WHITHER KRUPP?
Alfried Krupp is now fifty-nine years old, while Berthold Beitz is fifty-three. Although Alfried has never mentioned, publicly at least, at what age he might wish to step down from the proprietorship of the House of Krupp, Beitz is certainly on record as stating that he intends to retire when he reaches sixty, that is in 1973. The House of Krupp is therefore rapidly taking on a middle-aged look at the top and the problem of succession is beginning to loom large.
Alfried of course has a son Arndt, from his first marriage, now aged twenty-eight—though he is not obliged to turn over the massive inheritance to him. By the strict terms of the Lex Krupp, Alfried can name as his successor whom he likes, so long as he does not divide the inheritance and so long as the inheritor takes the name of Krupp (at the moment Arndt is called Arndt von Bohlen und Halbach—he will only become Arndt Krupp if Alfried in fact names him as his successor). It remains to be seen of course whether or not Alfried will abide by what is after all a Hitler-signed law. Equally it remains to be seen whether or not the West German Government will choose to recognise this relic of the Third Reich.
Being traditionalists, and since the Lex Krupp was not imposed on them by the Nazis but is rather a law of inheritance originating within the family itself and certainly following on the will of old Alfred, the Krupps would be expected to want to keep to the 1943 ruling, particularly as there do not seem to be any other successors to Alfried within the family, apart from Arndt.
Arndt was born in a suburb of Berlin on 24 January 1938, the year of Munich and the Nazi Anschluss with Austria. He was barely four years old when his father divorced his mother—it was the year that Fat Gustav thundered out against the walls of Sevastopol. His mother took him to live with her in Bavaria: to her house near the little town of Tegernsee, a famed local beauty spot on a lake, just south of Munich and not far from the Austrian border. It also happens to be on the route by road from Essen to Berchtes-gaden, Hitler’s hideout, so it can be presumed that during his frequent trips to visit his Führer in the celebrated mountain-retreat, Alfried stopped off to see his son and perhaps even his ex-wife, since the divorce was not of his own choosing but had been imposed on him by his parents.
When Arndt was little more than seven years old, Alfried was already in an Allied jail and from the mood of the time did not look like ever again emerging with his life. Like the dowager she undoubtedly aspired to be, and conscious as ever of her responsibilities to the dynasty of which she was the true descendant, Alfried’s mother, Bertha, had taken Arndt with her and Gustav to Bltihnbach Castle, the Krupps’ own mountain retreat, long before the war had ended. When Gustav finally died there in January 1950, Arndt represented his father at the funeral—for although the American Governor of Landsberg jail had been prepared to let him attend, under strict security guard of course, Alfried had preferred not to go.
Arndt was thirteen before he saw his father again. Meantime his mother had sent him to a fashionable, cosmopolitan Swiss boarding-school. A year after Alfried’s release, he was confirmed into the Protestant religion, the venue being a small church near the Villa Hügel. The confirmation was the suggestion of his mother, Anneliese, who despite Bertha’s efforts, had remained the biggest influence on Arndt in his early years. Alfried did, however, come to the confirmation, although he is, as we have pointed out, a completely irreligious man and accepts no church. What is more, Alfried brought along Arndt’s new step-mother, but there does not seem to have been any rapport between the new Frau Krupp and Alfried’s first-born, and, as it has turned out, only-born.
Arndt’s first major appearance in public was at his grand mother’s funeral. Aged nineteen, he walked with his father behind Bertha’s bier. Two years later, on the occasion of his twenty-first birthday, Arndt received from his father the inevitable fast sports-car and even accompanied him on a business trip to the Far East.
Undoubtedly Alfried has been at pains to introduce—and to be seen to be introducing—his son into the ways of the House of Krupp. When West German notabilities by the score came to Essen in November 1961 to help the firm celebrate its one hundred and fiftieth anniversary, Arndt stood in line next to Alfried and Beitz to receive the guests—and Krupp PR men sought every opportunity to have the three of them pictured together.
Remembering perhaps his own early frustrations, Alfried has not forced an Essen apprenticeship on his son. After studying economics at Freiburg University, Arndt’s only contact with the business has been in Brazil, at the Campo Limpo outpost of the Krupp empire. Tall, slim and as elegant and as handsome as his father, Arndt nevertheless does not give the impression of being a Krupp—and it is perhaps this immediate, albeit superficial first feeling that is the basis for all the rumour of rift between father and son (and between Alfried and Beitz over the question of the son’s possible succession), and for all the insinuation about Arndt’s unsuitability for such a massive inheritance as the House of Krupp. Essen gossips allege that he refers to Alfried and Beitz as “V1” and “V2”, that is Vater-One and Vater-Two (Vater being the German word for father). They also recall how he seems to spend more time in fleshpots like Tangier and Rio than getting to know people in the Ruhr.
Every time some malicious story appears about Arndt, this sets off again all the talk of a possible Krupp Foundation, of Alfried following the precedent of other industrial dynasties by placing the family fortune in the hands of a bunch of worthy trustees rather than a single, uncertain heir. This of course would also be one way of “depersonalising” the world’s most personal industrial dynasty and so perhaps ending what Herr von Hase has chosen to call “the British Krupp trauma”. Another way would be for the firm to “go public”, that is for it to float all its shares on the markets and so become another General Motors or I.C.I.: one among many similarly large impersonal industrial undertakings in the world today.
Rumour has it too that Alfried has been looking into the question of other heirs within the family. Chief favourite here might be his nephew Arnold, son of his brother Claus, the Luftwaffe pilot killed in 1940. A year or so back, newspapers across the world made great play of a flight this young Oxford-educated German took one summer with a fellow undergraduate of his own age. The two safaried in a Piper Comanche around Africa and the Middle East, dropping in for a meal or two with people such as Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia and King Hussein of Jordan. Nothing remarkable in that perhaps, except that Arnold von Bohlen’s flying companion was by name Winston Churchill, grandson of the Winston Churchill! As can be imagined, headline-writers and gossip-columnists everywhere had a field-day pinpointing the apparent paradox of “these illustrious scions of two immortal foes” touring together and purpling their stories with sentences such as “with a Krupp and a Churchill in the same cockpit the day of European disunity must be over”. What pleased the Krupp P.R. men about the incident, however, was that young Arnold got a “good press” wherever he went, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world. Other observers noted that after Oxford Arnold was going to study business administration at the new European school for technocrats at Fontainebleau.
Arnold was not of course the first member of his family to go to Oxford. Apart from his father Claus, who was up at Balliol before the war, another of Arnold’s uncles, Berthold, Alfried’s younger brother, is an Oxford man too. Alone of the family, Berthold has chosen science, but even this did not keep him out of the Wehrmacht when Hitler’s war came. Like two of his brothers, Harald and Eckbert, Berthold was commissioned in the artillery—in the year that Claus died. He saw action in Holland, Belgium and France, as well as later on in Russia—firing the very same Krupp guns his father and his eldest brother were helping to turn out by the score back in Essen. The war’s end saw him at his parents’ side at Bluhnbach, and although after Alfried’s release he in fact shared a flat with him for a time (Berthold had of course gone to meet Alfried coming out of Landsberg in February 1951) these two particular brothers have never been really close and are not so today. Berthold used the £1 million he received from the Krupp estate as a result of the 1953 Agreement to buy himself a chemical company in Essen and a brake-lining factory in Hamburg. Now he is married and has one daughter.
The one brother Berthold is closest to—they are as a matter of fact business partners—is Harald, the youngest of Gustav’s sons still alive and the lawyer of the family. Harald was taken prisoner by the Russians in Rumania in August 1944 at the time of the great Soviet offensive which finally ended the war on that front. The Russians did not release him until the autumn of 1955. At first he had preferred to keep from his captors his connection with the hated Krupp family, calling himself Harald Bohlen, which a Russian jailer later corrupted to Boiler. Due to be repatriated to West Germany shortly after VE day he was in fact crossing the Eastern Zone by train when a German Communist from the Ruhr recognised him. The Russians promptly threw him into a jail for political prisoners near Moscow and interrogated him endlessly, even on one occasion requiring him to write them an essay entitled “The Childhood of the Son of a Capitalist”. Eventually in 1950 they brought him to trial—and predictably convicted him of war crimes although he had had absolutely nothing to do with administering the Krupp armament factories. Like his other brothers he had, however, been a member of the Nazi party. Sent to Siberia for twenty-five years, he only served five of them before being suddenly selected as one of the 800 chosen to be released as a Soviet gesture of goodwill ten years after the end of the war. The Russians duly handed him over along with his fellow repatriates at a camp near Göttingen. Harald’s release had come at a time when Alfried was abroad on business and Berthold was honeymooning in Greece. It fell, therefore, to his younger sister, Waldtraut, to greet him and to take him to meet his mother whom he had not seen for twelve years. Harald has never married.
Waldtraut is in fact the sole member of the family with whom Alfried maintains any really cordial relations, although today she lives mostly in South America. Besides being now the youngest of Bertha’s children still alive, as it happens she is also the most extrovert of the lot. Marrying at an early age a wealthy Bremen wool merchant she eventually divorced him after the war (and also after trying to get him appointed by the Allies in late 1945 21s the trustee for the Krupp estates) to wed a few years later an Argentinian shipping millionaire. Her visits to Essen are not all that frequent now, but when they do occur they provide just about the only warm family occasions for Alfried and the other Krupps.
Shyer than her younger sister, Irmgard, the oldest member of the family now next to Alfried, has also married twice. Her first husband, a Prussian baron, was killed in the opening months of the Russian campaign in 1941. Today, living with her second husband and their six children in Bavaria, she seldom sees her brothers, practically never her younger sister.
Like many other large families in this day and age, Bertha’s offspring have become scattered and separated. For the most part they prefer to go their own ways. Nor will they ever starve, and so the necessity for a family to stick together for fear of possible hard times is not applicable in their case, for the one clause in the 1953 Agreement which Alfried has done nothing to circumvent is that whereby he gave each of his brothers and sisters roughly £1 million apiece. They could all become even richer, for yet another possibility on the succession issue is that Alfried might choose to divide up his fortune among them all.
Arndt may not be exactly a heavyweight as Krupps go, but it could be that he is also not really interested in expanding the millions and changing the reputations of his family. Presumably too, no matter what the final settlement is, he will never go short of money, but will receive the odd few million by way of recompense in the event of his disinheritance.
If with Alfried’s death, or perhaps before, Krupp’s were to cease to be either singly owned or family owned, then undoubtedly much of the heat would be taken out of the age-old Krupp controversy—for one thing it is much less easy or satisfying to loathe an institution than an individual. Many ignominious deeds were perpetrated on the premises of IG Farben, for instance, the pre-1945 chemical colossus and manufacturer of most of the poison gases used in the Nazi extermination camps such as Auschwitz, but because these terrible acts are not linked with a single family or a single individual, IG Farben is not nearly so well known or so notorious as Krupp’s.
Such a radical change in the constitution of the House of Krupp would also probably mean the end of the now farcical “enforced sale” of the firm’s coal and steel assets. Pride on the part of the former Allies presumably precludes any complete repudiation of the 1953 Agreement before such a radical change, and it is clear, as it has been ever since that day in March thirteen years ago, that Alfried never intends to sell of his own accord. In this case, until the radical change in the constitution of the House of Krupp occurs, one can expect the trips to continue by certain American and European worthies every summer to Zürich for the ritual of the annual extensions—to date Alfried has had six such extensions since the original five-year period ran out on 31 January 1959.
It is the single ownership of the House of Krupp that is its uniqueness and that makes it a seemingly glaring anachronism today. For the armament factories to have been in the possession and control of just one man suited Bismarck’s or the Kaiser’s or Hitler’s book admirably. They had only one individual to persuade—only one person to bargain with and to cajole. If they had had to deal with a lot of directors worrying about dividends, having hundreds of shareholders breathing down their necks and asking awkward questions at annual meetings, their task would have been all the more difficult and hence Europe’s recent history might have been that bit different.
No business enterprise has ever come in for so much censure as Krupp’s. Unlike other giant firms in America, Britain or elsewhere, anonymity was impossible at Krupp’s. One man, and one man only, stood for the firm—and it was he who in the eyes of the rest of the world “carried the can” for all its activities. Questions of any great moment were never decided by underlings but purely by the proprietors—so it was always easy to pinpoint responsibility.
Alfried Krupp, sole proprietor could well be his firm’s epitaph as well as his own, for it is highly unlikely that the House of Krupp will continue in its present form past Alfried’s death.
Léon Blum used to say that the great industrialists of Europe were the Continent’s only true internationalists: that as a result they survived the cataclysms that periodically shake Europe.
No doubt the two most incredible facts of the whole Krupp saga are how the firm and family recovered after the two major débâcles their country suffered this century. Because of this, the name Krupp has come to take on an almost mythical and immortal quality in German thinking—the symbol of German industrialism that has outlived empires, defied defeats, and adapted itself to every kind of economic situation. If Germans were perhaps to throw off for a while their “sacred cow” attitude towards the Krupps and to think a little more deeply about what the family and the firm have done to Europe and not just to Germany these past 150 years then they might well learn a little more about themselves in the process. They might discover too why others regard them with so much suspicion. Such a realisation could also lead to the evaporation of that “British Krupp trauma” that worries official West German spokesmen so much.
This trauma was born out of disgust for Krupp’s treatment of the slave-workers in his care during the Second World War—was born out of distaste for the devilish cunning and lack of honesty shown by Gustav towards the Treaty of Versailles and by Alfried towards the Agreement of 1953. There would be much for the average Englishman or Frenchman or American to admire in the Krupp saga if there were not at the back of many people’s minds the disturbing suspicion that perhaps just as the House of Krupp has fallen and risen again so, like the Bourbons of old, the family has seen nothing and learnt nothing, and that just as the name of Krupp has run like a scarlet thread through the unhappy history of our times it could, if we do not watch out, be responsible for a lot more wretchedness in the decades to come. One would like to think that the seamy side of the House of Krupp has gone for ever—but how can one be so sure, for there is nothing in the recent Krupp story to make one convinced that the attitudes of mind of the man at the top have changed. The products are different, but are the principles?
The answer lies with the Krupps themselves. Let them by their actions and their deeds prove our fears and our suspicions to be baseless. If there is silence from them or a shrugging of shoulders or a bland laugh of ridicule then the fears and the suspicions will continue, indeed must continue. The House of Krupp has risen, fallen, and risen again. Let us hope that there will be no further fall and hence no further rise to have to record.