Krieg: The Radiated World

Among the countless regiments of the Astra Militarum, few are as grimly single-minded as the Death Korps of Krieg. They are soldiers who court death as a form of prayer, marching without hesitation into the meat-grinder of siege warfare to atone for a sin committed long before any of them were born. To understand them, one must first understand the poisoned, radiation-scoured world that made them, and the ancient act of treason it can never forgive itself.

A World That Betrayed the Emperor

Krieg was once a loyal and prosperous world of the Imperium, but its rulers grew fat and complacent. The planet was governed by the Council of Autocrats, an oligarchy so bloated with wealth and riven by petty feuds that it lost sight of its duty entirely. In the year 433.M40, in an act of monumental arrogance, this council renounced the Emperor and declared Krieg independent of Imperial rule.

It was a betrayal that could not be allowed to stand, and the reckoning it summoned would leave the world a corpse.

Atomic Penance

Not all of Krieg's sons followed their masters into heresy. Colonel Jurten of the 83rd Krieg Regiment gathered those still loyal to the Emperor and struck back, and rather than surrender the world to the traitors he made a terrible choice: he unleashed atomic fire upon his own planet. For nearly five hundred years the civil war raged on, a nightmare of continent-spanning trench lines, ceaseless artillery and nuclear bombardment.

When at last the loyalists prevailed, their victory was total and their world was ruined. Krieg had been reduced to a blasted, irradiated wasteland, its skies choked with fallout and its surface scarcely able to sustain life. The loyalists had saved their planet's soul by destroying its body.

Life in the Ashes

The Krieg of today is a world of poison and shadow. Its people dwell in vast underground hive-bunkers, sheltering from the toxic, radioactive surface, and the whole culture has bent itself toward a single grim purpose: to serve the Imperium and to atone. Almost every Krieger goes masked behind an advanced respirator, a permanent relic of a homeworld that has never stopped trying to kill them.

To meet the endless demand for soldiers, the population is sustained largely through gene-cloning, born and raised in great growth-vats before being marched away to war. It is an existence stripped of comfort, individuality and hope, and the men it produces regard their own lives as coin to be spent in the Emperor's name.

The Death Korps

From this bleak world march the regiments of the Death Korps of Krieg, and they carry the shame of their ancestors' rebellion like a brand. Every Krieger fights to expiate that ancient treason, seeking through absolute obedience and self-sacrifice to earn a forgiveness that can never quite be granted. They do not break, they do not rout, and they show a disregard for their own survival that unnerves even hardened comrades.

There is no bravado in them and no hunger for glory. A Krieger asks only to die usefully, in the service of the Master of Mankind, and counts a life spent for the Imperium as the highest fortune a son of Krieg can hope for.

Masters of the Siege

The Death Korps have made an art of the cruellest form of war. They are without peer in attritional siege warfare - the digging of trenches, the reduction of fortresses, and the grinding, methodical assault upon fortified positions that other regiments would consider suicidal. Under storms of shellfire they advance in disciplined ranks, taking ground metre by bloody metre and holding it against any cost.

Their methods deliberately echo the war that forged them. Where a battle demands patience, sacrifice and an ocean of lives to win a single fortified line, the Imperium sends for Krieg, and the Death Korps oblige without complaint or question.

The Grenadiers and the Price of Duty

The elite of the Korps are the Grenadiers, storm-troopers drawn from proven veterans and the survivors of shattered squads. A Krieger raised to their ranks may not refuse, and he dons a skull-faced mask to mark his acceptance of what the honour truly means: the great majority of Grenadiers are killed carrying out the deadliest assaults, and the men behind the masks know themselves to be already dead.

Even a soldier's ruin is accounted for. The Quartermaster cadre follow the fighting to reclaim the weapons and gear of the fallen, and in the desperate logic of Krieg a man too badly wounded to return to battle was once granted the Emperor's Peace, a merciful bullet. To the Death Korps, the individual is nothing; only duty, atonement and the Imperium endure.