THE MAN who now inherited Alfred’s multi-million-pound cannon-kingdom was as different from him as Alfred had been from his own father—and knowing Alfred, as we now do, it can be no shock to learn that his son should have burgeoned into a very bizarre fellow indeed!
Fritz Krupp even looked unlike his father. A black, bushy moustache adorned, somewhat incongruously, his round, dumpy face. He was short and fat, with prematurely greying hair, and stooped a little as he walked, peering shortsightedly through gold-rimmed spectacles. When he was only in his early forties, an English visitor mistook him for an old man of at least sixty. In fact Fritz was really rather ugly, whereas Alfred on the other hand, with his tall, slender figure and fine-boned, bearded face had been considered quite handsome by many people in his day.
But Fritz had been a delicate child from birth, suffering first from asthma and then articular rheumatism. His mother’s health had been permanently damaged in bearing him. Until he was well into his teens the pair of them used to wander from health-resort to health-resort, from spa to spa, in search of the sun and the hundred and one other so-called “cures” of nineteenth-century Europe. As a result, he never went to school with other children, but was entirely educated by tutors. Thus he grew up to be a shy, highly sensitive creature, thoroughly unused to the company of boys and girls of his own age. His father had thought he would never be fit enough to take on the task of running the firm and had begun looking elsewhere in the family for a possible successor. It was only when Fritz was almost twenty that Alfred became convinced of his son’s suitability and strength. Then with typical thoroughness and tenacity he had promptly set about moulding him in his own image.
Father and son had come closest together in the months immediately following the Prussian victory of 1871, when Alfred was compiling his Constitution for the House of Krupp. But the bond between the two was only finally confirmed by Fritz’s tactful handling of his father’s moods of deep gloom and despondency after the firm’s financial crisis in 1874. From then onwards. Fritz became one of Alfred’s few friends. Apart from Albert Longsdon, the veteran Krupp man in London, he was the only other person in whom his father would confide during the years of retreat and decline.
By this time Fritz was acting as Alfred’s confidential secretary, faithfully taking down in his numerous notebooks the thousands of words of advice his father dictated to him daily. He had wanted to study the natural sciences, for which he appeared to have a genuine interest and gift, but Alfred had vetoed the notion, arguing that science like technical matters was better left to employees while employers should concern themselves with the mysteries of management. Alfred even went so far as to tell some of his business acquaintances that he thought Fritz’s exposure to an academic training might hold dangers for him when it came to running the firm. All his life, he resisted promoting technical men to executive positions.
Perhaps it was in preparing his successor that Alfred betrayed most his megalomania, for he enjoined his son to read every note and letter he had ever written: “You will thus be led progressively to absorb the spirit and aspirations of my career and so save yourself much thought and worry on your own.” Young Fritz must surely have blenched though when he saw the plethora of paper in his father’s cabinets. Alfred’s main preoccupation was to keep his heir in the closest possible contact with him, short of carrying him around kangaroo-like in his pouch, for he was determined that his successor should be a “mirror-image” of him. Only in this way, he argued to his acquaintances, could the continuity of the firm be assured. Perhaps this was his most supreme vanity of all!
A bizarre, almost tragi-comic incident in their relationship occurred in 1874 when Fritz was just twenty years old. A particularly bad attack of rheumatism had laid him low. As a convalescence his doctors had advised a long trip to Egypt. At first the suggestion had angered Alfred since he was depressed himself over having had to mortgage the firm to the banks, but then he had become quite enthusiastic about his son’s proposed trip when it had been pointed out to him that perhaps Fritz could combine a little business with his holiday.
Egypt at that time was believed to be contemplating building a railway southwards down the Nile from Cairo to Khartoum, so Alfred thought that a personal visit from Krupp’s heir might sway the Egyptians into buying Krupp rails and Krupp springs and Krupp axles. But Fritz soon discovered after his arrival in Cairo that the reports were grossly exaggerated. Therefore, after writing to tell his father this he continued his convalescence by boat down the Nile-As usual, however, Alfred was not prepared to take a simple “no” for an answer and immediately began bombarding his son with further instructions and proposals, none of which reached him until many months had passed, since there were no deliveries of mail on board the steamer as it made its way slowly along the Nile. Alfred interpreted the long silence as at best laziness or at worst hurt pride, and promptly increased the deluge of obiter dicta, so much so that when Fritz finally returned to Cairo his doctor-companion felt obliged to hasten back to Essen to explain. Fritz for his part stayed behind enjoying the sun, yet still endeavouring to satisfy his father’s strictures to pursue “all possible selling opportunities” among the patently disinterested Egyptians.
After this, Fritz became a sort of filial A.D.C. to Alfred, often having to pass on in person to the managers of the firm his father’s complaints and criticisms of their conduct—and over the years he would seem to have grown quite adept at filtering such outbursts and at translating them into more meaningful and perhaps even practical suggestions. When he was twenty-five he acted as host instead of Alfred at the great Meppen “Bombardment of the Nations”, but even so it was to be another three years before his father gave him an income of his own. Fritz’s one really rebellious act in his whole life was his volunteering for a year’s service with the Baden Dragoons at Karlsruhe, though his father soon put a stop to it. There were people of course who were quick to point out that whereas Alfred might not mind other fellows’ sons being blown to bits by guns he was apparently reluctant to let his own son run that risk.
It was also when he was twenty-five that Fritz told Alfred he wanted to marry Margarethe von Ende, the daughter of a Prussian Government official. Margarethe and Fritz by that time had known each other for seven years, but still Alfred would not agree to their marrying, and went on saying “no” for another three years despite the pleas of Fritz’s mother. Whether it was because of his inveterate hatred of Prussian bureaucrats, or whether he had hoped for a more aristocratic match for his son, Alfred’s refusal was certainly the last straw so far as his own marriage was concerned—for after a final quarrel in 1882 over his continuing refusal, Bertha packed her bags and never entered the Villa Hügel again. Yet within a few weeks Alfred had given Fritz and Margarethe his consent, though not his blessing. Later that same year they were wed—in Bertha’s presence, but not Alfred’s. The young couple went to live in the “little” castle next door to Alfred, which in the end had been his only proviso for letting them marry.
Margarethe was the same age as Fritz. After a comfortable though far from luxurious childhood, she had rebelled against her prim and puritanical mother by taking a job as governess to an English admiral’s family living in North Wales. But her mother had her revenge by insisting whenever Margarethe visited them that she sleep in one of the servants’ bedrooms since “as a paid employee she did not deserve any better accommodation”. It was shortly after this, while Margarethe was working as tutor at the court of a minor German prince, that she met Fritz.
Neither plain nor beautiful, her harsh, unhappy early life had left its mark on Margarethe—which perhaps was just as well, for it could be said to have groomed her for her battles with Fritz’s father, who seemed to delight in humiliating and hurting her. If, for instance, a carriage that had been ordered to take Fritz and her off to some engagement or other was kept waiting outside for only a short while, Alfred would send a servant every five minutes or so to enquire whether Margarethe needed any assistance in her dressing. Furthermore, he used to chide her for buying vegetables in the town when they had such vast vegetable gardens of their own—except that he had ordered his gardeners never to supply her. At times even the dress and behaviour of the young couple’s guests came in for a blast or two of complaint from him—and on occasion he would lecture Fritz and his wife in the presence of others on their responsibilities as heirs of the House of Krupp.
For with his marriage Fritz became formally accepted as the “Cannon King’s” Crown Prince. He was given 20 per cent of the profits and a seat on the Committee of Management, though without any particular responsibilities. In March 1886, when Margarethe and Fritz were both thirty-two, their first child, Bertha, was born. There is no record of Fritz having discussed the name with his father, nor is it a connection with Alfred’s wife that eulogisers of the Krupp saga sing about. However, Alfred had died within the year—and only a few months later Fritz’s mother passed away too.
Immediately after moving into the main part of the Hügel, Fritz and Margarethe began desperately trying to make it into a family house, something that Alfred had never even attempted. Although they opened the windows, put in a modern heating and ventilating system, and stocked the place with books and pictures, they failed—nor was anyone after them to succeed. To at least one later inhabitant of the Villa Hügel it was always a “tomb” and Fritz’s younger daughter’s abiding memory of it was that it was “for ever cold”.
Whereas Fritz had hitherto struck his managers as being a somewhat timid, self-effacing kind of chap, once he was boss he straightaway showed them that he intended ruling not reigning. He resisted all their attempts to increase their powers at his expense. Indeed, as if to show the world that while one cannon king might have died another was certainly taking his place, Fritz almost indecently soon after his father’s death was setting off on a sort of “Royal Tour”. Complete with large retinue of directors, personal physicians, and gunnery experts—and of course bearing such suitable gifts as steel ingots and ceremonial cannons—he visited first of all the old Kaiser in Berlin, then the King of the Belgians in Brussels, the King of Saxony in Dresden, the King of Rumania in Bucharest, finally ending up with the Turkish Sultan in Constantinople. They for their part responded as though they were greeting a monarch of sorts by bestowing on Fritz a profusion of honours and decorations—the Sultan of Turkey even entrusted him with an important diplomatic message for Bismarck concerning Germany’s policy in the Balkans. It was only a few days’ after Fritz’s triumphant return that his second daughter was born—Barbara, named after the patroness of gunners of course.
Although Fritz was not as domineering or as ruthless or as intolerant as his father, the House of Krupp continued to grow, aided once more by contemporary developments. The new Kaiser, William II, proclaimed what he described as a “new direction” for Germany—a direction aimed, he said, at producing even greater victories than those of the previous quarter of a century. Within a couple of years he had dropped the old pilot of the old direction. But the new direction, as it turned out, was really a collision course, for it could only be interpreted as a concerted attempt by Germany to end England’s long naval and economic supremacy.
The new Kaiser wanted a navy because Britain had one, because he considered it the sign of a Great Power to possess one, and because it would draw the world’s attention to his Germany. Naturally such a policy could only bring yet greater profits to Krupp’s, and so it was perhaps inevitable that Fritz should back William to the hilt, even though the Kaiser was alarming the rest of Europe with such remarks as that rather than lose “a single stone” of its conquests of 1870, Germany was prepared to leave 42,000,000 people dead on the battle-field. The new Kaiser could count on the new “Cannon King”. Once again Krupp’s and Prussian Germany’s aims and ambitions were indissolubly linked—and just as Alfred had courted old William so Fritz came more and more to rely on new William to help him get preferential treatment from officialdom.
It was on William the Second’s suggestion that Fritz branched out into shipbuilding, for instance, with his purchase of the decaying Germania shipyards at Kiel in 1896. Again, it was through the new Kaiser that he was able to acquire sufficient land along the waterfront there for him quickly to extend the yards and so make berths big enough for building battleships. Only the year before, William had invited Fritz to be his personal guest at the opening of the Kiel Canal. It was also largely at the Kaiser’s prompting that he entered politics in 1893 as the representative for Essen. Fritz fought that election entirely on the need for a larger navy and a bigger army. He had already stood at the polls twice before and had each time been defeated. As it turned out he only just scraped home in 1893, largely because his opponents had been unable to agree on a single candidate to put up against him.
But Fritz was no parliamentarian. He never actually spoke in the Reichstag and rarely pronounced even on the hustings. On the night of his 1893 victory his supporters marched in a torchlight procession to the Villa Hügel, but when they got there he could only splutter out one or two platitudes in greeting that the crowd could barely hear.
Instead, Fritz preferred more subtle methods of putting his point across. In the same year as his election to the Reichstag he acquired his own newspaper, the Berliner Neueste Nachrichten. He also began subsidising a press service that provided, so he told the Kaiser, “stories on the activities of Your Majesty and of Your Majesty’s Army and Navy”, which was his way of saying that it was a propaganda organ on behalf of the military. Along with other leading German manufacturers he financed the German Navy League and the German Colonial League to the tune of hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Founded in 1898, the year after von Tirpitz had been appointed Naval Secretary, the Navy League was unashamedly devoted to securing support in the country for the enormous battle-fleet the Kaiser and his armament manufacturers wanted to build. It so happened that the League’s organiser was none other than the editor of Fritz’s Berlin newspaper—so perhaps it was no accident that in selling the notion of a fleet to the German industrial proletariat the League emphasised the increased jobs it would bring to armament workers, particularly to those who happened to be on the Krupp pay-roll.
And it worked. The first Navy Act of 1898 authorising seven battleships and nine cruisers was quickly followed two years later by the Second Navy Act outlining a twenty-year programme for laying down at least three new battleships every year. Within fifteen years Krupp’s had built nine battleships, five light-cruisers, thirty-three destroyers, and ten submarines. As well as supplying most of the armour-plating to the rest of the new fleet, they were selling the licence to manufactures it to all the major shipbuilding countries of the world, including Britain. In the United States, for instance, Bethlehem Steel and Carnegie were each paying royalties to Fritz of about £9 a ton for the armour-plating they were producing according to his patent—although ironically the famous Krupp Armour was based on an earlier American process for making a nickel-alloy gun-steel.
Fritz’s personal income as head of the firm trebled between 1895 and 1902. Before his death it was running at over a million pounds a year, while his private fortune stood at nearly £10 million. These figures were the subject of a bitterly contested Reichstag enquiry at the turn of the century when allegations of over-pricing and excessive profiteering were levelled at the House of Krupp. Even von Tirpitz was made to admit that, until his Ministry had been able to improve its own system of accounting, the navy had been steadily overcharged by Fritz and others for its warships. There were also accusations, never adequately disproved, that armament manufacturers such as Krupp and Stumm-Halberg were operating a monopolistic ring that was keeping prices artificially high.
But whether or not every detail of these various allegations was true or not, what was certain was that Fritz was easily Germany’s richest individual. As well as owning the Villa Hügel, he now had a lavish shooting-lodge at Sayneck on the Rhine together with a magnificent mansion at Baden-Baden. The Kaiser had made him an Excellency and had nominated him to both the Prussian and the German Upper Chambers of Parliament. Berlin saw him more often than Essen. A frequent and regular guest at ministerial dinner parties and court receptions, he also became renowned for his own extensive entertaining. In February 1898, for instance, the Volkszeitung newspaper reported that:
Deputy Krupp gave a luncheon to some 250 people at the Hotel Bristol.… Almost every Minister and most members of parliament, were present. Each place laid but with yet more violets and other flowers. Once the meal was finished a special entertainment took place, given by actors and actresses from the Central Theatre and the Winter Garden, together with Tyrolean singers, nigger minstrels, and an Italian concert party.
Whereas nearly all his life Alfred had had to do battle with the Prussian bureaucracy, Fritz now worked in close cooperation, it seemed at times like collaboration, with the new German officials. That web of close threads spun between Berlin and Essen in Alfred’s day Fritz now proceeded year by year to draw ever more tightly. As well as the Kaiser himself, almost every German minister, German general, German admiral worth his salt took it upon himself to become a regular visitor to Krupp’s. William used to say to his wife that he was going down to Essen “to be shown a bit of shooting”. Fritz had no shortage of friends in high places: the Minister of Labour, Major-General Budde, was a former director of one of Krupp’s associated firms, the Karlsruhe Arms and Munitions Works. Budde’s brother was still a senior executive at Essen, as was the younger brother of von Bülow, the Secretary of State and future Chancellor. Fritz also employed the son of the President of the Ordnance Board and made him responsible for placing the army’s weapons contracts with industry.
Krupp’s, apparently with the Kaiser’s blessing, came to look upon German ambassadors and ministers in places like Constantinople, Tokio, and Peking, as being mere extensions of their international sales force. Indeed Fritz’s agents in the field never hesitated to use the diplomatic bag for their business correspondence. On occasion, the interests of the firm could even sway diplomatic decisions. China, for instance, had long been a good customer of Krupp’s, buying guns, rails, and warships from them for years, and it is extremely likely that this was a deciding factor in Germany’s opposing Japan’s demands for extra Chinese territory at the Peace of Shimonoseki—the diplomatic decision which Bismarck dubbed “a leap in the dark”. On the other hand when Japan had attacked China in April 1895, and Russia and France had proposed to Germany that they all intervene, the Kaiser had refused. An official German document of this time, across which William had scrawled his approval, declared, “Our manufacturers, exporters, and shippers have been afforded a good opportunity to do business by deliveries and transport of war materials”. It later transpired that Krupp’s had in fact been supplying guns to Japan as well as to China. Furthermore, during the discussions at The Hague in 1899 when attempts were being made to secure an agreement to limit armaments, William had written in the margin of one of the briefing documents, “But how is Krupp to pay his men?” And Krupp’s could also override the actions of German diplomats on the spot: in one instance, again in China, Fritz secured the recall of the Kaiser’s senior representative there when he opposed the local Krupp agent.
Apart from the dispute between China and Japan that led to the war of 1895, Krupp’s through their indiscriminate selling of weapons to all-comers invariably helped to exacerbate one diplomatic crisis after another. They sold to both sides in the conflict between Austria and Russia over the Balkans and in that between Russia and Turkey over the Bosphorus. Nearly every South American tin-pot dictatorship got its weapons from Fritz whose men on the spot were unmerciful in misleading their customers so long as it meant increased order-books.
When Britain looked around for guns to buy during the Boer War, Krupp’s despite a declaration of strict neutrality by the German Government supplied the British Army with the weapons they needed through agents in Italy.
However, such business had its ironies too. During the so-called Boxer Rebellion of 1900, for example, a German gun-boat trying to rescue some German citizens was fired on by a group of Chinese forts along the Yangtse with considerable loss of life among the crew. Later, in his report to Berlin, the gun-boat’s commander complained that the shells that had killed his men were Krupp-made!
But there was another side to Fritz Krupp, armament tycoon. Until 1898 he had usually spent his autumns and winters among the fashionable spas of southern Germany or else in one of the newer resorts along the French and Italian Riviera. In that year, however, when he was forty-four years old, he began going instead to Capri. He had never enjoyed good health, and his childhood ailments of asthma and articular rheumatism stayed with him all his life.
Even so, it was not just for the sake of his health that his visits to the Italian island became more and more frequent, and his sojourns there grew longer and longer.
Fritz Krupp was homosexual. While it was not a crime to be homosexual in Italy it was in Germany. Nor as it turned out had Fritz confined his amours to Capri—though the full facts on that score were not to be revealed until after 1919, when it came to light that a member of the Berlin C.I.D. had for many years been compiling a secret dossier of known homosexual blackmail cases among prominent people in the German capital. The list included the Kaiser’s A.D.C., the military commandant of Berlin, the private secretary to the Kaiser’s wife, a younger brother of the Kaiser, the Court Chamberlain, a Counsellor at the French Embassy—and Fritz Krupp. Apparently Fritz had installed a number of young waiters from Capri at the Hotel Bristol where he used to stay while in Berlin—and a footman, employed at one time by him, when picked up by the police had said of an exceedingly expensive diamond ring discovered on his person that it had been given to him by Krupp, because, as he put it, “Fritz was my friend”.
Although prevented by his father from taking a formal training in the natural sciences, Fritz had persisted in his biological studies as an amateur. In particular he had become interested in oceanography and had had his luxurious steam-yacht Puritan fitted out for deep-sea research. He liked to fish in it around the shores of Capri for some of the tiny organisms living on the ocean-bed. But he had also bought a grotto in the southern part of the island, a grotto that had one time been the home of a religious recluse called Fra Felice. Hitherto unapproachable, except by sea, Fritz had had a private road cut to it which the local people came to call Strada Krupp. In addition he had transformed the place with terraces, pillars, statues, flowers, and bushes, and had had golden keys specially made to fit the lock of the gate leading to it—keys which he distributed among his closest companions on the island, most of whom appear to have been young fishermen, waiters, barbers, and so on. Fritz used to refer to the grotto as the holy place of a secret fraternity of devout mystics, which he had created and whose membership he alone controlled. But these merry pranks came to the ears of certain Neapolitan newsmen who began publishing in the Italian press lurid stories of so-called orgies and perversions, together with lewd snapshots allegedly featuring Fritz. Inevitably the reports eventually found their way into German newspapers.
As the scandal broke, Fritz quickly and quietly left Capri—it has been said, though never documented, that the Italian Government demanded his departure. On hearing the stories, Margarethe evidently sought the help of the Kaiser, but William merely shrugged her off. Fritz, however, got to know about her action and when he returned to Germany “persuaded” Margarethe to enter a private nursing home for a medical check-up—some critics of Krupp have preferred to describe the manœuvre as that of committing her to a lunatic asylum. Little is known in fact of how their marriage had been faring, though since even the most eulogistic of the family’s chroniclers make no mention of it, it would seem fairly evident that husband and wife, like Alfred and Bertha before them, had been going their separate ways for some time.
At first all the stories appearing in the German press were merely insinuations without naming names—simply referring to a “a big industrialist of the highest reputation and enjoying the friendship of the Kaiser and his court”. But then on 15 November 1902, two weeks after Margarethe’s mysterious disappearance with her doctors, the Social Democrat newspaper in Berlin, Vorwärts, published a report headlined “Krupp in Capri” repeating the accusations already made, though this time of course mentioning names. Within a few hours of the story hitting the Berlin streets, Fritz had issued a writ for libel against the paper’s editor. The Berlin authorities followed this up by confiscating as many copies of the offending edition as they could find.
Six days later, Fritz asked to see the Kaiser, but on the morning of his appointment was discovered lying unconscious in his room at the Hügel. He died that same day, 22 November 1902, without regaining his senses. His body was immediately committed to a coffin and the lid straightaway sealed—nor was it opened again, even on the day of the funeral. The Kaiser came to the burial, as indeed did most of the members of the Imperial court as well as all the top generals and admirals. Addressing the mourners, William tried to put the blame for Fritz’s death on the Social Democrats, who, he said, “had murdered his friend”. But no sooner had the Kaiser returned to Berlin than the libel suit against the newspaper editor was promptly dropped—and although some Krupp biographers to this day still persist in talking of Fritz dying from a stroke brought on by worry over the scandal, the evidence would seem surely to indicate no natural end but rather that of a suicide. Indeed just before his death, Fritz had written to a close friend who had asked to visit the Villa Hügel warning him “you will be coming in melancholy circumstances”.
Despite the shortness of his time at the helm—just fifteen years in all—the House of Krupp had continued on its spectacular upward course. Fritz had started with 21,000 workers and had left behind 43,000. Under his direction, Krupp’s had moved into new fields of activity, such as building warships and making armour-plating, and had quickly attained world prominence in both. They had acquired fresh iron-ore deposits in Sweden and new coalmines in Lorraine. The old steelworks at Essen had been totally rebuilt and reorganised. To date, these had been the most prosperous days the firm had ever known, but they had also been the most squalid—but then the graph in the fortunes of the House of Krupp during the next forty years was to show a sharp and uncannily pronounced correlation between moral meanness and material success, none more so perhaps than in the period from Fritz’s death up to the beginning of the First World War.