ZDFzeit

They are hidden, closely guarded, and only a few have access. Germany is full of places that hide a secret: military research laboratories, closed temples, meeting places for insiders, underground hospitals, mysterious places of worship. The film “Secret Germany” shows our homeland in a way that hardly anyone knows.

Higher faster further? That no longer applies - today the slogan is “Deeper!”. More and more people are overcoming the natural primal fear of darkness, damp caves, fragile tunnels and ghostly catacombs - many out of daring and a thirst for adventure, but most out of sheer necessity. ZDFzeit descends with mine rescuers, subway builders and cave goers down into the Orkus, but also travels to where no one has been before: to the center of the earth. And that's not all. Under many German roofs, a creeping, fatal danger lurks from the depths. So it is time to discover the mysterious underworlds.

For years they had been waiting for the “most beautiful day” of their lives: When the English Crown Prince William showed his Kate to the altar in April 2011, the cheers were boundless, a picture-book wedding according to plan. At the princely wedding in Monaco two months later, things didn't go quite as smoothly. Even before the wedding there had been rumors: Charlene Wittstock, the bride on hold, allegedly wanted to leave Monaco head over heels shortly before the wedding because she had learned of the existence of another illegitimate offspring of the prince. In fact, the bride looked strangely absent on her wedding day. What happened? Who was interested in torpedoing the marriage between Prince Albert and the South African Charlene Wittstock? At least not the people. That was happy with the newly wed princely couple.

Eleven years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Germany is targeted by Islamist terrorism. Security authorities expect terrorist attacks by tiny cells and individual perpetrators, so-called "lone wolves". They are recruited from Salafist groups who call for battle in Germany under the banner of Al-Qaeda. Not least, they are incited by right-wing extremist groups who network across Europe and, with their tirades of hatred against Islam, create fertile ground for a clash of cultures. Are the seeds of Osama bin Laden growing now, eleven years after the attacks in New York and one year after his death?

"Secrets of the Second World War", part 1: Rudolf Hess was Hitler's deputy, landed surprisingly in Scotland in 1941 and remained in captivity until his death in 1987.

“It lay in front of us like a ghost ship”, Vilfredo Schürmann remembers the moment when he saw the first pictures that the diving robot sent from the depths in March 2012. For nine years, the German-born Brazilian and his team had searched the coastal waters of Brazil for traces of German submarines that crossed there 70 years ago - since Brazil entered the war on the side of the Allies. After years of searching, he was there: At a depth of 130 meters, Schürmann discovered the wreck of the U 513, a German long-range submarine of the type IX C, which had previously been considered lost.

How sick was Hitler? This question has preoccupied physicians, psychiatrists and historians for more than sixty years. "A man who started a criminal war and had six million Jews murdered has to be examined for his health," says the medical historian Prof. Dr. Hans-Joachim Neumann.

Nothing caused the Allied strategists more sleepless nights in the last months of the war than the “Alpine fortress”. As early as the autumn of 1944, US chief Allen Dulles had been collecting disturbing reports in Bern and wired them to Washington: The Germans were in the process of transforming the Alpine region from Lake Como to Wiener Neustadt into an almost impregnable "Reduit" with underground factories and command centers , Missiles and jets, hundreds of thousands of battle-hardened soldiers and supplies for years.