AllMovie

Michael Kloft's 2004 documentary The Reich Underground opens the cask to an aspect of WWII history long-sealed off from public knowledge and discussion. During the said conflict, the Nazis continually strove to gain an edge on the Allied Powers in the arena of artillery, and foresaw achieving their greatest coup via a byzantine system of tunnels that lay underground - and that would house the most state-of-the-art weaponry, hidden from public view and knowledge. Although the Americans did discover these tunnels when the war wrapped, they promptly sealed off the locales indefinitely. The Reich Underground witnesses researchers opening these tunnels for the first time in nearly 50 years. Via a combination of revealing archival footage and exclusive interviews, the program discusses the intensive and extreme efforts that went into the construction of the tunnels (which reportedly led to tens of thousands of fatal casualties), the artillery housed therein, and the role of the tunnels in the war per se.