The Daily Star's FREE newsletter is spectacular! Sign up today for the best stories straight to your inbox Sign up today! Thank you for subscribing See our privacy notice Invalid Email

(Image: DAILY STAR)

The sinister state has long denied its prison camp network even exists, but defectors from the country have revealed the truth.

Hundreds of thousands of prisoners are being worked to death, starved, executed without trial, experimented on and even gassed by Kim Jong-un's regime.

Now, speaking exclusively to Daily Star Online, a former inmate has blown the lid on the camps — branding them worse than the notorious Auschwitz.

Related content

Kang Chol-hwan was just nine when he was sent to the Yodok concentration camp with most of his family, including his father and grandmother.

His grandad, who he would never see again, was accused of being a spy for the Japanese — and under North Korean rules, the whole family was guilty.

The camps, according to propaganda, were designed to "desiccate the seedlings of counterrevolution, pull them out by their roots and exterminate every last one of them".

Mr Kang told Daily Star Online the camps are like those of Nazi Germany, but with the prisoners' suffering drawn out for as long as possible.

He said: "Both share a common goal of exterminating their prisoners’ desire to live. Prisoners are forced to work from dusk till dawn until there is not much distinction between life and death.

"I’ve read that in Auschwitz and Nazi prison camps, the prisoners would be renamed by numbers to be deprived of personal identities.

"In North Korean prison camps, the prison guards constantly remind prisoners that their lives are less valuable than that of animals.

"At Yoduk, prisoners are executed in public to instill fear and obedience. Children, out of hunger and desperation, resort to scavenging for roots and rats.

Related content

"There is one distinction, though, that I would draw between the North Korean prison camps and Auschwitz," he continued.

"While Auschwitz’s goal was rapid, industrial-style extermination, Yodok prolongs the suffering over three generations.

"The purpose of Yodok is to be but one facility that helps sustain the regime and cleanse the North Korean people of any freedom of thought."

Mr Kang spent 10 years at Yodok before his "re-education" was complete and he was released, yet there are camps where nobody leaves alive.

Kwon-Hyuk was once the commander of Haengyong Concentration Camp — the infamous Camp 22 — but abandoned the regime after taking an embassy job in China.

Speaking about Haengyong to documentary filmmakers in 2004, he swore he had seen a family being gassed and said he had himself ordered the deaths of five families.

He recalled: "I watched a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber. Parents, one son and a daughter.

"The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save their kids by doing mouth to mouth breathing."

Related content

A study by the Database Centre for North Korean Human Rights claims no prisoner has left Haengyong alive, while reports indicate the camp closed in 2012.

But a Daily Star Online investigation reveals the camp still stands, with satellite scans taken this year showing an extensive complex with railway and mining infrastructure.

Victor Cha, who advised President George Bush about North Korea, sets out the offences that can get you sent to the camps in his book, The Impossible State.

They include sitting on a picture of Kim or allowing it to gather dust, humming South Korean pop songs and even crimes of necessity, like stealing food to avoid starving.

Related content

Prisoners can be punished with long periods of solitary confinement and more backbreaking work, or they can be forced into agonising positions for barbaric lengths of time.

Some of the cruellest treatment is saved for pregnant women, who are made to have abortions without anaesthesia, or witness their babies murdered at birth.

One grandmother, cited by Mr Cha, was tasked with looking after pregnant women at Sinŭiju camp and said newborns were left to die in a box which was simply buried when full.

Another defector illustrated in a sketch how a pregnant woman had a board placed across her bump, which other prisoners were then forced to seesaw on.

(Image: MAUERMUSEUM.DE/FREE THE NK GULAG)

In his memoir — The Aquariums of Pyongyang — Mr Kang recounts how a guard made a pregnant woman disrobe, exposing her belly, and then he beat her.

He shouted: "You, a counterrevolutionary, dare to bring a child into this world? You, from a family of traitors of the fatherland? It's unspeakable!"

Even in Yodok, where some people have hope of release, sex is banned — and women caught in the act must tell everyone in lurid detail what they did and what positions were tried.

Men, meanwhile, are sent for an extended stay in the sweatbox — which Mr Kang describes as a small, dark box where prisoners are forced to crouch in silence, sometimes for months.

Related content

Life is no better for children, who spend hours every day doing debilitating physical work in treacherous conditions; sometimes with their bare hands.

One of Mr Kang's friends as a child, repeatedly tasked with emptying a sewage tank, moaned to his mates and was beaten so severely that he fell into the tank and later died.

Those dreaming of escape face high-voltage electric fences, moats bristling with spikes, armed patrols, guard dogs and minefields, though security varies by camp.

Anyone caught escaping is executed by either firing squad, hanging or stoning, typically in front of the other prisoners, and with rocks stuffed in their mouths to stop them screaming.

In his book, Kang recalls how his fellow prisoners were ordered to stone the corpses or two particularly elusive escapees after they were hanged.

He writes: "We did as we were told, but disgust was written all over our faces. Most closed their eyes or lowered their heads to avoid seeing the mutilated bodies oozing with black-red blood.

"The skin on the victims’ faces eventually came undone and nothing remained of their clothing but a few bloody shreds.

"By the time my turn came, stones were heaped at the foot of the gallows."

Related content

But the biggest killer in the camps is malnutrition, with no more food available than a handful of corn, grain and cabbage, plus what ever bugs, snakes, rats, grasses and barks can be found.

Sketches drawn by gulag survivors detail how people, in their desperation, delay reporting each other's deaths so that they kept getting their rations, and even steal dog food.

Now, with prisoners the very last in line for food, the threat of starvation looms greater than ever — because Kim Jong-un has warned North Korea to expect a new famine.

Kim Yōng, who was imprisoned from 1996 to 1998, revealed that at the height of the last famine "people picked undigested beans out of the dung of oxen to eat."

(Image: FUJI TV)

The camps, which are blamed for a million deaths already, hold between 200,000 and 300,000 people today and the largest of them covers an area bigger than Los Angeles.

With North Korea teetering on the verge of collapse, the day draws nearer when the full horror of the camps will be exposed to the world.

Mr Cha writes: "The only reason that we cannot claim that North Korea is the worst human rights disaster in the world today is because we are not allowed to see the extent of it."

"When North Korea collapses, the gulags will be revealed as one of the worst human rights disasters in modern history."