From the Manitoban Archives
Immensely powerful Krupp contributed to U of M newspaper
Kyle Lamothe, Staff
Graphics: Jessica Koroscil / Manitoban Archives
Thirty-five years ago this week on September 23, 1960, the Manitoban published an exclusive column from, at the time, one of the world’s richest men. A German industrialist and the sole proprietor of the Krupp family enterprises, Alfried Felix Alwyn Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach (Alfried Krupp) was a billionaire who took the lead in rebuilding his country’s industry after the Second World War. Looked at from a business standpoint, Krupp was a visionary — from another, he was a convicted war criminal, Nazi Party member, supplier of arms to the German war machine and exploiter of slave labour during the war.
The scale of his life is mystifying — so far beyond the average person’s imagination that the obvious question you may ask yourself is: “Really? Why the Manitoban?” Why would one of the world’s most powerful businessmen choose to break his own rule of never writing for any publication by publishing in the pages of a Canadian university newspaper? Apparently, he liked the spirit of young people in Canada — and the Manitoban was probably the first to ask him to contribute.
As noted in his letter that accompanied the article, he was impressed after visiting Canada: “. . . I also became aware of the vigorous efforts the Canadian people, and particularly the younger generation, are making in every field,” he wrote.
Genealogy of an empire
The Krupp family became one of the most powerful in the world, but began in 1811 when a merchant from the German city of Essen began to produce steel. Friedruch Krupp’s dream did not take flight, and he died at the age of 40, leaving his 14-year-old son Alfred a run-down factory to manage.
At age 15, Alfred assumed a false identity and travelled to Britain to study methods of producing high-quality steel. Upon returning to Essen, his factory was rebuilt and orders began pouring in from all over the world. Being that railroad expansion was a burgeoning sector in the mid-1800s, the Krupp factories expanded and began producing rails and the first-ever seamless steel train tires.
In the 1840s, Alfred Krupp took his business in a direction that leads modern-day conspiracy theorists to declare his bloodline evil to the core. Large government subsidies and low non-military demand for steel transformed the steel industry, and Krupp began producing cannons and other armaments. By 1887, over 24,000 large cannons had been sold to 21 nations on both sides of wars, and more than 50 per cent of his business consisted of making weapons. Alfred also bought coal and ore mines around Europe, built power, gas and water plants and a private fleet of ships to carry the goods around the world. He was known as “Alfred the Great” in Essen, but as the “Cannon King” everywhere else.
After Alfred’s death, his son Friedrich controlled the company for a few years, but was apparently more interested in reading zoological books than running a steel firm. His daughter Bertha married a Prussian councillor to the Vatican named Gustav von Bohlen und Halbach. Gustav ran the Krupp empire at the onset of the First World War, when it was the largest industrial firm in Europe, employing 82,500 workers. The massive 42-centimetre mortar cannons that Germany used to shell Paris from 75 miles away were produced by the company and affectionately named “Big Bertha,” after Gustav’s wife.
Although much of the Krupp steelmaking capacity was either destroyed or taken by the Allies after the end of the war, the rise of Hitler in 1933 ushered in rapid expansion of the business. Violating the Versailles Treaty, Gustav secretly began to undertake weapon research and supplied the Nazi government with large numbers of tanks, submarines and guns.
During the Second World War, Gustav and his family-owned company were the chief arms supplier for Germany, employing about 160,000 workers. In 1943, as Allied bombs began shelling the massive factories in Essen, Gustav convinced Hitler to take time out to draft a law allowing the massive Krupp empire to be passed down to a single successor: his first son, Alfried Krupp.
War criminal
In 1945, American forces rolled into Essen and entered the monolithic brick and mortar castle estate of Alfried Krupp. In spite of his pleas of innocence and assurances that he was only a businessman and not guilty of any crimes, Alfried was thrown into a jeep and taken to be interrogated.
Some publications refer to the Krupp family as unwilling participants in Nazi Germany — merely profiteers who were only interested in the expansion of their industries and not involved in the crimes against humanity associated with that period. Other records put the dynasty on the front lines of Hitler’s evil expanses.
What is known for sure is that Gustav became a Nazi Party member in 1939, and worked closely with the German government as the Wehrwirtschaftsführer, the economic leader of the Third Reich. He also contributed millions of marks to Hitler through the Krupp firm and his personal savings. Gustav’s face and the company emblem were used in propaganda to instil confidence in German industrialism. Alfried himself, after finishing his studies in steelmaking, joined the Nazi Party in 1938.
When it came time to prosecute the Nazis as war criminals, France and Russia chose not to go after the leaders of German industry. America, on the other hand, felt that the industrialists played a larger role in the war and exploited slave labourers.
In the occupied zone of Nuremberg, the International Military Tribunal (IMT) was set up to prosecute the Nazis. America conducted its own trials before U.S. military courts unilaterally, although in the same rooms as the multilateral IMT. The 10th of only 12 trials that were held originally named Gustav as the primary defendant, but he was deemed senile and not fit to stand before the court, so his charges were transferred to his son Alfried.
In the third of only three trials to be conducted for German industrialists, Alfried was accused of all four eligible charges: crimes against peace, plundering and exploiting occupied countries, participating in murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, torture, and use for slave labour of civilians and prisoners of war, and conspiracy to commit crimes against peace.
The Americans alleged that during the war, Krupp had used concentration camp prisoners and over 100,000 slave labourers (80 per cent of whom died) to produce arms for the war effort. To access these labourers, the Americans stated that Krupp built factories near the death camps of Markstaedt and Auschwitz. As the then chairman, Alfried was held personally responsible for these crimes and was sentenced to 12 years in prison. All of his possessions were confiscated.
During the trial, Alfried held his innocence:
“The economy needed a steady or growing development. Because of the rivalries between the many political parties in Germany and the general disorder, there was no opportunity for prosperity. . . . We thought that Hitler would give us such a healthy environment. Indeed, he did do that. . . . We Krupps never cared much about [political] ideas. We only wanted a system that worked well and allowed us to work unhindered. Politics is not our business,” he said in his defence.
Crawling out from behind bars
As part of one of the richest families in the world, Alfried grew up in quiet isolation in the massive estate named Villa Hugel, built upon a hill in Essen. Everything was regulated, including relations with his parents. In a large feature article on the man, Time Magazine reported in 1957 that Alfried saw very little of them.
“Once a day, from exactly 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. [he was] summoned to play with his father (Gustav) — whether they wanted to or not. “We never fought nor laughed loud nor shouted,” says Krupp. “Everything had to be orderly and properly done.””
There are indications that Alfried’s stay in prison was not that much different from his upbringing and life outside the bars. In 2000, Lutz Hachmeister, a German historian, discovered information in the U.S. national archives indicating that Alfried had a pretty sweet ride. Incarcerated in the Bavarian jail where Adolf Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, Krupp lived next door to the likes of General Erhard Milch (second in command of the Luftwaffe) and General Frank Six (head of the S.S. and the man chosen to “cleanse” Britain if invasion had been successful).
The Gazette reported in 2000 that Hachmeister found information proving that Alfried was allowed to hold board meetings in a special room within the prison, receive bank account information and sufficiently run the operation from behind bars while feasting on caviar and champagne. Some prisoners were given Spanish lessons to prepare them to flee to South America upon release, escaping further war crime-related prosecution. Even his social life went largely unaffected, as he courted his second wife Vera while incarcerated.
In February 1951, John J. McCloy, the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, decided that there was no reason why Alfried should serve so much more time behind bars than anyone else. McCloy ordered his release from prison and the return of all possessions. After leaving the jail and having breakfast with family, the once-again billionaire told correspondents: “I hope it will never be necessary to produce arms again.” And he never did.
With the help of loans, savings and tax write-offs by the West German government, Alfried spent about $40 million US in rebuilding the company’s infrastructure. Since large proportions of his plants had been destroyed in the war, new machinery could be bought that gave his firm an edge over British, French and Russian industries. Only three years after leaving the prison gates, Krupp began to make a profit again. A couple of years later, his company was named the 12th- largest corporation in the world.
Lonely businessman
Tradition in the Krupp family put strong emphasis on the bonds developed between company and employee. The so-called “Kruppianer spirit” centred on caring for the workers their entire lives with pension plans, housing, company hospitals, theatres, sports arenas, clubs and food stores that provided cheap foodstuffs. Alfried continued this once his company was rebuilt.
By the time Alfried left prison, his company had shifted away from refining and forging steel to become a machinery and trading group. To help him manage this change, a young insurance company executive was hired to run the day-to-day affairs, while Alfried drifted away from the company to focus on his social life.
In the late-1950s, Alfried moved out of the Villa Hugel mansion into a modest (considering his position) 15-room house nearby. He was said to have few personal friends, did not attend any church and had two failed marriages. The first, was to Anneliese Bahr, ended after only four years, after Gustav threatened to disinherit him if the two stayed married.
After prison, Alfried married Vera von Hossenfeldt, a longtime friend. Vera told Time Magazine that Alfried was “the only man I ever loved,” but she divorced him four years later. Alfried’s engagement ring for Vera was the 33.19 carat Krupp Diamond that later sold at auction for a record-breaking $305,000 in 1968 to Elizabeth Taylor. The movie star wore the diamond in nearly all of her movies and still wears it everyday, making it her trademark — it even appeared on her finger in an episode of The Simpsons.
By the late 1960s, Krupp enterprises began to accumulate debt as the German economy began to stagnate. His only son, Arndt, showed no interest in taking over the family’s company but preferred to travel Europe as a playboy, deeply hurting his father.
Some of Alfried’s few loves in life were driving his sports car, playing “skat” and sailing in his 55-foot schooner, but none of these brought him joy near the end. Bankers and the West German government rebelled against him in early 1967, forcing him to go public with the privately-owned conglomerate. Alfried saw this as an undignified exit and died of bronchial cancer on July 30, 1967, just two weeks shy of his 60th birthday.
Impact on the world
Many associate the legacy of Alfried Krupp with his conviction as a war criminal. Eight months before writing for the Manitoban, in what can only be considered an admission of guilt, he announced that he would pay about $1,200 US (in 1960’s dollars) to any Jewish person who could prove that he or she worked as a slave labourer in the Krupp enterprise.
In any case, Alfried was an important man. Time Magazine put him on their cover on August 19, 1957. Kaiser Wilhelm II was his godfather. Five-hundred political, business and labour leaders attended his funeral. He entertained kings, presidents and other government officials, as well as some of the most powerful businesspeople in the world.
Published in the September 23, 1960, edition of the Manitoban, Alfried Krupp’s article, “The Economic Re-development of Post-War Germany,” was written in happier times than those in which he died.
