THE OFFICIAL announcement that Alfried and his colleagues were to be released was made on 31 January 1951. It came shortly after American morale during the Korean War had reached its lowest ebb: Seoul, the South Korean capital, had just been captured for the second time by the Communists, while the United States Eighth Army had retreated 275 miles from the Yalu River, the longest retreat in American military history.
McCloy had in fact chosen to proclaim a more general amnesty—commuting the death sentences on nearly all the Nazi war criminals awaiting execution at that time and reducing the terms of imprisonment for the rest, in most cases to the time they had already served. He had also to many people’s surprise decided to cancel the order confiscating Krupp’s properties—it had not been expected that he would go quite that far. McCloy’s justification for his generosity was that no other war criminal had been punished in this way:
Confiscation of personal property does not belong to the practices of our legal system and in general is in contradiction of the American conception of justice. I am not able, on the basis of the evidence against the accused Krupp, to find any degree of personal guilt which would put him above all the others sentenced by the Nuremberg courts.
Later, when challenged by a number of eminent Americans to explain himself further, McCloy described his decision to release Krupp as the most “wearing” he had ever had to make. But to his eternal shame, in my opinion at least, he also endeavoured to play down the charges of slave-labour brought against Alfried at Nuremberg. The German press, however, were in no doubt as to the real reason for the release. They saw it simply as one of necessity for the Americans rather than of choice.
And so the incredible had happened. The Krupps were living up to their reputation for being indestructible. As with Gustav after the First World War, the pattern of arrest and early release was being repeated.
It took just three days to complete the formalities for Alfried’s official return to freedom. Then on 3 February 1951 at precisely 9 a.m., while the cold, early morning mists were still shrouding the old Bavarian fortress, Krupp and his confrères walked out of the wicket-gate that served as Landsberg’s side-entrance, clad in the warm overcoats their thoughtful American jailors had provided for them.
His younger brother Berthold was there to bunch him with a bouquet of tulips, his favourite flowers. In a puny attempt to escape the newspapermen and the photographers, Berthold had driven up to the prison in a battered old van specially chartered for the occasion and carrying the label “Snow White Laundry” emblazoned on its sides. But if Berthold had really thought the world’s press were going to take this incident in the life of the House of Krupp so lightly then he was in for a rude awakening.
Ironically it was British newsmen who made the loudest and the most anguished noises of the lot—whereas of course it had been the British who had been the least enthusiastic of all the Allies at Nuremberg towards the notion of trying Alfried. The Sunday Chronicle, for one, sounded off against him personally, describing Alfried as “one of the most calculating brains in Germany” and suggesting that it would not be long before he would be producing guns again. This sentiment was echoed by the Sunday Pictorial who said that Bertha must be rubbing her hands “with glee” at the prospect once more of all those profits from armaments. Even the usually moderate Observer declared that “the American decision means that dangerous lunatics will again be at large”.
Curiously enough, French newspapers despite their longer history of animosity towards the Krupps were several decibels lower than the British in their denunciation of McCloy’s decision. Le Monde for instance merely referred to “the odium which after three wars has come to be associated with Krupp” and contented itself with the comment that no doubt Alfried would be prepared to “reap the benefit” of producing guns again no matter who asked him to—though L’Aube on the other hand advised Alfried to “Disappear! We have seen enough of you!” As perhaps was only to be expected, the bulk of the American press backed their High Commissioner’s action up to the hilt. In any case they were much more concerned with the reports of a new Chinese Communist offensive in Korea.
But even while the ticker-tape machines of the news agencies were still typing out the reports and the reactions to his release, Alfried had been whisked off by Berthold to a champagne breakfast in his honour at a local hotel. There he held his first public press conference ever. Inevitably someone asked him whether he would ever produce guns again—and his reply was one that was to be discussed and argued over for years afterwards as to its true intent. “I hope that it will never again be necessary for a Krupp to produce arms”, he said, “but what a factory makes depends after all not only on the decisions of its owner but also on the politics of its government.” To many people it sounded as though the Krupps had still not learned their lesson and that so far as Alfried was concerned expediency would always outweigh morality.
This reply, on top of his release, brought forth a flurry of protest in the British House of Commons. Prime Minister Attlee tried hard to reassure his belligerent back-benchers by declaring, “There is no question of Krupp being allowed to assume either ownership or control of the former Krupp industrial empire.” But many observers, as the Manchester Guardian at the time pointed out, thought that precisely the opposite would happen. Said that paper’s Bonn correspondent ten days after Alfried’s release, “There is very little chance that the Federal German Government will discriminate against a man who is as powerful and as popular as Herr Krupp”—and he went on to add, “as a coalition of the Right Wing it has no wish to alienate private property rights in a single invidious case”. In this matter at least, the Manchester Guardian, as we all now know, was to be more prophetic than the British Foreign Office.
Although Essen’s Lord Mayor had planned a massive homecoming for him, Alfried preferred to slip away to Blühnbach to see his mother. His grand re-entry into the city of the cannon kings could wait—and in any case there were many more battles to be fought yet before the final victory would be his.
For one thing, British typists and British officials still occupied the Villa Hügel, and a British Controller was still running what remained of Alfried’s empire. The dismantlings by now had dropped to an almost insignificant trickle—and within two months of Alfried’s release they had stopped altogether. All in all, according to the official statistics, some 201,000 tons of machinery and equipment, valued at more than £8 million, had been taken out of the Krupp factories and sent as reparations-in-kind to Russia and the other sufferers from Nazi aggression.
In May 1950 the Allied Control Council had decreed in its now famous Allied Law 27 that “excessive concentrations of economic power” be eliminated from German industry. As a result, the House of Krupp in particular had been stripped of all its coal-mines, iron-ore deposits, and steel mills, and these had been put in the hands of Allied trustees. But what remained had already begun to boom again even while Alfried was still in Landsberg—and especially after the West German currency reform of June 1948.
The Widia tungsten-carbide plant had been one of the first to be given the go-ahead by its British managers to start up large-scale production again, since the hard-cutting tools it turned out were needed for such essential industries as coal-mining. The Krupp railway-workshops had been used throughout the occupation to patch up the goods-wagons and the steam-locomotives that right from Essen’s first capture by the Americans had been in great demand for getting the coal and the iron-ore moving again. In time these selfsame workshops had begun manufacturing new locomotives, some even for export to places like Indonesia and South Africa. Rheinhausen had also been re-opened for heavy engineering products such as boilers and parts for bridges to replace the broken ones that were still littering the Rhine. The U-boat yards at Kiel had long since been razed to the ground, but in their place had sprung up factories producing machine-tools and electrical instruments. All told, Krupp’s in the month Alfried left Landsberg were giving employment to some 12,700 workers. Even so, this represented less than one-twelfth of the number at the height of the war.
Although a free man after six years behind Allied bars, Alfried had still to tread warily. He may have straightaway gone out and bought himself a fast sports-car and he may also have moved with Berthold into a plush flat in the smartest suburb in Essen, but as yet he did not know whether the Allies really meant to return to him what remained of his properties. It was still possible that they might prefer to dispose of them in other ways and simply to pay him some form of compensation.
But he did not wait for them to make up their minds. Instead, he immediately began bombarding the Allies with proposals and counter-proposals—some people called them threats and counter-threats. He hired the best American lawyers Krupp money could buy and used every contact he and they could muster to prod and to cajole, to pressure and to impress. The major point at issue was how to reconcile the American High Commissioner’s decision to give Krupp back his millions with the Allied Law 27 which called not only for the old industrial empires in Germany to be broken up but also for a bar to be put on “the return to positions of ownership and control of those persons who have been found, or may be found, to have furthered the aggressive designs of the National-Socialist Party”—it was hard to see how Alfried could escape this specific prohibition.
The Americans, however, were impatient for an agreement. They were anxious at this time for the west Germans to make what was euphemistically described as a “contribution to the defence of Europe”. But to their intense annoyance the German people were far from eager to rearm. To help them perhaps change their minds, Washington had ordered its officials on the spot to grant the We Germans almost anything they wanted. Time was of the vei essence in getting the Federal Republic firmly committe to the anti-Communist cause: in the Far East the Korea War was settling down into an uneasy stalemate, while o: the European front too there was no let-up in the Cold Wai Once again the men in the Kremlin were proving the bes bunch of allies a Krupp could possibly wish for.
But the French and the British were less enthusiastic and less eager than the Americans for an agreement with Krupp solely on his own terms. They wanted “concrete guarantees’ from him first that he would abide by Law 27 even after the Allies had pulled out of Germany entirely and that he would not try to buy back at the earliest opportunity the coalmines, the iron-ore deposits, and the steel mills that had been unscrambled from his empire. Moreover, they were demanding from him an assurance that he would not attempt to rebuild his coal and steel colossus on its former lines by embarking on these “forbidden” activities elsewhere in the future—and his reluctance to give them such an assurance only increased their suspicions.
In the midst of all this intense discussion, however, Alfried for once found the time to think of something other than business. In May 1952, just fifteen months after his release from Landsberg, he married again. His bride on this occasion was a thrice-wed, thrice-divorced daughter of a German insurance official. Her first husband had been a certain Baron von Langen. Then she had wed a film-maker called Frank Wisbar, with whom she had emigrated to Hollywood. But not making good there, she had found herself forced to work: first as a shop-assistant in a Los Angeles department-store and then as a receptionist to a Dr. Knauer. After divorcing Wisbar in Las Vegas she had married Knauer and through him had obtained American citizenship. However, this marriage had not lasted long either. Still in her thirties, she had returned to Hamburg where she had met the forty-five-year-old head of the House of Krupp during one of his frequent business trips to that city.
Vera Hossenfeldt was her name—and after a lightning courtship Alfried married her discreetly and almost surreptitiously in a registry office at Berchtesgaden, the Bavarian mountain resort which of course had been Hitler’s holiday hide-out too. Such was their eagerness to keep their elopement out of the public gaze that they drove to the mayor’s parlour in a baker’s delivery van—shades of Berthold and the battered old laundry van at Landsberg! The only other two witnesses to the wedding were the proprietor and his wife of the hotel where they were staying. Alfried gave his bride a white Porsche sports-car and bunched her with the inevitable tulips.
But once back in Essen after a brief honeymoon. Alfried had begun the bargaining again in earnest. He had also straightaway started building another castle, this time fit for a re-crowned modern industrial king—a luxurious fifteen-roomed bungalow in the grounds of the Villa Hügel though not within sight of it (Alfried was at least trying to banish some of the more unhappy memories of his past).
Pretty, like his first wife Anneliese, but much more determined and much more worldly than her, Vera in the changed circumstances of the Ruhr in 1952 stood a reasonable chance of succeeding as the wife of Germany’s richest and biggest industrialist. Evidently she played the part well of the perfect hostess at the big business parties Alfried started giving once he was back at Krupp’s. She even accompanied him on many of his overseas trips. But there were no children of the marriage, and after just four years it ended in yet another divorce.
Meantime, despite the suspicions of the British and French officials, the American diplomats had had their way. Scarcely three months after Alfried’s and Vera’s nuptials, they presented them with the best wedding gift of all—a preliminary agreement whereby Krupp was to be paid something like £25 million in compensation for the coal, iron, and steel holdings the Allies had already taken away from him.
This prompted an even louder and more angry outcry in Britain than that of eighteen months before. Said the News Chronicle, “It is hard to stomach the vast compensation that is to be paid to Alfried Krupp to console him for the loss of control of his coal and steel interests.” While the Manchester Guardian considered it “disquieting” and the Financial Times found it “baffling”, the Daily Telegraph after first declaring it to be “monstrous” went on to point out that “The arch-profiteers of the régime are apparently to lose none of their gains”. It was Anthony Eden’s turn this time, as Churchill’s Foreign Secretary, to try to reassure an indignant nation:
It is the Government’s purpose to ensure that Herr Krupp shall not be allowed to use the proceeds of the sale of his holdings to buy his way back into the coal and steel industries or otherwise to acquire a controlling interest. The means of achieving that end are under discussion in Germany between the High Commission and th t Federal Government.
But for many Britons this was not enough. The Liberal leader in the House of Commons, Clement Davies, spoke for a far wider section of the population than his party’s meagre strength in Parliament indicated when he said, “The restoration of such a vast sum of money to the family whose activities were of such assistance to Hitler has deeply shocked people everywhere”—and he went on to ask, “Inasmuch as Krupp has been found guilty of using slave-labour and of taking other people’s property, is it not possible to devote some of this wealth to the people who have suffered ?” Alas, in the diplomatic turmoils of the Cold War, no one in authority at least was to pay much heed to such liberal sentiments. However, later that same year, on Armistice Day, a wreath inscribed “To the Dead from Alfried Krupp—Thanks a £40 million” was found placed against the Royal Artillery War Memorial at Hyde Park Corner in London. Two months after this particular incident, 4,000 French ex-servicemen demonstrated in Paris against the proposed Krupp compensation plan.
So far as the American public was concerned, the announcement came at the time of a Presidential Election—an election that was being fought on what degrees of toughness should be shown towards the Russians and on whether General Eisenhower’s notion of “rolling back Communism” should be given the chance over the Democratic Administration’s previous policy of merely “containing Communism”. In all such discussions, issues to do with whether or not the Allies should continue to be “nasty to the Nazis” did not loom very large—and the Republicans were if anything keener to commit Germany to America’s side than their Democratic opponents. After all, General Eisenhower as early as January 1951 had spoken of his former enemies as “honourable comrades”. He had declared publicly that for him bygones were bygones and that it was his intention to secure for Germany equal status with the other countries of the Western alliance. What is more the Republican Party was the party of big businessmen, some of whom had had commercial relations with Krupp’s before the war and had quickly re-established them shortly afterwards.
For Alfried an Eisenhower victory at the polls and a breakdown to the peace talks in Korea meant that he could afford to be even tougher in his bargaining with the Allies than hitherto. The American negotiators now made no bones about their sympathies lying entirely with him—and so he preferred to work through them, to get them to prod the British and the French. Alfried wanted a limit put on his pledge not to re-enter the coal, iron, and steel business—perhaps a limit for ten years only from the date of signing. But while the Americans were eager to agree to this, the British and French flatly refused. Another stumbling-block was whether he was to be permitted to make any alloy-steel at all, such as for instance in his Widia tungsten-carbide works. But on this point the Allies did give way, and in doing so they opened up a loophole in the Agreement through which Alfried was to drive a coach-and-four—for he interpreted the compromise clause banning him from making alloy-steel “except in small quantities incidental to the enterprises which will remain in the possession of Alfried Krupp” as allowing him to buy steel ingots elsewhere in unlimited amounts for re-shaping in his own foundries, and no one later was able to question this interpretation.
As the months of the bargaining dragged on, Alfried became more and more confident. Indeed, when the British coal control authorities moved out of the Villa Hügel he did not hesitate to petition Whitehall for the immediate return of some 300 to 400 “art treasures”, the value of which he said approached £200,000 and which he claimed were missing. What is more, a group of British officials straightaway visited Essen and secured the return to him of several of the articles!
It took from August 1952 to March 1953 to turn a preliminary draft into a final agreement—and in the end another diplomatic deus ex machina came to Alfried’s aid. In the early weeks of 1953 Western diplomats were concerned with clearing away the obstacles and creating the machinery for completing West Germany’s sovereignty to enable her to rearm as a member of the European Defence Community and so enter NATO at some future date. A lot of loose ends left over from the Occupation remained to be tied up—one piece of such unfinished business was a settlement with Krupp. A fortnight only was allotted to obtaining Alfried’s signature to a document binding him to the term of Allied Law 27. In such circumstances of acute haste Alfried was naturally in a strong bargaining position, and it would appear that he did not deign to help the diplomats over their shortage of days—at least that is how the officials responsible for the final agreement excuse its patent drawbacks.
Thus it came to pass that on 4 March 1953 signatures were put to the so-called Krupp Treaty. By it Alfried undertook to sell off his coal and steel companies within five years as a condition of the rest of his industrial empire being returned to him. At the same time he was made to provide for those members of his family who had been summarily disinherited by the 1943 Lex Krupp—for instance the shares in two small processing plants in Düsseldorf and Hamm were to be divided equally between his sister Irmgard and his nephew Arnold von Bohlen und Halbach, the son of his brother Claus, the Luftwaffe pilot who had been killed when his aeroplane crashed in 1940. Alfried was also bidden to give £1 million each to his other sister Waldtraut, to his two surviving brothers Berthold and Harald (although Harald at that time was still a prisoner in Russian hands and was not released until October 1955), and to his only son Arndt, to be held in trust for him until he came of age.
Significantly, Alfried did not sign the Agreement himself—he preferred to leave that to his American lawyers. On the day in question he had chosen to go off ski-ing in Switzerland. But the real reason was that by avoiding penning his own name to the document he could that more easily deny final moral responsibility for its contents should the occasion ever arise. So far the occasion has not in fact arisen—for as usual time has been on Alfried Krupp’s side.
All in all the 1953 Agreement was unprecedented—for it was in effect a commercial Treaty between a private individual and three sovereign nations, Britain, France and the United States. It was yet one more indication of the now internationally accepted uniqueness of the House of Krupp.
It had its critics of course right from the start. British politicians were particularly angry. Many Conservative M.P.s harried their Government in the House of Commons with complaints that there was absolutely nothing in the Treaty to prevent Krupp, a convicted war criminal, from again becoming one of Germany’s most powerful and influential men—nor were there even any specific provisions to stop him re-entering the armaments business. Some London newspapers were unusually virulent. The Daily Telegraph for instance argued that the Agreement’s weaknesses were apparent to all and quoted an Allied official as saying that it “must be regarded largely as an academic solution”. Even on the day before the signing, that selfsame newspaper had pointed out that German financial experts were convinced that because of the large sums of capital involved it would be difficult if not impossible to find a suitable purchaser for the companies Krupp was being ordered to sell. It also reminded its readers—and presumably they included the British Foreign Office—that the West German Government had already stated that it could not hold Alfried to his undertaking not to re-enter coal and steel because the Federal Constitution, largely written by the Allies, granted every West German citizen the right to enter any business.
But voices were raised in Krupp’s defence at that time even within Britain. On the day after the signing, The Times, for instance, declared that “the settlement obliges Herr Krupp to take a very large sum, perhaps between £20 million and £25 million, out of the coal, iron and steel industries where it is needed and to put this money to other uses in which it will probably do less good”—and the editorial writer went on to argue, “The German shortage of capital for heavy industry is already a European problem, and there is no evidence for supposing that Europe as a whole can afford to have the shortage aggravated in an avoidable way.” Special pleading like this on behalf of sectional interests was to be of enormous help and comfort to Alfried during the years to come.
Although, once the signing was over, his lawyers had promptly published a statement on his behalf denouncing the Agreement as not only recriminatory and reactionary but also harmful to the well-being of the workers’ community of Krupp, Alfried himself did not protest too loudly. He knew that he had made a remarkably good bargain—so good in fact that he did not want to give others the chance of perhaps spoiling it. He had realised long since that the restrictions were unenforceable—and indeed that the whole Agreement was unworkable. All he had to do now was to be patient, for as usual “time would settle all”.
Then, as though he had not had enough luck already, on the day following the signing, Stalin died. Straightaway Krupp disappeared off the front pages—and the attentions of Western diplomats and Western leader-writers were immediately switched to coping with that seemingly shattering event. So even if any of them had had second thoughts on the Krupp Treaty and might have wanted to do something about it before it was entirely too late, they now had the excuse that there was no longer the time.
If Alfried had been looking for a new motto for the armorial bearings of the House of Krupp he could hardly have chosen better than “Time is on my side”, for that is really the theme and the explanation of his rehabilitation and his recovery in the Ruhr.