Krieg is a dead world that its own people killed. Once a prosperous and industrious planet, it was ravaged by an atomic apocalypse that rendered its surface a radioactive wasteland of ash, rubble, and lethal fallout, its skies choked and its soil poisoned for ten thousand years to come. That ruin was no accident of war with an alien foe, but a wound Krieg inflicted upon itself.
Long ago the world rebelled against the rule of the Imperium, and when a loyalist faction rose to reclaim it the resulting civil war was waged with weapons of mass destruction. Rather than surrender their world to the heretics, the loyalists chose to poison it, unleashing atomics upon their own planet in a decades-long conflict that scoured Krieg of nearly all life and left only the victors and their guilt.
Having won back their world through such horror, the survivors pledged eternal penance to the Imperium, and their descendants live still in vast sealed hive-shelters deep beneath the toxic surface, breeding in birthing-vats to replace the endless dead. From these grim depths come the Death Korps of Krieg, the most fatalistic soldiers of the entire Astra Militarum.
The warriors of the Krieg regiments seek not survival but redemption through sacrifice, throwing themselves into the deadliest trench-warfare and siege-lines the galaxy can offer with an eerie, uncomplaining calm. To die in the Emperor's service is, to them, the highest honour a son of Krieg can achieve, an atonement paid in blood for a sin committed lifetimes ago. Krieg gives its children to war without hesitation, and its children give themselves gladly, seeking in death the forgiveness their world can never earn in life.
The atlas continues
