To AT least one group of people in Germany, the night of 5 March 1943 has a particular significance, such that they will never forget it. That group is the citizens of Essen, the great iron and steel town of Germany’s industrial heartland, the Ruhr—and the reason for their remembering that night in March twenty-three years ago is that it was the occasion for their first major air-raid of the Second World War.
After the flares of the Royal Air Force’s Pathfinder Mosquito bombers had pierced the smoky haze above the sleeping city, within minutes the heavier loads of the hundreds of Halifaxes, Wellingtons, and Lancasters following had laid waste some 160 acres in the centre of Essen and badly damaged another 450.
And that was not all, for this first raid was merely a taste of what was to come, a grim sample of what lay in store for the people of Essen. Essen was to be the target for many, many more bombing raids—for Essen was the home of Krupp’s, of the Krupp armament factories that had forged Bismarck his cannons in his wars against Austria and France nearly a century before, that had made Kaiser “Bill” his notorious Big Bertha to smash the Belgian forts standing in the way of his army’s advance on Paris in 1914. And now thirty years later this selfsame Krupp’s was turning out tanks and guns and U-boats for Hitler.
Before the war was won, RAF bombers alone were to make some 11,000 or so individual sorties over Essen, and in nearly 200 full-scale air-raids were to drop more than 36,000 tons of incendiary and high-explosive bombs, most of them on the three square miles of Krupp factories. Goebbels was to record in his diary that he thought Essen was the city hardest hit by Allied raids, while General Heinz Guderian reported to his Führer the final Christmas before Germany’s defeat that the home of Krupp’s was already prostrate.
When British and American troops finally captured the city in April 1945, they found almost total destruction. Nothing worked any more—there was no gas, no electricity, no water. “It was a place of the dead”, wrote home one American corporal. “It is impossible to imagine this city ever living again”, a British intelligence officer reported to his superior. What little Krupp machinery that still remained undamaged was earmarked to be broken up and shipped piece by piece by way of recompense to some of the countries formerly overrun by the Nazis. The rest was expected to be sent as scrap to either British or French blastfurnaces.
In November 1945 a British chartered accountant from North Harrow was put in charge of Krupp’s. He announced to all and sundry that it was intended to prevent the Essen firm from ever rising again. “No Krupp chimney will ever smoke again”, he told the few workmen who were left—and amidst the rubble and the ruin that was the Ruhr in those chaotic months immediately after the war, who could have doubted him ? Except of course that the selfsame thing had been said by the victorious Allies in 1918 and yet within a relatively short time Krupp’s had been back in business.
History was indeed to repeat itself. Today, Krupp’s are bigger, busier, and boomier than ever before. In twelve months between 1965 and 1966 they sold nearly £600 million worth of goods, a record for the firm, and they were giving employment to 112,000 people—roughly the number of inhabitants in a town the size of Oxford or Preston.
Yet just one man owns this monolithic factory-kingdom—Alfried Felix Alwyn Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach. Like Gustav Krupp, his father, who was arrested and imprisoned after the First World War, Alfried was arrested and imprisoned after the Second. American judges at Nuremberg in 1948 found him guilty of war crimes and sentenced him to be stripped of his wealth and to be jailed for twelve years. But again, just like his father, Alfried was soon released. His properties were returned to him, though on the clear understanding that he would sell off his coal-mines and his steelworks. Today, his private industrial empire remains intact. What is more, he is one of the richest men alive, worth, it is said, every penny of £1,500 million. No wonder his family have been called the “Incredible Krupps”.
But the Krupp saga is full of paradoxes. Perhaps the most pertinent one of all is that even the very name symbolises different things to different people. Outside Germany, Krupp has become identified with that country’s aggression and that country’s beastliness in two world wars. As a word it fits easily into a newspaper headline; and it is one of the four or five German family names that are known the world over. Even when you pronounce Krupp, it sounds like a shell exploding!
To Frenchmen, it was Krupp guns that ravaged France three times in a century. To Americans, it was Krupp tanks that spearheaded the German Army’s counter-offensive through the Ardennes in November 1944 with its terrible toll of doughboy dead. To Russians, it was the Krupp giant railway-guns that decided the siege of Sevastopol and devastated many of her ancient cities. To British people, Krupp is remembered for having built the first U-boat and most of the hundreds that followed—while the coastal batteries that shelled Dover and Folkestone in the Second World War were Krupp-made too.
But to Germans, Krupp means something entirely different. It is the symbol of their country’s industrial prowess. Furthermore, Krupp’s have always had the reputation in Germany of being an excellent employer of labour. Once taken on, workers tend to stay with the firm: son following father, father following grandfather. Even the title “House of Krupp”, the title preferred as the name of their firm by Krupps themselves, suggests a kingly dynasty.
In Germany there is a saying, “As the Fatherland goes, Krupp goes”—a sort of Teutonic version of “what’s good for America is good for General Motors”. Indeed there are striking parallels between the triumphs and disasters of Germany under Bismarck, the Kaiser, or Hitler, and the rise and fall in the fortunes of the House of Krupp. What is more, this habit of matching the mood of the moment has been continued by Alfried in the Germany of Konrad Adenauer and Chancellor Erhard. If slavish devotion to whoever happens to be controlling the political power-strings is considered a virtue, then the Krupps must be numbered among the most virtuous of men. But, equally, if such blinkered compliance is thought of as something less than praiseworthy, then the family of which Alfried is the present head must suffer the appropriate obloquy.
The Krupps are always proud of their loyalty to the State—and whether this loyalty leads them into supporting a Kaiser’s vanities or a führer’s megalomania is immaterial to them. It happens usually to be good for Krupp business—and the Krupps are first and foremost businessmen; being human is only incidental to their way of doing things. Accordingly, the story of the House of Krupp is the story, purely and simply, of an exercise in industrial power. That the cast-steel cannons old Alfred made and perfected were to be used to maim and to murder thousands of luckless men never entered his thinking. That the subterfuges Gustav got up to in duping the Allied disarmament commissioners after 1919 could only end in another bloody holocaust never occurred to him or worried him. That the thousands of Jewish workers forced to make weapons for Alfried during the Second World War could be living in abominable conditions, could be being brutally treated by their Gestapo guards, could be being needlessly exposed to Allied air-raids, and could be dying off in their hundreds, evidently never caused him then or even now to lose a single night’s sleep.
The Krupps are insensitive men—unscrupulous, grasping, materialistic, but thoroughly able. There is a continuum in their behaviour and in their attitudes. To understand them fully you must go back to their origins and to their past.
The Krupps of course created Essen—at least they created Essen in the sense that without them Essen would probably still be just another insignificant market-town, unsung and unknown to the rest of the world. The family, like none other, were totally responsible for Essen’s tremendous growth during the second half of the nineteenth century. Equally, it was the presence of the firm there that made the Allies determined to destroy Essen during the Second World War.
Today, Essen is no longer dependent upon Krupp’s for its livelihood, but the Krupp presence and the Krupp influence is nevertheless still strong there. Alfried, for instance, owns the city’s best hotel and hence its smartest rendezvous for visitors. There again, some one hundred or more streets in Essen are still to this day named after members of the family or firm, not to mention of course the many parks, hospitals, and other public institutions that were originally founded by the Krupps.
But the story of the House of Krupp is not just the story of the growth of an industrial family, of an industrial city, and of an industrial area—albeit the most famous, or perhaps the most infamous, industrial area in the world, the Ruhr. It is also the story of an exercise in public relations, particularly in their selling themselves successfully to their employees and their receiving in return their employees’ loyalty and respect. It can of course be argued that the Krupps, along with other German industrial families in the nineteenth century, stepped into the shoes of the landed aristocracy whom Napoleon had diminished both in quantity and in influence. The factory barons of the industrial revolution came in for that compliance and devotion that had previously been the prerogative of the feudal lords. This submissiveness and veneration they repaid in their turn by their well-nigh fatherly concern towards their employees—concern which found its best expression in acts of welfare, especially the provision of housing, and also in the benignant gestures of charity on the part of wives and daughters to the workers and their families. Such attitudes were clearly at odds with the political and social trends of the age. Indeed, the Krupps in keeping with the other German industrial dynasties were strongly antipathetic to any groupings of workers or in fact to any activity by their men that savoured of socialism, selfhelp, or syndicalism. Alfred Krupp’s writings on this subject rank among the most virulent manifestations of the reactionary point of view in the whole of the nineteenth century. Krupp workers, along with German workers in general, were probably disposed to accepting meekly this state of affairs, yet Krupp’s success in this sphere of internal public relations must be regarded as perhaps their most astonishing accomplishment of all.
As a French diplomat once described them, Krupp’s are indeed “a state within a state”. In Bonn, the. new West German capital, they maintain an office which in its outward appearance and interior splendour can only be likened to an embassy—in fact its occupant is sometimes referred to as “the ambassador from Essen”. For its part too the Federal Government tends to look upon Alfried as its industrial prince, for when heads of state come visiting the country a trip to Essen and a meeting with Alfried is usually on their schedules. Even some of the titles of the top Krupp executives have a stately ring about them: for instance, the Krupp man in London is occasionally known as their Commonwealth Delegate, while Berthold Beitz, the number two in the Krupp hierarchy, is often called in Krupp literature the General Plenipotentiary.
The saga of Krupp’s, stretching backwards in time to the sixteenth century, is one of the most fascinating and fantastic stories of all time. It is a story of intrigue and greed, of the lust for power and of the possession of power. It is a story of men apparently strong and ruthless, but in fact weak and fallible. Above all it is a story of dangerous men.
It is a story of the growth of big business and of gigantic industrial organisation. Unfortunately it is the story of our times and of our fathers’ times, of our grandfathers’ times and of our great-grandfathers’ times. It is in many ways almost unbelievable.
The Krupps are already a legend, already a lore unto themselves. But they are also a lesson—and theirs is a tale worth the telling.
One has not embarked on such a project without a certain trepidation. Many books have already been written on the Krupps and many more will follow mine. I by no means claim for mine the epithet definitive. Indeed, but for the encouragement of my family and my friends, and above all my colleagues at Associated Television, I doubt whether I would have ever started to write it at all.
Let it be said straightaway that the idea for attempting a book on Krupp’s sprang out of a television documentary I made for Associated Television in the winter of 1964-5, which was subsequently shown twice on the independent television network here in Britain at a peak hour in February and September 1965. On each occasion the audience estimated to be watching was between nine and ten million people. The programme was also transmitted overseas in nearly twenty different countries, including both East and West Germany, Italy, Holland, Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States. It brought, too, to the writer a grand prix for television documentaries at both the 1965 Venice and the Leipzig film festivals.
My interest in Krupp’s, however, dates from long before joining Associated Television. It is to my father that I owe the first mention of the name of Krupp in my consciousness. Like many of his generation who had to fight in the First World War, and for whom that terrible experience was a lasting and deeply felt one, he has what might be called the conventional British ex-serviceman’s view of the Krupps: he loathes and despises them. Accordingly, the name Big Bertha, inevitably as it was included in his stories and tales of that war, came to have a very real menace and at the same time a certain mythical charm in my early childhood. Although I was fortunately too young to be called upon to fight in the Second World War, I was nevertheless old enough to know and to fear the Krupp U-boats and the Krupp Tiger tanks. Therefore, to my parents, and to those of their generation for whom war has unfortunately loomed large in their lives this century, I respectfully dedicate this book.
Many people have helped me in this project. My colleagues at Associated Television, in particular Robert P. Heller, Norman Collins, Lew Grade, and Robin Gill, who both encouraged me to get started and then made possible the opportunity for me to finish it: to them I am permanently grateful, as I am also to Ingrid Floering who assisted with the research for the television documentary, and to Ann Scorer, who over the months aided me in a multitude of ways. I am indebted too to George Clark, Guy Ambler, Roger James, and Cyril Hayden, for their forbearance at a certain key-moment in my saga of the Krupp saga! To the press clippings library at Chatham House I owe an enormous debt, especially for their thoroughness and their patience in dealing with my persistent queries—as I do also to Margaret Duerden who helped me obtain books, and indeed to every library I have plundered unmercifully and to every mind I have picked uncharitably over the years.
Without the substantial aid of officials of Essen Public Library, I could not have compiled the earlier history of the family, since my primary sources for that particular period include the various official Krupp histories, monographs, anniversary brochures, company reports and picture-albums which were kindly put at my disposal there. I have also had access to the files of British newspapers and magazines of the last century. In particular, Wilhelm Berdrow’s edited collection of Alfred Krupp’s Letters (Gollancz, 1930) was of immense value.
For the period between the wars, I have again largely relied on the newspapers and magazines of the time, together with the talks I have had with key principals such as Gottfried Treviranus, a Cabinet Minister in the Weimar Republic, a close acquaintance of both Bertha and Gustav Krupp, and a frequent visitor to the Villa Hügel. It goes without saying of course that I have needed to refer closely to the proceedings of the Krupp Trial {Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Tribunals, Vol. IX, Alfried Krupp, et al.).
Most of the recent material, especially that from 1945 onwards, has in fact come from conversations I have had with people privy to certain crucial episodes of the Krupp story, as well as from a sedulous perusal of the newspapers and periodicals, German, American, French, and British, of the day. In particular, I would like to record the invaluable information and comments I received from Lord Shawcross, Lord Robertson, Sir Christopher Steel, Airey Neave, Goronwy Rees, Harris Burland, Rex Malik, Harold Edge, Professor Francis Carsten, Terence Prittie of the Guardian, Reginald Peck of the Daily Telegraph, Karl Robson of The Economist, Frederick Fischer of the Financial Times, and Lee Brawand and Dr. H. Alexander of Der Spiegel. The latter was kind enough to put his own collection of back numbers of Der Spiegel at my disposal. Many, many others—some former and some present employees of the Krupp concern—talked to me in strict confidence: a confidence which I intend to respect, come what may. The book’s merits, if it has any, can be laid at many doorsteps, its faults, alas, are purely mine alone.
A final word of gratitude must go to my wife and to my small children for being so tolerant in what has been a difficult time for me. I trust and hope that my two young sons and my young daughter will perhaps wonder in the years to come what was all their father’s fuss about guns and U-boats and tanks and slave-labour. For myself, if another Krupp cannon is never again fired in anger then it will have been worth while.
Richmond, Surrey, 1966