The snow is probably over two feet deep, and they don't plow out here. It's a penetrating cold, even in the few moments of sunlight. Above us is this huge support structure called the Henge, a ring like the one at Stonehenge, only over a hundred feet high an built by construction workers during World War II. Around us are the bombed out structures of buildings. We don't know who bombed them, almost on the Czech border, the Germans, the Russians, or the Americans. 

We're here to meet a Polish UFO expert on Nazi secret weapons to talk about the Die Glocke, the legendary Nazi Bell. Did it exist? Was it a time-traveling machine? Was it all a myth? Can we find the residue of Red Mercury? Are we at the very site of the  Wonder Weapon?

It's  been a long journey from Berlin to Peenemunde to a desolate German underground facility in Poland. And every stop along the way is burdened by the history of what happened at these places and how America's military rocket program was begun by the work of Nazi scientists, who were, in truth, war criminals. Our German hosts, historians mostly, except for a 90-year old self-declared SS officer and member of the mysterious Vril Society, are uncomfortably conscious of the past crimes in these places and the names of the concentration camps that supplied the slave labor to keep these facilities functioning. They, too, lament the past and the victims.

I'm trying to keep a reporter's mindset: watch, listen, ask questions, let your respondents speak their truths, document, and interpret later. But it's hard. The photos on the wall of the concentration camp victims in their striped pajamas working in sub-freezing cold and ill-heated factories are frightening. The special Anne Frank exhibit advertised on a bulletin board wall at Peenemunde is grimly ironic. Our guests, academically cordial in a way that I remember only too well from my years teaching college, are encyclopedic in their recitation of the facts: X number of laborers, these types of weapons, those types of propulsion systems, the names of scientists, and the day they closed down Peenemunde to take the work underground to places like Mittelbau-Dora and Nordhausen to escape the allied bombing. 

We stop at a bombed out field that housed the barracks of some of the slave laborers at Peenemunde. Our host tells us that it was ironic that the first news of the existence of Peenemunde reached the British from an escaped concentration camp victim. The RAF then bombed Peenemunde in 1943, only they bombed the barracks housing the slave laborers, almost all of whom died in the raid.

Our trip continues to the underground facilities in Poland that, legend has it, housed the project that developed the Bell. The cave walls reek of death. The cold is the cold of death, not of winter. The sound of water dripping and running along the ditches inside, echoing within the massive structure carved inside a mountain, makes the place seem alive with the spirits of the dead. This is reality, not legend. 

There is still one remaining worker alive somewhere in Poland or Germany who attests to something so critical taking place at these sites that the SS went to incredible lengths to keep the project functioning even though they knew, by 1943, that the war had been lost at the failed siege at Stalingrad. 

And now we're trudging through the snow around a structure allegedly used to hold down a device so powerful that it could have been a delivery system for a weapon of mass destruction aimed at New York, where, in 1945,  I  was living in the Manhattan neighborhood of Morningside Heights. So now it's even more personal. You can look at the stories of the Holocaust and the War in a textbook or learn about them first hand from your aunts and uncles in Brooklyn, but only feel the impact decades later when you stare at the proof and realize that whatever this thing was it might have been aimed at your city and launched, but for the Battle of the Bulge.

Downtown Berlin, today, looks more like Fifth Avenue and 57th Street than it does anything else. But the looming Brandenburg Gate, Checkpoint Charlie, and some relics of the old Berlin Wall are reminders of the past and the Cold War. You can have your picture taken with a man in a Soviet Army uniform or a British Tommy. You can stand, smiling, under the Hammer and Sickle or even flash a V sign at the camera before you grab a quick Starbucks on the corner. But the past weighs heavy and you're all too happy to get away. 

Far away.