Krieg

Krieg is a former hive world whose sole enduring export is the Death Korps, its surface scoured barren by atomic war and centuries of trench fighting. Krieg was a hive world until its ruling autocrats seceded from Imperial authority in 433.M40, the four-hundred-and-thirty-third year of the fortieth millennium. Colonel Jurten, commanding the world’s loyalist forces, answered the secession with atomic bombardment, and roughly five centuries of trench warfare followed between the loyalist and secessionist populations. The Departmento Munitorum now administers what remains of the planet, having inherited a world with no productive capacity beyond the raising of soldiers.

Krieg’s surface is uninhabitable; its civilian population, descended from the war’s survivors, lives in bunkers and subsists on vat-produced gruel, and a named grave is regarded as a luxury reserved for the fortunate. The Death Korps of Krieg is drawn directly from this population and is the only commodity the world provides to the wider Imperium, making Krieg a source of manpower rather than of agricultural, industrial, or mineral goods.

As a regiment-source within the Astra Militarum, Krieg’s forces answer to the Departmento Munitorum’s raising and deployment structures rather than to any local nobility, and are commanded in the field alongside Officio Prefectus commissars who share the regiments’ fatalist discipline. The Death Korps’ most extensively recorded service beyond Krieg itself is the protracted Siege of Vraks, where Krieg regiments were committed against a renegade Imperial Guard force joined by warbands of Chaos, a campaign lasting years that drew on the trench-warfare doctrine the regiments carry from their home world.

Krieg itself has remained an uncontested Imperial holding since the civil war’s end, its continuing importance lying not in territory or resources but in the unbroken supply of soldiers it furnishes to campaigns across the galaxy. The civil war and its centuries of trench fighting are commemorated chiefly through the Death Korps’ own martial culture, which treats survival as incidental to duty and links every deployed regiment back to the bombarded trenches of its origin.