Extermination Camp

Basic Information

This is the concentration camp's ugly sister - a facility which is designed not merely to imprison civilians but to actively massacre them. The crudest of these merely make deliberate the worst features of bad concentration camps - forced labour, starvation and disease whilst nothing has yet been created to rival the perverse ingenuity exhibited by the German government during WW2 in its development of techniques of industrial mass-murder. Not to say that they didn't use the old classic techniques as well.

There is also the matter of those camps where, despite absence of any declared policy of extermination, the deaths of the internees are at least connived at. These can be hard to tell from the death-through-incompetence camp without probing the intent behind them.

Of course, mass murder is only part of the game - the logistical challenge of the disposal of human corpses on such an industrial scale also presents a stomach churning obstacle.

Sources

Bibliography

1. full source reference

Game and Story Use

• These are not things that bear much thinking about unless you are running a horror themed game. If you are, on the other hand, then they are certainly horrific in a very upfront manner.
  • This sort of mass murder is also likely to invoke the supernatural undead and bad places are common themes, but that many corpses also screams "ghoul buffet".
    • …and then, when the supply of corpses stops…
  • So far there is no evidence of any systematic process of industrial cannibalism in any historical camp - plenty of incidents in which starving prisoners have resorted to eating one another, but nothing organised by the camp authorities. Fiction can feel free to ignore that though.
    • Again, where the supernatural is involved, this can backfire spectacularly. A camp full of starving internees is one thing - one full of wendigo quite another. Frankly even one wendigo could put the dampers on the whole operation if it so chose. Conversely, a group of tamanous might even start the ball rolling and then snack their way through the inmates, although this is unlikely to be part of anyone else's plan.
• They can be more easily rationalised when they are not human-on-human … after all they are a standard trope in robot-war fiction. When it is human on non-human then what measure is a non-human can be invoked, and even lampshaded. Or simply glossed over in one of those weird morality black holes that sometimes exist in fantasy fiction. Values dissonance is to be expected.