We dig a WW2 Bunker and find LOADS of relics! [Battlefield Recovery]

a buried bunker and the Buried secrets of the soldiers who fought and died here we open like a time chest the Eastern Front of World War two where Hitler and Stalin's armies fought to the death millions of soldiers and their weapons lie rotting under the battlefields where they found four men determined to combine their skills and unearth this history Krag military tactics I'm a historian and a military officer that's a bunker when other people see fields and trees I see a battlefield I see fighting positions I see fields of fire Chris gadgets diggin is like a Psalms it's knowing your terrain your targets and most of all your kids would you bury a dead body by outside your door Stephen relics and rust give me a piece of World War two scrap and I can identify what it was who made it and in what year this is the fella we look and Adrian the man with the Eastern Front in his blood that is the German uniform I'm half British than half polish and to me these digs up personal I literally got goose bumps on my back they are racing against time to save the history from the ground Ford's lost forever it's good those miners there's tons of rusted treasure waiting for us May 1945 Adolf Hitler was dead and Germany's army the vemma was being crushed across the Eastern Front by Stalin's victorious forces in soldiers in western Latvia the desperate men of the German 18th army were holed up in bunkers and trenches encircled by the Soviets surrender also known as capitulation was inevitable most bunkers here have been opened and looted of their contents long ago but the diggers have heard local rumors of an underground chamber sealed up and left exactly as it was at the time of German surrender if it hasn't been touched since it's a potential treasure trove a snapshot of German army life on the very point of capitulation in May 1945 the team's mission is to find the bunker open it and give its contents to the Latvian War Museum Chris who had gone off to ask the local villagers for clues has come back to see how the guys are doing seriously but we have dug trenches everywhere trying to find another bunker the trail on the ground is dead so everyone is hoping Chris has some news to lift the mood when a farmer was giving me a lift up this way yeah he said years ago he was playing field and there was lots of logs which looked just like these logs in the middle of his film he's just left in there if you think you can find it again he seems convinced ok tell you what guys we're burning daylight Suns down in a couple hours this is or not a room let's go check that out the site where the farmer said he saw the logs underground is in a cow field half a kilometer down from the hilltop bunker weather team had been digging committing the last two hours of the day to a story from years ago is a gamble instinct tells me we go with the local knowledge this guy says has a bunker in his field I'm gonna go look for it hey Chris yeah hey Barry about this area okay so the foam sit right next to the park cow dung which is right here as far as I can see I see any more piles around I don't know why anybody would put a bunker here terrible place for a bunker I mean look up see the plane there all it takes is one plane going by and you can see what's here so good to know up in trees it has probably been a farm for quite some time if we go even the slimmest lead is true I'm just gonna I'm just gonna say looking here look out there what do you see Hills high ground yeah this is the worst place to stop and dig a trench we were facing a real diggers dilemma ah what we're gonna do down boys check it we get 45 minutes a day light why should crack on their comp times of life then it's good I'll tell you what it would have to be next to a great big steaming pile of poo and Chris did he say logs no see at Oaks he didn't say how far down did he my Latvia to be sketching oh whoa yeah there's bugs he was talked about well it's water walk this is exactly this it's a branch branches so if you were if you were building a bunker would you leave the bunches sticking out like that I made an utter loss for words that we would dig here and find a log in the middle of nowhere okay we really know it a lot let's listen cracking oh there there is more yes yeah there's an or there is another one yeah it's those [Music] is gonna be tree locks and that's our depth is some sort of structure and then we could actually be onto something I'm still thinking like a fence something civilian there's no reason to put a bunker in the middle of a field something really big down here on the end of his shovel because you can't get it up lock where me a crate was standing earlier coming across here one next to the other black roof with excitement Mountain the whole day is now riding on Chris's tip-off from the farmer last field won't allow us to look stupid I want it to be a bunker usually thing yeah could be an outhouse could be a cow house could be a house house let me quickly grab a bite the only thing to do was to get in and get a closer look look look what the space down there what does that say oh yeah oh yes so the mud was really really loosed it was really really easy just to pass that spike through means there's open space there which is a result that's a German bunker no doubt about it it's bunker shaped bunker sized it's bunker deep and I have no idea why it's here but dusk is now approaching fast and the diggers aren't going to throw any light on the mystery bunker tonight it was so frustrating and I could almost smell the relics but I just couldn't touch them hey guys it's getting dark this isn't safe let's come back tomorrow yeah great for stretching I know dream about it we'll be back in the morning really really excited very excited this is what I do this for that place has never been touched since they're in the World War two it is gonna be jammed with stuff helmuth's bits of uniforms badges ammunition guns anything that was used in a warfare it could be machine guns there could be dead Russians there could be dead Germans we're gonna go home get some sleep and come back bright early in the morning and start today last night the team uncovered a mysterious Verma bunker I drafted the bunker I seriously dreamt of the bunker last night I need to go back in the van and drive back here to dig it yourself I was so excited no one else has been there before where [Music] the first job was to get the roof off was like opening a huge treasure chest we were all wondering what is going to be underneath well that's deep enough from an hour I could get a kit start detecting all this support as well with rektboys yeah yep inside this bunker isn't an empty space it's full of mud that seeped in over 70 years this could just be soil and rock or it could be full of wartime German equipment stop for two seconds just stop for a second go first you check the wall I check how deep that goes this is one heck of a sized bunker it's not a little to three-month unko this is this is a unit you know this is definitely not a fighting position because if you get down low you can't see anything you can see nothing so there's no place to shoot from this is likely command bunker storage bunker definitely not communications because again it's too low what the hell is going on in this bloody bunker battles round bunkers were particularly bloody the soldiers in the underground chambers were hard to dislodge but once cornered were sitting ducks with no chance of escape the Nazis developed their very own bunker busting tool the mp40 the diggers tested one that belongs to a local collector when I shoot this I think a one thing bunker clearing yeah okay guys what we have here is the mp40 Co MP stands for exactly one of the reasons that it's called a pistol even though it looks like a rifle or a machine gun it's because it takes nine millimeter ammunition that's the same ammunition they use in Lugar's and p38 so cuts down on German logistics one kind of bullet it's only a lot of attic I want to take but it has a slow enough cyclic rate and you can actually squeeze off single rounds quite easily max effective range really is about a hundred meters think about this good guys is this was designed to be fired when you're moving my the reason I love this gun a its iconic you look at it one look it's German okay number two though it's a lot of fun to shoot I mean you don't necessarily even have to aim it at close range you can start shooting in the general direction and you can sort of walk the rounds on target so it's like pointing a flashlights when they go far in from the hip basically rocker row today is a good day yeah that's the floorboards back at the dig the bunker is so deep the field around it is turning into a quagmire I mean the field all around was just an absolute mess it was full of really wet slushy mud careful the nails are the efforts of wood all you see is mud and rocks roots and then all of a sudden your eye trains on something man-made and square there hold this it's something big and I saw it it was glinting there barely sticking out of the mud and so I'm so excited to find it because it meant we're in the right place tripping magazine pouch it's like a German magazine pouch that'd be awesome right yeah it's gonna grab all the mud I'm gonna bring it over okay there it is the German magazine pouch I'm almost positive yep Wow from the magazine pouch oh no it's fine nice finds look at that totally intact hey sue that's why nobody's gonna drop this cuz they need it this is still complete it's still functional and there's still ammo in it clean bullets right there this brings me very close to whoever it was that was fighting in this bunker I mean this is incredible this is a piece of gear that someone was wearing who was sitting in this hole so I'm absolutely excited that I found this magazine pouch and then I hear over from the hole Oh guys I found something go for your net and of course Adrienne completely upstages me the chain have uncovered an incredible find to k98 bayonet the frog stop Adrien found it because he's got more energy and he can dig more so he was covering a lot more mud than I was and finding that bayonet was epic so this is a k98 rifle bayonets it is the very violent ends of the Second World War when it got to sort of like hand-to-hand combat oh wow look at that the blade is pristine yeah every soldier receives bayonet training put it on the end of a rifle you can stab with it you can slash with it you can cut with it it's a very very violent weather [Music] although designed to be fixed to the end of a carabiner rifle the k98 was most often used independent of the gun as a utility knife for use while living and working in the field or as a weapon of war in brutal hand-to-hand combat market something like this if it was in brand-new condition would be worth three hundred dollars obviously this is much more valuable than that gear I can tell you one thing whoever dropped this drop in in a hurry this is all kit that might have belonged to one person bayonet this pouches whole this pouch up where it would be and you're starting to get a picture of a soldier when I finally have time to take a breath and actually look at what we'd found it was fascinating we'd recovered all sorts from that bunker the team haven't found any bodies but the Germans that were in here left behind weapons and ammunition they would never have dreamed of leaving in normal circumstances and the diggers still don't know what this bunker was for or why it's here in the middle of an exposed cow field so what I suggested to Craig let's take a look around his place and who died bump into farmer he tipped me off about the site Wow a dog tag so German yeah yeah that's awesome very cool where'd you get this because yeah yeah yeah yeah great it's the first battalion or first company of artillery regiment 218 and this would hang around his neck from these holes and if ya died they'd break it in half and leave half of his body and take the other half back amazing this is incredible that is isn't it value in the markets not that much but here it's priceless because it tells us exactly who was fighting on this field it's gonna be interesting to see if something out of that bunker matches this dog tag Brittany wouldn't it be fantastic mmm wait to tell the guy is when the farmer showed us the dog tag and I saw that it was from an artillery unit something in my brain clicked and I had a theory so I had to look around and take a walk and look at the landscape you think long thinking do you see what I see yeah I can't believe this go on use iodine I know what you thought I'm not you thinking this is the best ground anywhere you can see totally down that valley or the hill it was so obvious it just was staring at us the whole time all I had to do is turn around 180 degrees and look down rather than up and it was immediately clear to me why there were bunkers in the middle of a cow field it is a perfect strategic stronghold exactly suddenly it all made sense it might be an artillery firing position because guess what if the artillery guns are behind us people coming up from the south can't see so if you placed artillery from back here where it couldn't be seen you can place mortars back there where they couldn't be seen and you just loved them in that general direction South I mean everybody in that valley would be a sitting duck and you'd put an observer right for it on this hill and they just run a wire back to the gun position and he'd just call in fire never so me just look out there and pick a target find something serious like I think the end of the copse of trees over there so what he would do he determine his position and a direction and a distance and that's all he would need and he'd radio that back to the gun platoon and they would figure a firing solution and he'd sit there and watch the rounds land and if they were off a little bit he would adjust them once they were on target he'd say fire imagine the carnage its food please stop flying up everywhere gunfire people just getting mowed down imagine hearing the screams from up there you could hear him couldn't you probably so now we knew that we were on a slightly raised plateau which means the artillery would have been shooting down into the valley it would have been a killing field down there and the mud of the bunker has yielded an intriguing clue that might back up Chris and Craig's discovery it's like a battery pack for something yeah right that's right Chris just threw me this battery and while I'm not sure what it was used for I can just imagine that the forward observer on that hill would have been radioing or calling back or something a fire mission here and this battery was a part of that solution so this bunker may have been an 18th Army position and as the mud clears Stephen with his eye for detail can start to pick out the lost world lived by the ordinary German soldiers stationed here at the bottom of this bunker we've got a bed here so all the bed boards have collapsed onto the normal floor over there we've got something else maybe a table or maybe a little stove but when I've dug down to the floor we've got floorboards then we've got bricks then we've got massive logs going this way again in fact there's your desk every World War 2 relic hunters dream is to find a bunker and dig it up that's just amazing this axe is absolutely awesome do you know that could have chopped the trees down to make this bunker with this axe Toby what made this trench yeah this thing yeah I mean it's dirty but the mud is the least of Stephens worries guys guys I've got a grenade and to me it looks like the top of the fuse and the spoon has come off so this is rather dangerous it's primed and ready to go basically when I looked at Stephen he looked worried if this goes off now me you everybody around us forget it we don't want any danger of anybody treading on it knocking it kicking it or anything don't drop it it's getting a little bit dangerous now with live grenades in here but you can't assume that's because it's been buried for 70 years that it's safe you have to assume that it's as dangerous as it was the day it was made [Music] the German kitten here wasn't decayed relics like the helmets the guys found back in the woods the stuff in a bank was absolutely pristine it looked ready to use it was in the same condition as it was dropped 70 years ago that guy's gas mask absolutely breathtaking look at the gum it's so deep down there's very very little oxygen down here so they call it anaerobic there's no oxygen there's no oxygen you don't get rust and it affects all other metals and everything in the same way leather doesn't deteriorate as quickly it's it's just it's just it's a little treasure trove waiting to be uncovered all German soldiers on the Eastern Front were issued with gas masks containing filters that stop the wearer breathing in gas particulates during World War 2 the Japanese and Italian armies both used gas in combat situations but while the German and Red Army forces stockpiled mustard gas neither side used it against each other for fear of retaliation it was absolutely amazing to be the first person alongside of Steven to be here after 70 years you know we opened like a time chest nothing here has been touched wherever they dropped and gas masks by Anna is still was laying there and we preserve in history and saving it from black diggers black diggers are thieves who raid archaeological sites and in Latvia they are an ever-present problem we had to work as fast as possible not only because night was coming but we'd noticed some guys across the field it seemed that we were up to see that car over there yeah it's his car all right whatever they you know my Arden yeah in fact biggest might they're waiting for us to leave so they can go through this Farley and get stuff and Senate how long we've been there 20 minutes hmm black diggers contaminate a crime scene that's exactly what they're doing and you just lose all sense of history because they're only concerned about one thing its profit it's not history they want to get the artifact out of the ground history be damned and go sell it and I have a problem with that we gotta be really far off just make sure there's nothing left is that habit and I've said it why'd you buy in there despite jail sentences of up to four years for illegal digging this site is a potential goldmine the team have to work as fast as they can when black diggers hunt on battlefields all the way interested in is the weapons and the badges they find anything personal it just gets trashed which is heartbreaking for me that's the history [Music] that's a bonus another planet and a uniform look well look at the camo it's a budget that's another jacket no it's not a jacket because it's loose it's like a pouch or something that is awesome look at that look at that there's racism that's braces you don't sleep in your full gear and because all of that is left by suppose they were attacked as sleep so that's what we find is so much good that much like a bakelite and one that won't yep that's true just just just bring it up really slowly but really slowly even right at the bottom the bunker was throwing up clues about what might have happened here slowly this one my friend its pristine look at those they're called stripper clips it's just a little strip of metal with a groove in it until it point one two three five cartridges in you go put ball five in with one push condition [Music] whoever all this belonged to left basically everything it's like you left naked [Music] I tell you what this suggests this suggests a hasty retreat in other words he got out of here quick he didn't take anything with him it seems crazy maybe he grabbed a coat but he left all his combat gear here the team have discovered a hidden bunker whose wartime occupant seemed to have left everything behind yeah it's not a camera is it soap dish it's got soap in it maybe it's my imagination but it's nozzoli I think it's your own motivation iron sniffing that look at the condition of a plant eating the standard German army mestan was made of aluminium it could hold nearly 2 litres of food which would include canned meat a condensed vegetable mix and coffee the lid was designed to be used as a frying pan soldiers would often scratch their name on the top so they knew whose tin was whose the writing isn't clear enough for us to identify who was in this bunker but the mess tin is a direct link to one of the soldiers who served here in 1945 just knowing that the last person to touch this 70 years ago was a very much solder it's just a tangible link to the past this guy lived here it was his personal stuff and it gives you a real connection over those 70 years it's just so personal [Music] I just found a wristwatch a guy that was running out the trench must have lost it and just dropped it in a corner I literally got goose bumps on my back right now this is the best thing our killer did you can get [Music] I'll take that over everything outside is amazing what time does it take honestly what time is it 10:00 you got one there and one there 3:27 so there's a makers mark that is absolutely amazing the watch has no monetary value you couldn't get $5.00 for it at a flea market but it's of immense historic value for example look at it and see when it stopped to give you a clue of not only what happened but when it happened so it has a very particular story to tell and for me that makes the watch priceless I've done well in solving the mystery of this place today would you reckon that view over there is amazing it's a dime see that it just all opens up in front of you just everything makes sense yeah it's a killing field over there and this is the place that they would do it the team found the lost bunker away from the trench line in the forest but in the perfect position to rain maximum death on tanks and soldiers coming up from the valley below it was probably an 18th Army artillery position and it's proved to be an Aladdin's cave of wartime relics the bunker was incredible because it was a stop motion photograph of the particular moment in time just as the Germans had left it the one thing we hadn't agreed on was the biggest mystery of all why on earth that those men left the bunker like that with all that stuff in it did they flee on their attack or did they surrender to the Red Army we couldn't leave that place of our answering that question would be actually thing happened here when these guys left older stuff there's one thing they got out of here in a hurry he left all their personal gear the watch messed tens gas masks the only thing they took is their rifle like they did get woken up in the middle of the night he grabbed the only thing that they needed which was their weapon and they got out of the hole I'm sort of edging towards capitulation the war's over that don't need anything they just leave it behind just drop the whole lot and go well he could have just forgotten to watch you know well now if you think about it if did that the watch acts as a reminder of all the held it he's just been through I want it on my wrist when I remember that and look at that every day I think I agree with you guys the weapons they had to hand them over on capitulation so that's that might be the reason why they're not there you know that would explain where there's ammo pouches you wouldn't go to attack to bottom oh yeah yeah Adrienne's got a good point change in my mind I mean yeah that really does explain the lack of weapons in a better way cuz they didn't take their MOS you mean to say we've reached an agreement mm-hm I think we have bodies it's crazy the truth I think on the last day in that Bank are these guys must have been terrified go into a prisoner of war camp after capitulation [Music] over three million German soldiers were captured on the Eastern Front most were sent to work as slave labor in the Soviet Union often in copper pits or coal mines at least one in 10 never returned there was nothing more that we could do for the guys that once mandus Blanca but what we could do is make sure that the site and the contents of that bunker were treated with respect the gang of black diggers are still waiting to loot anything the guys have missed in the mud we had one more job today just so they can't get their hands on stuff yeah sure we bucking again they'll never get anything out stuff in that the black diggers were lurking but we got in there first we got a stuff in there's no chance that they can get their hands on there they can get on the black market for it being in that bunker really made me feel close to the guys who fought there in the first person to stand in that bunker the 70 years is just absolutely amazing I was in the same place that those guys were I picked up their stuff that they last touched it's just it's just brilliant we were like kids in a toy shop today that that is what a hunt is about excellent seeing a treasure trove like this after 70 years and returning every single item to the museum is something that we can really be proud of good well done boys let's move on to the next one

Channel: Addictedtobleeps

Views: 4,468,446

Rating: 4.8459249 out of 5

Keywords: metal detecting, metal detector, best metal detector, best metal detecting find, best beginners metal detector, how to find gold, how to find coins, how to find treasure, easy metal detector, make money metal detecting, treasure hunting uk, treasure hunting use, metal detecting use, metal detecting uk, metal detecting finds, treasure hunt, detecting metal, treasure hunting metal detector, searching for treasure, finding treasure, finding treasure with metal detector

Id: Tli1DSsGXPA

Length: 31min 53sec (1913 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 15 2019