Pol Pot Turned Children Into Mass Murderers

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]Did you know that Pol Pot turned children into killers? In 1970s Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge recruited kids as young as 12 to become executioners.

[00:00:09]They called them Angkar, child soldiers dressed in black uniforms carrying assault rifles through villages. These weren't just guards, they were judge, jury, and executioner. Wearing glasses, death sentence. It meant you could read.

[00:00:23]Soft hands, death sentence. It meant you weren't a farmer. The regime trained these children to kill without mercy, even their own parents if they showed disloyalty. At places like Choeung Ek, these child executioners beat victims to death with farming tools. Bullets were too expensive. For 4 years, kids who should have been playing became instruments of genocide. They helped murder 2 million Cambodians, one in every four people. When it ended, the surviving children faced a horrifying reality. They had spent their childhood as killers in one of history's most systematic campaigns of terror. Many never recovered from what they were forced to become.