Episode 60: Samcheong Re-education Camps (삼청교육대)

Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries · Sep 12, 2026 · 45m

In about five months in 1980 and 1981, South Korea arrested 60,755 of its own citizens. No warrants. No charges for most of them. No trials. More than a third of them had no criminal record of any kind. They were driven to army bases, sorted into grades — A, B, C, D — and handed over to soldiers for something the government called "purification education." Fifty-four of them did not come out alive. The state's own commissions would later count at least 367 more who died afterwards of what it had done to them. And the man who signed off on the plan spent the next seven and a half years as…