The Death Korps of Krieg are a fan-favourite Imperial Guard regiment in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. Born from rebellion, nuclear apocalypse and a 500-year-long civil conflict, these gas-masked, great-coated “normal soldiers” (as opposed to aliens, daemons and superhumans of other factions), serve as a condensed repository of 20th-century cultural memories of total war. This paper examines the Death Korps not merely as grimdark pastiche but as a palimpsest of historical imaginaries shaped by trench warfare, ideological extremism, nuclear anxiety, and civil war trauma.
Their iconography, ethos, and narrative trajectories evoke multiple overlapping regimes of memory: the mechanized slaughter and trench-bound futility of the First World War; the totalizing mobilization, dehumanization, and war crimes of the Second; the scorched, irradiated wastelands of anticipated Third and the psychological scars of civil conflict, internal purging, and collective guilt. Devastated ecologies associated with them, Krieg and Vraks, merge images of Verdun, Stalingrad, numerous skull-covered killing fields and future Hiroshimas.
The paper contrasts the “canonical” representations of the Death Korps not only with a structure of cultural memory of total wars, but also with fan-created depictions that valorise them as ultimate warriors (armed with shovels, making funny gasmask noises). The Death Korps are an aestheticization of sacrifice, suffering, and submission through the logics of biopolitical control and necropolitical expendability. Their imagined masculinity—stoic, silent, and asexual—foregrounds a gendered fantasy of obedient, self-erasing soldiering.
By reading the Death Korps as carriers of modernity’s darkest military legacies, this paper probes how Warhammer 40,000 stages historical memory through speculative futurism. And why these very real horrors fascinate us.
Author bio
Michal Cáp is a PhD candidate at the Institute of History, Faculty of Arts, Charles University and a researcher at the Military History Institute Prague. His research concerns the socio-cultural history of Czechoslovak officer corps and questions of military preparedness, paramilitarism and civic defence. He should finally paint his miniatures.
