The Death Korps of Krieg are rightly famous for the sheer determination of their Guardsmen, though few in the Imperium know quite what tragedies have caused the entire planet to devote its efforts into dispatching die-hard soldiers by the million. Fewer still know that Krieg wasn’t always this way – so for most, the events that transformed it from a thriving trading hub into a blasted, irradiated wasteland are the stuff of mystery and rumour.
As Krieg’s leaders and merchants grew wealthy and indolent from their trade, they began to harbour resentment towards the Departmento Munitorum adepts who collected their tithes with efficient regularity. Eventually, the High Autocrat of the planet’s largest hive city declared martial law and secession from the Imperium, turning Krieg’s formidable orbital defences outwards while billions of traitorious militiamen scoured the hive cities of loyalist defenders.
Not everyone rebelled, but after only a few months of fighting, a single city was all that remained of the loyalist holdouts – Hive Ferrograd. Here, Colonel Jurten of the Krieg 83rd Imperial Guard Regiment had taken decisive action to execute the hive’s traitorous leaders and fortified the city as a safe haven for loyalists, though even after taking in millions of refugees they were still hopelessly outnumbered by billions of rebels.
With no other option left and no relief fleet daring to get close to the orbital guns, Jurten dug down into vast caches of forbidden weapons with the aid of his loyal ally Archmagos Greel. Determined to deny Krieg to the enemy if they could not return it to the Emperor, the pair launched a barrage of extraordinarily lethal rad-missiles into the stratosphere during the Feast of the Emperor’s Ascension, quickly blanketing the entire planet in deadly isotopes.
Rad-storms wracked the battlescarred landscape while poisoned winds blew across hive cities and raging fires blocked out the warmth of the sun. Krieg’s biosphere had completely collapsed before the sun began to set on Hive Ferrograd, and with it the balance of power had swung towards the loyalist defenders – though victory would not come easy, and it took over 500 years of gruelling constant warfare before the last traitor was expunged from the surface.
Much of the brutal extermination work was carried out by regiments of greatcoated, gas mask-wearing infantry grinding through irradiated trenches and across shell-cratered fields of barbed wire and unexploded munitions. The extreme casualty rates and intense devotion to self-sacrifice led to these units being known as the ‘Death Korps’, and the name stuck even when those units were formally reintroduced to the Astra Militarum.
Krieg finally returned to Imperial control in the closing years of the 40th Millennium, and the reward for their efforts was a notice that the planet’s tithes were deep in arrears. The Departmento Munitorum demanded a newly raised regiment of Guardsmen almost as soon as they took stock of Krieg’s resources, but were surprised when they were instead offered 20 – all fully trained, equipped, and ready for war – and bidden to deploy them to the harshest and most dangerous warzones in the galaxy.
The pressure upon Krieg to produce soldiers for the endless Imperial war machine never abates, but its citizens endure every misery in their fanatical desire to atone for their ancestors’ heresies. Those who cannot fight toil in underground manufactorums to produce arms and armour, and cases of insubordination are all-but unheard of, as every power pack produced and trench club forged is another enemy of the Imperium piled upon the pyre of Krieg’s redemption.
