Igni Irae
OUT OF CHARACTER INFORMATION
Intent: Codify a location for future rp.
Image Credit: Here.
Canon: N/A.
Permissions: N/A.
Links: Tephrike, Prosperity Quarter, Hope Falls, The Valkyrie's Diary, Adlerberg, Dominion of Light, Republican Guard, Into Darkness, After Darkness, Glorious Conflict, Kyriaki, Castle Maysaf, Amidala Corps, Extermination Camp 28, Darth Eisen.
SETTING INFORMATION
Military Base Name: Camp Progress.
Classification: Forced Labour Camp. Extermination Site.
Location: Adlerberg, Tephrike.
Affiliation: Humanist People's Party, Disciples of the Vader, Tephrike.
Population: Heavy.
Demographics: Most of the prisoners are aliens, especially Twi'leks, Zeltrons, Bothans, Togruta and Mon Calamari. These are seen as particularly dangerous and depraved by the human supremacist Vaderites. However, there are also human and near-human prisoners as well as members of other alien species. The inmates include political dissenters, 'defeatists', rebels, common criminals, beggars or simply aliens who were brought to the camp after being deported from their homelands in the course of Vaderite ethnic cleansings. Their land now belongs to human colonists. Many of the 'criminals' - identifiable by a green triangle on their uniform - are actually just petty criminals such as thieves, pickpockets and minor con artists, though the KEC depicts them as violent murderers. The Vaderites practice 'kin detention', so the inmates include people who were arrested simply because a relative was accused of having committed a crime.
Aside from a garrison, the Vaderites maintain administrative staff, overseers, researchers, medical personnel and so on. These are all members of the KEC. As a supplement to the regular guards, the administration also uses alien auxiliaries. These are commonly drawn from Houk, as the Vaderites regard them as simple-minded and savage. In many cases, they are former prisoners of war or ghetto residents. In short, they were faced with the choice between collaborating with the regime and becoming part of the machinery of death or being murdered. The Amidala Corps, a labour and support unit for the Vaderites, has provided female clerks, supervisors and guards. These female guards are not considered members of the KEC, but must abide by military discipline. There is a small cadre of darkside adepts from the Disciples of the Vader. These tend to be specialists, such as interrogators or alchemists.
Accessibility: Camp Progress is an extremely barbaric, savage place, but not totally isolated from society. Indeed, it is considered part of Adlerberg, though it is located outside the city proper. However, it is a slave labour and extermination camp run by a totalitarian regime's praetorian guard. As a result, access is heavily restricted. Only those authorised by the Disciples of the Vader are let in. The guards will use terminal force to prevent escape attempts and intrusions.
The road and the railway line are both extensively monitored. Camp Progress is surrounded by a wall and each sub-camp has a barbed wire fence and watchtowers. Armed soldiers patrol the complex. The families of inmates do not have the right to visit their loved ones. However, the camp features a settlement for the families of camp administrators and officers. Moreover, several local businesses have set up facilities in the camp to exploit the prisoners.
Description: Camp Progress is a forced labour and extermination camp located not far from the city of Adlerberg. Indeed, it is considered part of the city. All of Adlerberg's residents know about the camp's existence. They know that prisoners - most of them aliens - are held here without trial or access to legal recourse. It does not take much effort to find out that the inmates are tortured, starved and worked to death. Admittedly, the experiments that go inside the camp are top secret, but the general nature of the camp is known. Here it is pertinent to note that the camp administration leases inmates to various human companies so that they can be used as slave labour.
However, Adlerberg's human inhabitants do not talk about the camp. If one sees no evil and hears no evil, one can pretend it does not exist and wash one's hands in innocence. The media seldom mentions it, and when it does, it never fails to claim that all the inmates are asocial individuals, dangerous criminals and terrorists who would murder innocent human families in their beds if they were ever let out. It helps keep the city's populace loyal to the totalitarian regime.
Camp Progress is run by the Knights of the Ebon Claw, or KEC for short. This group started out as an elite bodyguard formation for the Supreme Leader of the Disciples of the Vader, but is now a major political and economic stakeholder in the regime. It controls the police, fields its own combat troops and owns massive economic conglomerates. The Economic and Administrative Head Office is responsible for administering the camp and exploiting the inmates. It transmits its orders to camp officials through the Concentration Camp Inspectorate. A special division called the Cerberus Legion has responsibility for guarding the inmates and breaking them. KEC personnel are not accountable to civilian or military courts. Instead they fall under the jurisdiction of the KEC and Police Courts. This effectively places the guards and officials above the law, though it is to be noted that the regular army's record in dealing with prisoners of war is also atrocious. The secret police is responsible for the admission and release of the prisoners. Rivalry between the disparate agencies is a common occurence.
Strictly speaking, Camp Progress is a complex rather than a singular camp. It consists of a concentration camp, which the transit area, the barracks for inmates. The general administration, including the commandant's office and the guards' facilities, lie adjacent to it. The living areas for inmates are segregated by gender. It also features a central area for public executions to make 'salient examples'. The guards like to hang people and leave them for a few days. The second camp is a massive factory complex.
Private businesses as well as enterprises controlled by the KEC have workshops and factories here. Private businessowners pay rent to the KEC for every prisoner they utilise. Not all prisoners actually work within the camp. Instead many are sent to factories and farms outside of it. However, the KEC prefer to maintain a firm grip on its slaves, so companies who do not have facilities in the sub-camp must pay more. The third camp is an extermination site, where prisoners who are no longer capable of work are sent to be murdered. Secretly, this area also houses laboratories where KEC doctors conduct cybernetic and alchemical experiments on prisoners.
Moreover, Camp Progress features homes for KEC officers and their families. They have their own little village. A KEC officer who was born into a low or lower middle class family can now live in a beautiful villa. The villas are wonderfully maintained and manicured and face away from the camp. Naturally the families have inmates as servants. Sometimes the KEC officers organise tours of the camp for their wives and children. This area also features amenities such as a bathhouse, bakery, a Vaderite shrine, a mess hall and a holiday home with a sauna for guests. Aspasia Koukoura, a former camp commandant and now the head of the secret police, still has a villa here. Sometimes she gives 'tutorials on breaking enemies of the state' to show young recruits how it is done.
Most of the inmates are non-humans and are drawn from the population of Prosperity Quarter. Their families are kept in the ghetto and live in fear of punishment if the labourers do not complete their tasks. Rather than being a single camp, it is a larger complex with various ancillary work camps located outside of it. There the inmates toil in the mines, stone quarries and factories. Various private companies have set up outposts here to exploit the forced labourers in return for a fee. There is an underground complex where 'special projects' are pursued. Conditions in the camp are extremely poor. Some members of the Amidala Corps serve as supervisors, clerks and guards. They have power over the prisoners, but are often treated patronisingly by the predominantly male KEC. This has driven some female guards to be particularly cruel to inmates to show how 'tough they are'. By the same token, some male guards do it because they believe it demonstrates their 'masculine strength' to the 'weaker sex'.
A select number of prisoners have been given positions of authority. These are called functionaries and receive better housing conditions and food. This group includes barracks clerks, overseers, barracks orderlies and trustees. They are still at the mercy of the KEC, but have a lot of power over their fellow prisoners. Some try to use their authority to improve the lot of their fellows, but others exploit it and have developed a taste for sadism to please their capricious masters.
Many of the overseers fall into a grey zone because they cannot help their fellow inmates without making abhorrent moral compromises with the camp management. The KEC tends to delegate beating prisoners to overseers and other functionaries. Sometimes an overseer will even receive the order to quietly murder a prisoner. Some overseers refuse - with fatal consequences. A few overseers manage to become quite powerful. The camp guards seldom visit the prison barracks themselves because they are concerned about diseases, so that is delegated to the functionaries. The Vaderites' humanocentric hierarchy still permeates the camp, and so many overseers are human inmates.
It goes without saying that the appalling conditions in the camp have had a destructive effect on bonds between inmates. No one can be certain they can trust their fellow prisoners, since anyone could be an informant. Theft is often the only way to survive. However, relationships between prisoners are not dominated by aggression and anarchy. Solidarity is essential to survival. This has led to the formulation of an honour code of sorts. Stealing a fellow prisoner’s loaf of bread is regarded as a grave sin. This does not prevent it from happening, but it is treated as a terrible crime nonetheless.
Prisoners have formed networks that mutually aid each other, providing the less fortunate members of the group with food, medical supplies and the like. These groups also try to protect children in the camp, as they are the most vulnerable. Some prisoner groups are bound by ideology or species. An example would be Twi’lek or Mon Calamari patriots or followers of the Republican Guard or the Dominion. Political prisoners are often at odds with apolitical career criminals. Typically, the latter tend to provide most of the overseers. A group of Twi’lek nationalists secretly publishes an underground newspaper, which exhorts the Twi’leks to remain united and show solidarity with their people. Oversees from the same group may try to protect their people from being given particularly arduous tasks or being sent to the death camp.
However, the other side of the coin is that because these circles are so tight-knit, they find it difficult to cooperate with inmates outside of their clique. Sometimes this means that an overseer who works in the medical facility might have to protect his people from being subjected to medical experiments by editing a KEC list and replacing their names with those not connected to his group. An overseer from a political faction might save his people from being put on a prison transport to a more dangerous facility by sacrificing prisoners who are seen as undesirable, such as criminals, social outcasts or members of a rival group. Of course, not all political prisoners enjoy the same degree of protection, as there is rivalry between different groups.
Supporters of the Guard and the Dominion are often enemies, for example. There are also often strong tensions between human prisoners and alien ones, as well as between alien groups, though some cliques transcend these bitter divides. Human prisoners tend to be on top of the hierarchy and are particularly hated and distrusted. Twi’leks, meanwhile, are often the target of abuse at the hands of the guards. They are stereotyped as licentious and devious. Bothans, meanwhile, are considered sly and duplicitous. Ethnic solidarity can save lives though. Groups of prisoners organise debate clubs and cultural activities such as theatrical performances. Once a group of Mon Calamari inmates organised a ‘Dac Day’, complete with a choir and a theatre play that was attended by KEC members. The clapping Vaderites did not notice that the ‘inferior xenos’ had inserted subversive messages into the play and were secretly mocking them.
Certain prisoners have become specialists for ‘organising’, which is a euphemism for smuggling. For instance, a prisoner responsible for sorting clothes in the warehouse may trade a coat for some food. Moreover, the prisoners do what they can to use their skills to survive. A multilingual inmate might get a job as a translator, while an artist might be able to trade his drawings for food. Furthermore, they try to preserve the pre-camp identity their captors are trying to deprive them of. For example, trying to keep themselves and their clothes clean is not just a hygienic measure, but also an attempt to hold on to their dignity as sentient beings, which the Vaderites deny them. Many prisoners try to find solace in art, literature or spirituality. Educated prisoners organise secret reading circles to pass on what they know about their culture. This is quite pertinent since the Vaderites are determined to destroy it.
The rule of the KEC is cruel and arbitrary. Prisoners are regularly beaten and abused for the pettiest of reasons. The rule is that if a prisoner is not capable of work, he or she does not deserve to live. New prisoners arrive at the camp in terrible conditions, for they are transported to a railway station in cattle wagons like chattel. Each day begins early in the morning for an inmate. A block supervisor finds a gong and greets them with brutal beatings. Clean water and latrines are scarce for the inmates, so the sanitary and hygienic conditions they live in are appalling. Each washhouse has to be shared with thousands of prisoners. Moreover, the prisoner barracks suffer from severe overcrowding.
These conditions are a feature, not a bug, because the KEC likes it when the prisoners come to resemble the 'barbaric savages' aliens are stereotyped as being. Inmates can receive packages and letters from families outside the camp. However, letters being sent into or outside the camp are opened by the political department of the camp administration, which censors anything 'uppity'. Moreover, the camp administration often steals the food packages. Indeed, corruption is endemic in the camp, both on top and at the bottom. This forces the prisoners to find ingenious ways to acquire food and clean clothes. Fortunately, many KEC guards are open to taking bribes. Inmates who work in facilities such as the kitchen, the storehouses or the infirmary can use their position to get their hands on supplies for barter with less fortunate prisoners. This has created a shadow economy within the camp. It has been the saving grace for many sick or starving prisoners.
Each morning, the prisoners must line up in the main square for roll call, regardless of how bad the weather is. Summers on Tephrike are very hot. The guards may force prisoners to do exercises in the scorching heat or simply beat them for minor infractions. The count goes on until all prisoners have been accounted for. When this is finally over, the prisoners must go to work. Their hours are very long and there are no break periods. A prison orchestra is forced to play cheerful music. The food is deliberately inadequate and prisoners whose performance is deemed 'inadequate' receive even less food. Inevitably, many prisoners die from disease, exhaustion and malnourishment. A second roll call takes place at night. The assembled prisoners are not allowed to leave until it is complete, no matter how late it gets. Prisoners may be flogged or murdered for 'disobedience', which can cover the most trivial reasons.
The inmates are tattooed and receive triangular badges to identify them. These are based on a prisoners' species and their supposed crime. The 'disobedient' are branded. These poor unfortunate souls receive extremely meagre rations, live in fear of the whip and tend to be worked to death. The Vaderites are not worried about attrition rates, but the mining process is very primitive and reliant on manual labour, which is performed by people who have few incentives. As a consequence, it is quite inefficient. Terror is used to keep the slaves in line and suppress dissent. On the one hand, the camp administration is supposed to extract as much economic value from a prisoner as possible, but on the other they are viewed as absolutely expendable. The low productivity is blamed on sabotage and 'laziness'.
On occasion, the KEC exhorts the administration not to waste labour assets and crack down on arbitrary punishments. Here and there, a guard or an officer is punished for corruption or 'excesses'. But these are symbolic measures that do not change the system and are not intended to do so. Camp officials often requisition prisoners for private purposes, such as building a villa, manufacturing furniture or painting for them. The system is so corrupt that the KEC's courts have dispatched judges to investigate and prosecute corruption, but the local officials are very good at stonewalling investigations. In one case, the commandant simply had his minions set fire to the building containing the judge's files.
The political department of the camp administration acts as the secret police. It maintains several interrogation chambers, where prisoners are tortured through mundane and supernatural mundanes. While most members of the KEC are Non-Force-Users, some are Force-Users. Force-Sensitive inmates are supposed to be eliminated outright. The medical areas for the inmates are inadequate and have a dark side. The KEC frequently tests chemical and biological weapons on inmates, exposing them to new forms of nerve gas or to infectious diseases. Moreover, they also use them as organic materiel to develop Sithspawn creatures. These experiments are kept secret from the rest of the inmates. Indeed, the administration often tells condemned inmates that they are being released and will be given less strenuous work. 'Epidemic prevention' is another common euphemism. But word inevitably leaks out.
A KEC scientist called Doctor Menkales is greatly feared for his vicious experiments. He started out trying to 'prove' the Twi'lek blood libel theory. This absurd 'theory postulates that Twi'leks start out white, but change colour by drinking the blood and eating the meat of humans who have been ensnared by them. The more they eat, the redder they become. To this end, he has conducted barbaric tests to see if he could change a Twi'lek's skin colour. When reality did not match his theories, Menkales faked the rest results. Many Twi'leks died in his tests. He has also tested infectious diseases and pathogen-releasing bombs on prisoners under the guise of creating 'cures'. Like some other KEC doctors, Menkales has published many of his findings in peer-reviewed journals. His articles give the impression that the tests were performed on non-sentient animals, not people.
Even in death, the inmates are still exploited. Their hair - if they have any - is cut off and used to make textiles. It is often used for socks and blankets. Some Vaderites own lampshades made from the skin of alien prisoners. Even a prisoner's gold teeth will be removed so that the metal can be reused. The possessions of the condemned are confiscated by the camp administration. A special group of prisoners is responsible for organising them and maintaining the massive storehouse, which has been named 'Coruscant'. The complex has large crematoria, where the bodies of the dead are disposed of. This is the responsibility of a special commando of prisoners. This group is also charged with preparing the prisoners for execution - and deceiving them about what will happen to them -, confiscating their possessions and clothing. The members of the group are decimated and replaced at regular intervals to preserve the secrecy of the operation.
The complex has watch towers with machine gun and rotary cannon emplacements. Moreover, prisoners wear shock collars. Aside from the threat of death, prisoners live in fear of being selected for alchemical experiments practiced by the sorcerers among the Disciples. Abuse is standard policy and indeed encouraged. Not every guard is a sadist or a Humanist zealot, but they operate in a system that encourages and indeed requires abuse. A guard who does not punish an 'uppity' prisoner will be disparaged as 'weak' and 'effeminate'. Camp guards are taught to regard the prisoners as the scum of the earth, as savage beings who are less than sentient and who would murder them and their families if not kept on a leash. The slogan 'Work sets you free' appears on a sign erected over the entrance to the camp.
Arrofk Narvoro, a Bothan, is one of the senior overseers among the prisoners. He lives in a grey zone. A doctor by trade, he used to be an underground activist agitating against the Vaderites. Now he is forced to enforce their rules - or people die. But if he enforces their rules, people die, too. The best he can do is mitigate the carnage. If he does not arrange for lazy prisoners or would-be escapees to be punished, the Vaderites will not just kill them, but carry out collective punishment. Individual escape attempts must be thwarted because everyone will suffer otherwise. Sometimes he can use his connections to protect and shield prisoners, especially vulnerable ones. But this often requires moral compromises. His survival strategy is to make himself indispensable to the camp administration, so that he is in a position to bargain in favour of inmates who need his help and is not replaced by someone who is only out for profit and authority.
Moreover, his skill as a doctor means that he is forced to cooperate with Doctor Menkales. This gives him a role when it comes to organising selections, deciding who is strong enough to work, who should receive medical care when they get sick and who should be sent to the killing site. Arrofk's knowledge of what goes on inside the Sith laboratories is limited, but he is observant and sometimes Menkales lets things slip, as he likes to boast. He knows enough to be horrified.
Deva is a Twi'lek and a member of the 'Helpers'. She was arrested in a random round-up because the police had an arrest quota to meet. When she was brought to the camp, she was assigned to one of the work crews that sorted clothes from the transports. For a while she looked after the camp animals and tended to the dogs of one of the officers. Said dogs had been trained to tear 'uppity' prisoners apart. An Amidala Corps supervisor decided to 'civilise the savage'. Her skill as a seamstress landed her a job, but an officer took a dislike to her due to her being 'surly' and 'ungrateful'.
She has been put to work in one of the special commandos. Aside from depriving them of their belongings, she has to dispose of the bodies. This, coupled with the murder of most of her family, has left her an emotionally scarred, troubled woman. She knows what grim fate awaits everyone here and has made connections with fellow inmates who are determined to carry out an uprising, regardless of the cost.
Camp Progress is run by KEC Paladin Rhesus Halkias. The commandant is an ideological bureaucrat who combines commitment to Humanism with managerial talent. He is an old hand at running camps and has been put in charge of Camp Progress to ensure productivity and security. He is scrupulously dedicated to his ‘calling’. However, certain trends dissatisfy him. The new Supreme Leader is a corrupt sybarite whose commitment to the finer points of Humanism is superficial. Eisen has proclaimed himself Grand Commander of the KEC, but he is not one of them.
The commandant views this as an affront; for he has dedicated his life to the sworn community of sword-brethren the order purports to be. It has only made him more radical and more receptive to certain scientific schemes proposed by Doctor Menkales. He looks at the ‘soft civilians’ in Adlerberg and sees complacency. He remembers the revolt during the Netherworld raptures and he fears the ‘xenos’ will rise again, backed by hordes of ‘sub-human degenerates’. The only solution is to be a political soldier who is ‘as hard as durasteel’. In his world view, there is only black and white. He is not murdering sentient beings; he is performing pest control. Struggle between worthy and unworthy species is the immutable law of nature. He considers himself a soldier, and resents being seen as a jailer or pen-pusher.
When he comes home, the stench of blood and charred corpses clings to him. His wife Mariana is fully aware of what he does for a living. She is the ‘good wife’ who stands by her husband and makes sure he can play the role of the benevolent patriarch in their beautiful villa. She often organises get-togethers for the wives of the camp officials. He has no affairs and a perfectly ordinary family life. Their life style is luxurious and she gets to pick inmates as servants. His children know him as strict, but loving father who helps them with their homework and always has nice gifts for them. He gets mad when they play ‘xenos and stormtroopers’.
POINTS OF INTEREST
Progress I - Redemption Centre:
This is the actual concentration camp. Vaderite doctrine stipulates that the aliens have to redeem themselves through hard work of the plots of their Jedi puppet masters. It features barracks for the prisoners, kitchens, latrines, warehouses, a garage, a bakery and registration centre where new arrivals are processed.
There is a receiving area where new prisoners arrive. It includes a railway ramp and an unloading platform. Guards who work on the ramp are known to be particularly cruel and to administer beatings to 'greet' new inmates. It is not uncommon for guards and camp doctors to be drunk when they carry out 'selections'. Money and jewellry are collected at a cashier's booth in the registration centre. Officially this is for safekeeping, but in practice the inmates never see their valuables again.
Prisoners who resist are taken away or beaten to death by the guards. There is a barber barracks where female prisoners are shorn off their hair, if they belong to a species that has any. The baggage of the prisoners is located at a building near the registration centre. A special work unit of prisoners is responsible for sorting it. There is a prison infirmary, but it is understaffed and ill-equipped. The camp administration increasingly utilises prisoners as infirmary staff. Needless to say being a doctor or clerk is a highly coveted position. There is a small cinema for the prisoners...which doubles as a torture chamber. The prisoners can often see and smell the drying blood when their tormentors allow them to see a movie.
The camp guards and the alien auxiliaries have separate barracks. The KEC have set up a small zoo and some stables. Prisoners are responsible for tending to the animals. Female prisoners have separate barracks, which are located close to the guard facilities and the commandant's office. A prisoner who is made a clerk in the commandery is considered privileged. The members of the special commando of prisoners responsible for disposing of the bodies of murdered inmates have their own barracks. There is a guard's office at the heavily fortified gate.
The daily roll-call takes place in the central square of the camp. The roll-call twice a day - early in the morning and late at night after work. It will drag on until all prisoners had been counted. Some sadistic guards make the prisoners do exercises. Moreover, 'exemplary' beatings and executions take place here to set an example. The camp administration has delegated beatings to the prisoners themselves and uses them to sow discord between groups of inmates. The central square features a large granite statue of Theodore Eliades, the founder and first commandant of Camp Progress. It portrays him as a valiant knight. The prisoners are forced to maintain it.
Progress II - Unity Complex:
This is a massive factory complex where inmates toil under appalling conditions. It is surrounded by an electrified fence of barbed wire. Their working conditions are appalling. The management believes that productivity can only be improved by beating prisoners. In their view, the only way to increase prisoner labour productivity is through the use of violence.
They do not see a correlation between these inhumane, self-defeating methods and the fact that the prisoners work more slowly than a freeborn worker. The managers have implemented a rudimentary motivational scheme, including the right to wear watches, the payment of scrip that can be used in the camp canteen to purchase cigarettes and other trifles, and free visits to the camp brothel. None of this has helped much. Prisoners who succumb to exhaustion and are too weak to continue working are killed or used in experiments. Workers receive a water soup to supplement their standard rations. However, the food is inadequate. The management is well-aware that prisoners are starving, but desires to maintain a high work rate at any cost.
Some of the companies that have factories and workshops here are privately owned, while others are part of the KEC's corporate empire. For ideological reasons, the Vaderites do not want the slaves to do anything technical and they are concerned about sabotage. So there are textile workshops where inmates weave uniforms and outfits, and manufacturing plants where they manufacture plating and metal sheets for tanks and other vehicles.
Moreover, there is a large factory for rubber and vulcanisation production. The latter is the process of hardening rubber so that it can be used for tanks. The process is quite primitive because if it bursts or leaks a worker will get molten sulfur and rubber on them. There is also a facility to produce fertilisers. The Tephriki Earth and Stone Works, a KEC company that procures and manufactures building materials for construction projects, maintains a brickworks factory here. Not every prisoner works in this complex. Many are leased to farms and private businesses outside of the camp or work on external construction sites.
A battalion of KEC guards is responsible for guarding the prisoners, and the complex has its own command centre. The relationship between the camp administration and the industrialists is not entirely harmonious. The economic conglomerates gladly utilise slave labourers, but would prefer it if the KEC brought the workers to them. For their part, the KEC dislikes being treated as the henchmen of big business. An increasing number of supervisors are drawn from the Amidala Corps. Originally they were only responsible for handling female inmates, but their role has been expanded.
Bastion of the Valiant:
Strictly speaking, this is not part of the complex, but both areas are connected. This is a settlement for the KEC officers, managers and their families. They have cottages and beautifully manicured villas. These are always well-maintained and face away from the camp. See no evil, hear no evil. However, one can still see the smoke rising from the crematoria. Moreover, the stench of death clings to a camp officer when he returns home after a day of tormenting innocent people.
Sometimes one can hear distant gun shots when a prisoner is executed. Although it is forbidden, the officers sometimes organise camp tours for their families or force the prisoners to assemble and sing for them. Low-ranking camp guards have to live in the barracks. Amidala Corps supervisors also have cotagges. From the balconies, the residents have a lovely view of a forest and a lake. They can also see chain-gangs of prisoners.
The camp management encourages officers to settle their families here. It is believed that their presence will exercise a stabilising influence on the camp officials. It also gives the officers ample reason to make sure that the prisoners remain under the yoke and never manage to escape. There are also various amenities such as a bathhouse, bakery, a laundry service and pub. It is like a normal village in the middle of hell. But then most of the guards are not psychopaths, but normal men and women who do horrible things.
The House of the Stormtroopers is quite popular. It has guest rooms for visitors and a restaurant that only serves humans. It is common for senior KEC members and their spouses to come together in the evening to eat, play cards, listen to music and so on. Female prisoners are employed as maidens and must work in the kitchen. Other amenities include a sauna, a gymnasium, playground, and a sports field.
Another location of note is the Shrine of the Sith'ari, a small Vaderite chapel. Aside from being a place of worship, it is a common venue for weddings as well as naming ceremonies for new-born offsprings. Fittingly, the chapel features mosaics depicting a Anakin Skywalker purging the Sand People, who are portrayed as animalistic savages.
The Bastion features the Camp Progress Museum. It is filled with propaganda. The leaders of the prisoners - and any prominent inmate the management feels like 'teaching a lesson' - have to come and inspect it. A good five minute contemplation of each exhibit is acceptable. Trying to 'rush' through is seen as ingratitude or worse 'seditious'.
Special Administration Zone 1:
This is the most secretive and tightly guarded area of the camp. Access to it is heavily restricted. It contains the killing site, crematoria and laboratories. Prisoners are told that they are being rewarded or will be given special medical care or transferred to a different site where conditions are less strenuous. A special commando of prisoners is forced to participate in the deception - and to dispose of the dead bodies. Sometimes they have to get rid of the bodies of their own family members.
The members of the special commando, nicknamed helpers, receive better living conditions than the typical inmate. They have their own barracks and cannot be arbitrarily killed by the guards. However, they are isolated from normal prisoners and are killed and are often killed and replaced at regular intervals, save for those who have essential skills. Some of the helpers, knowing what horrible fate awaits them, record their experiences and hide the writings in the hope that one day someone will liberate the camp and uncover the truth. Ironically, one of the largest camp revolts was instigated by a special commando.
The sector features a warehouse where the belongings of the condemned are stored. The prisoners who are murdered outright are, in a way, the 'lucky' ones. Those who are selected for tests suffer an even worse fate. This sector features laboratories disguised as an Epidemic Prevention Centre. It is run by Unit 137. There the Vaderites conduct barbaric medical and alchemical experiments. In addtion, they test weapons on prisoners. For example, they do use prisoners instead of crash test dummies. Some of the tests are carried out at the request of the army.
Prisoners have also been deliberately infected with pathogens to test their viability as bioweapons. The Vaderites regard cloning humans as unnatural, but they have no qualms about turning inmates into Sithspawn, grafting cybernetics onto them and implanting control chips to make them mindless killing machines. Following Dominion bombings, much of the critical work has been relocated underground.
SECURITY
High
- The camp is located close to Adlerberg, a major Vaderite city. The camp complex itself is enclosed by a heavy wall and an electrified fence. Watch towers with machine guns and rotary cannons have been set up. The camp features round the clock surveillance in form of a CCTV camera network. Crucial areas feature biometric security, heavy blast doors, motion sensors and pop-up turrets. Poison gas and paralysing chemicals can be released into the barracks in the case of revolt.
- Prisoners are required to wear identifying armbands with their numbers. Triangular badges of various colours are used to identify the various categories of prisoners. The inmates are monitored both by the guards and by those among them who have been made functionaries. There is only one main road and one railway line and both are guarded and monitored.
- The guards are drawn from the Vaderites' fanatical praetorian guard and will use terminal force. They are supplemented by alien auxiliaries, who receive inferior equipment though. Most of the guards are Non-Force-Users, but the guard contingent features a small number of darkside adepts of varying skill and specialisation. Moreover, Sithspawn are also utilised. Examples for those would be Harrowers and Storm Beasts.
- Electrostatic weapons have been set up in courtyards and at major work sites to be triggered in the case of revolts or mass breakout attempts.
Camp Progress is by no means the only Vaderite concentration camp. Nor is it the largest. But it is one of the most infamous. Moreover, it is considered a 'model' camp and many commandants have been schooled here. Before the Vaderites conquered Almopia and renamed it Adlerberg, it was called the Harmonious Education Facility. It served the Dominion of Light as a brainwashing and forced labour camp. Conditions were already bad then.
The camp was crowded and prisoners were abused, tortured and exploited. However, on occasion some were actually released back into civilian society. In its own twisted way, the Dominion took its belief in the New Ashlan Citizen seriously and promoted the idea of re-education, even though it amounted to brainwashing. When the Vaderites seized control of Almopia, they soon implemented a campaign of ethnic cleansing in order to transform it into a racially pure city for humans. After a brief period of moderation, the alien population was deported wholesale into a squalid ghetto called Prosperity Quarter.
Camp Progress was created to hold those aliens the Vaderites considered especially dangerous. Twi'lek, Mon Calamari and Bothans were prominent targets due to the hatred the Vaderites felt for them. Concentration camps were nothing new, but Camp Progress was a prototype for a new model. The old camps had been ad hoc creations. There had been no national authority to manage them. Instead the Humanist militia, the KEC and the police had set up their own camps. These 'wild camps' were highly heterogenous and thus conditions varied wildly. Some local commanders simply used them to intern rivals or people they wanted to extort favours from.
Camp Progress was supposed to bring order to the chaos and put the murder, torture and exploitation of prisoners on a 'rational' basis. The first commandant was Theodore Eliades, a KEC officer and war veteran. His men held him in awe, calling him 'Papa Eliades'. To the prisoners he was a brutal, petty tyrant. Eliades created the layout and building plans for the camp. They were applied to all future KEC detention facilities. It was he who designed the striped prisoner uniforms and wrote the guarding provisions.
On the one hand they mandated rigid discipline, on the other they defined the prisoners as semi-sentient scum that possessed no rights. Eliades replaced haphazard brutality with a clearly defined system of terror. Indeed, abusing prisoners became an initiation rite for new guards. Brutal punishments were instituted for the most trivial offences. Eliades despised weakness and once said that a soft guard should retire to a monastery and let the 'real men' do their job.
In this day and age, the camp was focused on punishment and detention. Prisoners were abused and given redundant, back-breaking work that was designed to break them. At the same time, Vaderite propaganda mouthpieces hailed the camp as progressive, claiming that its guards and wardens were heroes who protected innocent people from hordes of criminals. Thanks to them, Adlerberg was free of crime. In these early days, some officials in the ministries of justice and the interior tried to restore a modicrum of accountability.
All of them supported a human supremacist dictatorship, but they wanted to maintain a face of legal norms and to rule by law. They argued that the camps were not needed since the courts had been thoroughly Humanised and so the judges would pass sentences in accordance with a 'healthy folk sentiment'. Thus any convict could be locked up in a normal prison. It is obvious that this stance already represented the abolition of any form of rule of law. Moreover, these forces argued that decoupling the police and the camps would lead to administrative and legal chaos. Minister of Justice Pattakos, by no means a proponent of civil liberties, argued that only the courts could judge criminals and enemies of the regime, and protested against prisoners being abused and murdered.
However, the KEC had powerful allies and successfully argued in favour of a permanent state of emergency. It was not enough to put criminals who had already committed a crime behind bars; the security forces had to prophylactically eliminate all 'racial and spiritual enemies of mankind'. 'Hidebound' lawyers and bureaucrats did not have the 'stomach' to ruthlessly combat the legions of 'vermin'. Thus the camps and the guards' treatment of prisoners would not be subject to judicial review. Indeed, the KEC were soon removed from the jurisidiction of civilian courts. The influence of the Camp Progress model increased when Eliades was made inspector-general of all the camps.
However, over time its emphasis shifted from mere punishment to economic exploitation. The camp was supposed to become economically useful and this meant putting the prisoners to work. With so many humans being conscripted into the army to fight the Republican Guard and the Dominion, there were severe labour shortages. At the same time, the KEC wanted to retain control over its prisoners, which meant them out of the grasp of the industrialists and economic ministries. Thus the praetorian guard established its own enterprises in the camp.
These were unified under the Economic and Administrative Head Office of the KEC. The camp administration was subordinated to it. The leading officials of this department saw themselves as 'ideological administrators'. They often bickered with camp managers. Economic interests were in conflict with ideological imperatives because underfed, sick prisoners were not productive. The camp managers received contradictory goals, since the prisoners were supposed to be broken in, but also be turned into useful labour assets. As a result, productivity remained low. Extermination through labour became the guiding principle.
Abuse and tyranny were inherent to the system. The Vaderites did not value the lives of 'xenos' and 'asocials', so the prisoners received inadequate rations and lived in poor sanitary conditions. Eliades left his old job to take command of a stormtrooper division composed of former camp guards, which became notorious for pillaging 'impure' villages and committing war crimes. He retained influence in the camp system, but expressed dissatisfaction with the 'bean-counters' who were 'corrupting' his work. The butcher finally died when his aircraft was shot down by Dominion flak. The Vaderite's propaganda called him a hero of mankind. His body was buried with full military honours at a human military cemetery near a formerly Twi'lek village his soldiers had 'cleansed'. Dominion soldiers destroyed the Vaderite graves and bulldozed the bodies when they retook the village.
Back at home, the camp administration encouraged its senior officers to settle their families in a KEC settlement located within the camp complex, offering them various amenities, including 'servants'. While the composition of the prisoner population shifted, Twi'leks were always fairly prominent. The racialist Vaderites considered them a depraved, dangerous species. In their asinine world view, Twi'leks seduced innocent humans so that they could eat their flesh and had been part of a conspiracy of alien Jedi that created the Gulag Virus to destroy mankind.
The KEC tried to set up an independent armaments production in the camp. This was supposed to prove the efficiency of its economic model and make it more independent from the armaments industry, since the regular army received priority. However, the attempt was an abject failure. For understandable reasons, the arms industry was not inclined to cooperate with the KEC since it did not want a rival. Moreover, some inmates were able to arm themselves and escape, killing several guards and camp officials. After this fiasco, slaves were instead given work that was not too technical, but dangerous. They were also used for public works projects such as canal and road-building. The army's logistics corps even made use of labourers from the camp to build fortifications, repair roads and so on.
Because the Vaderites did not trust them with modern tools, the prisoners had to labour under primitive conditions. A Gungan called Odoh Senks, a future leader of the Republican Guard, was one of the inmates who managed to flee with the help of the rebels. The escape was particularly humiliating for the camp management, which liked to dismiss Gungans as half-wits. He soon gained notoriety as a rebel leader driven by a grim resolution to destroy both the Vaderites and the Dominion. One of the Vaderite's goals was to demoralise and humiliate their prisoners. Torment was both physical and spiritual. The Vaderites did all they could to degrade the prisoners. Thus an extensive network of spies was constantly at work to keep the campo officials informed of every thought and deed and to cultivate an atmosphere of suspicion. There was only one law, namely that of self-preservation. Stealing was often a necessity. Many inmates were forced to lie, cheat, inform on others and, in the worst case, even kill them to preserve their lives.
When a pandemic broke out, the camp guards murdered inmates en masse. Some of the infected were kept around so that they could be used for experiments. Camp Progress became even more brutal during the reign of Darth Hyperion. Captured Republican Guard partisans and Dominion soldiers were routinely executed at the camp until it turned out that there were labour shortages. However, political officers from both armies continued to be murdered. The Supreme Leader was committed to 'purifying' Tephrike and winning the war against the Vaderites' foes, but also needes slaves. With an increasing number of KEC members being sent to the frontlines, the camp administration was forced to make use of alien auxiliaries. They drafted them from species the human supremacist Vaderites considered simple-minded and dumb. Most of them were prisoners of war or ghetto residents and thus were in no position to refuse. By now the camp had become an enormous complex. Indeed, it resembled a small city.
Endemic corruption forced the KEC to conduct an internal investigation, but it was mostly a symbolic measure to give the impression that the organisation was an 'honest' organisation. One might note that while the KEC judges were punishing camp guards for stealing, thousands of innocent people were being murdered every day. But from the standpoint of the KEC, that was just. By contrast, stealing the prisoners' possessions for personal use instead of handing them over to the Imperial authorities was a crime. The commandant at the time was relieved of his duties after being charged with fraud, embezzlement, and drunkenness. However, he had poweful protectors and so he was given a second chance in another camp. He was eventually executed by firing squad when one of his rivals learned that the former commandant had murdered a hospital orderly in order to conceal that the prisoner had given him treatment for syphilis. Meanwhile, the murders continued. Indeed, when the camp inspectorate initiated a mass operation to rid the camps of 'useless eaters', the executioners were lauded as heroes and decorated with medals.
Aspasia Koukoura began her rise in the camp guard unit around this time. She started her career as a common camp guard responsible for female prisoners, but then became an overseer and finally an interrogator. When Aspasia took over the camp, she had the paths paved and flowers planted along the side of a street near the camp headquarters and the guards' living quarters because she found its old look unaesthetic. She had a guard punished for bullying the prisoners who were to, under pain of death, to dispose of the bodies of murdered inmates. She did this because it was inefficient, not immoral. The members of this unit received better treatment than the other inmates - and were eliminated and replaced at regular intervals.
She often wore a white uniform and carried a whip. Aspasia perceived the prisoners as cargo to be destroyed or used. She made a group of female prisoners form an orchestra to provide entertainment, serve as a propaganda tool for visitors and boost morale. When she was transferred to more a senior position, she took her favourite musicians with her and left the rest to die. Following an assassination attempt on the Supreme Leader, the euphemistically named People's Court had the family members of the conspirators sent to concentration camps. A couple of them were detained in Camp Progress. This did not include the younger children of the plotters. They were sent to orphanages and adopted by loyalist families.
The Netherworld Event was extremely disruptive for the camp. The commandant at the time grew crazed and paranoid. He personally murdered inmates and trained his two kath hounds to tear prisoners apart. A group of prisoners was able to stage a mass breakout. Then the Light Sith briefly managed to take control of Adlerberg and the camp was closed. However, in the aftermath of a ruinous war with the Dominion, reactionary forces prevailed. Darth Furcht, leader of the KEC, was swept to power as Supreme Leader. He was a dogmatic fanatic who brought persecution to new heights. Furcht was less interested in economic exploitation because he believed the Vaderites had become too reliant on alien slave labour and this threatened to turn them soft.
He was, however, very interested in medical and alchemical experiments. This included testing pathogens and chemical weapons on inmates. The camp became a hub for mad science. Secretly, Sith alchemists use it to experiment with cybernetics and Sith alchemy. One of the 'stars' among the medical staff, Doctor Menkales, was particularly interested in the development of epidemics and pandemics that could spread easily once launched. Methods of dispersal were tested on prisoners of war, using rodents as carriers. However, battlefield use had to be halted in the face of fierce Dominion retaliation, though plagues continued to be used against the Guard.
Then Furcht perished in a firestorm when Firemane laid waste to Castle Maysaf, the hub of the Disciples. The Vaderites descended into a brief civil war. The new Supreme Leader, Darth Eisen, is less invested in ideology than his predecessor and cares more about profit. Thus certain dubious projects have been halted because they constitute a waste of 'economic assets'. Camp Progress has been opened to various human companies to exploit the inmates, even at the cost of weakening the KEC's grip. It remains, however, hell on earth for the inmates.
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