Yodŏk Concentration Camp

Yodŏk (Korean 요덕, also romanized Yodeok or Yoduk) is a political concentration camp in North Korea. It is located in Yodŏk-gun (county) in South Hamgyong Province. The official name is Kwan-li-so (reeducation center) No. 15.

In the 1990s, an estimated 30,000 prisoners were in the lifetime area, and around 16,500 prisoners in the revolutionizing zone (many of them family members of prisoners and people repatriated from Japan).

Yodŏk camp has a lifetime-imprisonment "total-control zone", but also "revolutionizing zones", from which prisoners are sometimes released. That is why there are testimonies by refugees about Yodŏk.

The whole encampment is surrounded by a barbed-wire fence measuring 3 to 4 meters and walls 2 to 3 meters tall topped with electrical wire. Along the fence there are watchtowers, and patrolled by 1,000 guards armed with automatic rifles, hand grenades and guard dogs.