Genocide in the Necromanic Wars

Honoreck the Arch-Lich who led the [{Grey Temple]] in the Necromanic Wars was a big fan of death. Being dead himself, he had a special appreciation for it.

Necromancy in warfare essentially relies upon having a great many corpses to do your fighting for you. Durring the Mage Wars, necromancers were the ultimate super-weapon, as they could reanimate an entire battlefield of fallen soldiers and turn the battle.

But Honoreck wasn't content with these tactics. Why wait for a bunch of living men to die [he reasoned], when you can just kill them yourself?

No war is ever won entirely by armies of undead, who require a living army to work while the dead one mills about and wreaks havoc. As Honoreck's armies conquered new territories, any willing volunteers would be conscripted into the living army. Unwilling volunteers would be unceremoniously put to death, and conscripted into the undead army. These included: anyone who spoke out against the political leaders, anyone too old to work behind the lines, anyone at all sick (and there were a lot), and anyone not performing a task considered valuable to the war effort. This meant a whole lot of artists and political science majors found themselves on the wrong end of a pointed stick.

Eventually, Honoreck's non-necromancer allies began to take advantage of this policy, and used it to do away with criminals and political dissidents. Anyone they wished could be put to death and shipped in corpse-form to the front lines for combat. Some countries even took advantage of the opportunity to ethnically cleanse themselves.

When all was said and done and the war over, roughly two-thirds of the casualties were Honoreck's own people, murdered so their corpses could fight.