolated,
the prisoners, they were able to hear the ocean waves outside.
If there were boats sailing by with people celebrating
or even just people laughing,
prisoners could hear that very clearly.
It was like freedom was just at the tip of their fingers
but they could never touch it.
The most high-profile guy that was there when I was there was the Birdman.
They gave him life in solitary confinement.
Now can you imagine that? Never to come out.
They did the same thing to a guy in later years,
only they put him actually underground in a cell.
They buried him alive.
Eileen Joy: Solitary confinement is the most brutal punishment
a prisoner can receive.
If you’re in a room like that day after day after day,
it’s been proven that your mind completely breaks down.
Narrator: Solitary confinement isn’t the only form of punishment.
Ed O’Donnell: In the early years, you’re not allowed to speak at all.
The theory was it was a good idea to keep order.
But it actually was terrible for the psychological well-being of prisoners.
Narrator: Conditions are so bad,
some inmates contemplate drastic measures.
Daniel Dickrell: To build a prison, you have to understand
that the people inside will do everything in their power
to try and break out of that prison.
And so you have to keep that in mind
as you’re designing and building it,
human beings inside are very creative
and they’re very effective at finding weaknesses.
Narrator: Preventing any attempts to escape
are armed guards who patrol 24/7 from the gun galleries,
a maze of walkways protected by bars and mesh.
They had holes where they’d stick their gun through the window.
Any time there was a fight in Alcatraz,
they’d shoot one shot, a warning shot.
If you didn’t break it up, they would shoot you.
We hated the ( bleep ).
Ed O’Donnell: In addition to all of these guards,
highest percentage of guards to prisoners than anywhere in the country,
is a system of tear gas canisters that are suspended from the ceiling.
So, if there’s a prison uprising or an escape attempt,
they can release this tear gas and immobilize the prisoners.
Narrator: But these defenses don’t stop prisoners
from risking it all to break out.
Narrator: In the 29 years the prison is open,
few inmates are daring enough
to put the escape-proof Alcatraz to the test.
One of the most violent attempts
occurs in May of 1946.
Bernard Coy is a bank robber, and he’s hell-bent on escaping.
He enlists the help of several other inmates
in a scheme to find a way to break out.
They study for a period of months
the movements of the guards and the changing of shifts.
Ian Craig: Bernard Coy successfully navigated
his way to the gun gallery
when the guard had gone around the corner.
When he came back, Coy punched him unconscious.
He succeeded in getting his guns,
a .30-06 rifle and a handgun.
Their plan was to retrieve the key that hung on a chain
from the gun gallery, and it wasn’t there.
Narrator: Coy and his cohorts grab the keyring off the unconscious guard.
Daniel Dickrell: They try as many keys as possible in the mechanism,
but they jam the mechanism, and they can’t get out.
Ed O’Donnell: One of the prisoners says,
"We’ve gotta kill these guards because
they’re gonna testify against us
and send us all to the electric chair."
So Coy kills one, seriously injures several others.
Narrator: This ultimately leads to a tense three-day standoff
between the escaping inmates and law enforcement.
Ed O’Donnell: Marines come in with grenades
and the real heavy equipment and begin blasting away,
not really caring whether they take down the building
or kill a lot of innocent prisoners.
It’s all about simply suppressing the insurrection.
Ian Craig: And there was no escape,
and they would die in the plumbing corridor
under gunfire by guards and the Marines.
Announcer: The prison launch takes aboard the bodies
of the three leaders of the mutiny--
Coy, Hubbard, and Cretzer.
Narrator: The deadly mayhem
reminds prisoners that the harshest torture
is knowing that escape is all but impossible.
Bill Baker: I thought about escaping from Alcatraz. Everybody did, of course.
But I learned very quickly that if you’re gonna escape from Alcatraz,
you have to be willing to give up your life.
’Cause if you don’t make it, you’re either gonna drown
or they’re gonna shoot you-- one or the other.
There’s no second chances.
Ian Craig: During the federal penitentiary era,
from 1934 to 1963,
we had 1,576 federal prisoners sent to Alcatraz.
There were 14 official escape attempts.
36 men took part in those.
And we just have five men unaccounted for
out of that number.
Narrator: Even if on the off-chance
those five survived, an escape rate of 0.3%
makes Alcatraz one of the most escape-proof prisons in U.S. history.
Narrator: While Alcatraz proves effective at locking evil away,
there’s a temple of doom built to help unleash it out into the world.
Narrator: Germany, 1933.
As the Nazi party continues its rise to power,
Adolph Hitler’s chief deputy Heinrich Himmler
begins searching for a base of operations
for his elite soldiers, the Schutzstaffel,
otherwise known as the SS.
The SS under Himmler is exploding.
It’s an enormous number of new recruits that are coming in,
and they need to be trained.
And Himmler needs a place to do this.
The Nazis have for a long time been associated with the occult,
especially Himmler, who’s absolutely invested
in medieval chivalric culture.
Narrator: Himmler’s obsession with medieval culture
leads to the perfect location
deep in Germany’s Teutoburg Forest.
The Wewelsburg Castle is very near a site
where it is believed that native Germans
were able to defeat invading Roman armies
in the first decade of the common era.
This space is so important to Heinrich Himmler
and the Nazi regime because it connects it
to a storied and ancient history.
And this fortress, which is built in the 17th century
on much earlier medieval foundations,
comes to symbolize the heart of the Nazi regime.
Michael Livingston: All of this is coming together
in this kind of soup of symbolism
that Himmler distills into a vision
of this being the heart of the SS,
and a place to educate the future leaders of the great new Reich.
Narrator: Himmler signs a 100-year lease on the castle
and forces prisoners to help renovate it.
One of the most insidious aspects of Wewelsburg Castle
is its association with the death by work program.
And over 4,000 workers
were brought in from the concentration camps.
Himmler used the enforced labor
of individuals at concentration camps nearby,
and he then put into practice what he was teaching,
how to force people to death by laboring.
Larissa Tracy: Over a 1,000 people died in the reconstructing
and building of various aspects of this castle.
They were either starved to death,
worked to death, or they were beaten, or they were shot.
So this castle is literally built on the blood of the people
who were interned in those concentration camps
and forced to work to fulfill this sadistic Nazi ideal.
Narrator: In 1941,
with construction of his temple of doom well underway,
Himmler plans his sadistic hub of Nazi ideology.
They wanted to create a sort of academy of Nazism within this castle.
Kelly Devries: It was in Wewelsburg that Himmler
would have taught his philosophy to willing men.
They were going to become these elite, the ubermensch.
Larissa Tracy: They would have been educated
and taught in the rooms of this castle
about the Final Solution and about their role in it,
and their role in essentially exterminating anybody
who was not of pure Aryan blood.
Narrator: After training, recruits would be led
to the Obergruppenfuhrersaal, or the General’s Hall.
In the Obergruppenfuhrersaal,
he has a mosaic of a black sun on the floor,
because he believes that the astral significance
and the alignment of the building itself
would somehow endow them with a sense of immortality.
Cord Whitaker: In this chamber,
there would have been a large round oak table,
evocative of the Round Table.
Around the edges of the room, there are twelve seats
for the twelve knights of the Round Table.
And of course, there’s the central seat,
which is for the king himself,
which for Himmler would have been the Fuhrer.
Michael Shelden: The Nazis are not inventive enough
to create their own mythology. They’ve got to borrow it.
It’s especially ironic that they take
the whole Arthurian myth from the English
and try to put it in Germany and make their own version
of a kind of dark Camelot within this castle.
Narrator: It is here that members of the SS
would be officially indoctrinated.
Every cult needs to have its initiation,
and part of that is to give these SS men
a death’s head ring, something that will bond them
as though in a marriage to the cult,
but also as a reminder to future recruits,
"You belong to us."
Himmler would go so far as to have SS members
renounce the Judeo-Christian holidays
in favor of the pagan holidays that largely preceded them.
So in order to isolate them
from the lives they had lived previously,
you got to get rid of those things like Christmas.
Narrator: Himmler even goes as far
as to make plans for the afterlife.
In the north tower, he has the room constructed
with a domed roof like a Mycenaean tomb.
Daniel Dickrell: The crypt, or as Himmler called it, the gruft,
was the cistern of the castle that was modified
to become sort of a symbolic tomb
that Himmler himself wanted to be interred in.
Larissa Tracy: In this room, there are twelve niches
set up along in the circle along the walls
for the urns of elites of the SS.
And there’s an eternal flame in the center,
and that flame was meant to last as long as the Reich.
Narrator: A vile legacy Himmler and the SS work towards cementing.
Michael Shelden: Probably the most important event
that ever took place at the castle
was the meeting to plan for the invasion of the Soviet Union,
Operation Barbarossa.
The people belonging to this death cult
they were told, "Go out and kill as many people as you can."
It was assumed 30 million would die
who were mostly civilians or political officials or Jews,
and it was the SS’s job to do this methodical killing
in order to make it so that you purified the country
as you moved along in the battle.
Narrator: But Himmler’s dream of making this fortress
the center of a new Aryan empire
is ultimately crushed.
March of 1945, the Allies have landed
and are advancing across Germany.
And Himmler runs like a coward
and gives orders to destroy Wewelsburg Castle behind him.
Larissa Tracy: And of course, all that happens
is small fires throughout.
Tapestries, flammables burn, but for the most part
the castle itself is still standing
and the local population loot it once the Nazis vacate.
Narrator: Today, Wewelsburg Castle is home to a museum
commemorating the victims who suffered violence
at the hands of the Nazi SS.
Larissa Tracy: So Wewelsburg Castle, which was meant to be
the physical stone fortress
that symbolized the heart of the Nazi regime,
ultimately becomes a place for young German students
gaining a broader perspective of their history.
Narrator: The storied halls of these dark places
remind us that even though they were originally designed to protect,
they can just as easily become bastions of evil.