Recently, William Manchester, who had visited Alfried Krupp in 1964, said that he thought Krupp looked like “an unemployed English actor” or “an eccentric Midlands beekeeper,” but not at all like “gentry” and certainly not like a munitions tycoon. My own description of Krupp, after I had seen him in 1953, was that he resembled “another anonymous minor executive.” I can still recall that I thought him diffident, introverted, more the thinker than the doer, yet refreshingly direct and forthright in his conversation. At the same time, there had seemed to be some quality about him—and I think I might have sensed this even if I had not known his name and legend—that was strong and sure. I was left with the conviction that should this man have an ambition, he would somehow, by hook or by crook, satisfy it. I retain today my memory of this quality in him, and therefore I am not surprised that he has entered, in open defiance of the directive of his country’s conquerors, steel production where he was not to be permitted to try it again, as well as doing what his attorney had said was permissible. Evidently, the inner Krupp might be represented by the symbol of the traditional mailed fist in the velvet glove. His determination and his uncanny ability to play on the weaknesses and fears of his legal custodians (in this case the Western promoters of expediency in a world of uneasy coexistence with Communism), have made Alfried Krupp probably the richest single individual in the world today.
I had traveled from Paris to Essen, checked into the hotel known as the Kaiserhof, and taken a taxi to my meeting with Alfried Krupp during a morning in June, 1953. When I finished talking with him, I had returned by train to Frankfurt-am-Main, been driven to a house at 24 Rheinstrasse, and had enjoyed my talk with Krupp’s colorful American attorney. Not long ago, I read that Carroll received an alleged two and a half million dollars as his legal fee for obtaining clemency for Krupp, for getting Krupp out of prison after he had served only six years of his twelve-year sentence as a war criminal, and for helping Krupp recover his shattered and dispersed manufacturing empire. I do not know if this figure is correct, but if lawyers are entitled to charge not only what the traffic will bear but also for the results of services rendered, I feel that Carroll deserved at least that large a sum.
After my researches had been completed, I wrote a 5,000-word story about Krupp. Collier’s magazine accepted it and an editor wrote me, “The Krupp story couldn’t be better.” My literary agent wired me, COLLIER’S DELIGHTEDLY BUYS KRUPP. NOW FOR A BOOK.”
The last was in reference to the fact that I had decided that I had had enough of playing the Sunday Gentleman, that the Krupp story was to be my final magazine piece, and that I had decided to do what I had always wanted to do, to write books, and was in fact already writing my first book. I finished this book in October, 1954, and it was published under the title of The Fabulous Originals in October, 1955.
But even as my first book was being prepared, my last magazine article was published. The Krupp story appeared in the issue of Collier’s magazine for October 30, 1953. Although it excited a considerable amount of favorable comment, it was a disappointment to me. Collier’s had planned to feature my entire 5,000-word article in a later issue, but suddenly, for some reason, they had to replace another shorter article that was scheduled to go to press, and they were desperate for a substitute story. My Krupp story was on hand. Hastily, Collier’s slashed it to about half its length, and shoved it into the gaping hole left by the canceled piece. My article came out bowdlerized, as vapid and safe as an innocuous Victorian debutante. However, the Krupp story preceding this postscript is the full Krupp story, exactly as I wrote it following my visit to Essen.
After I had decided to follow Alfried Krupp’s footsteps from the moment I had left him at the third-floor elevator in the Krupp works in 1953 until 1965, I found myself astonished at how far he had traveled, and how much had happened to him along the way, in the interval of a dozen years. This, then, is a brief report on the high spots of Krupp’s rise and progress in the years since I saw him, and on his situation today.
At the time I saw Krupp, he had hired, only nine months before, a new general director for all of his enterprises. This recent addition to the firm was a hard-hitting, thirty-nine-year-old Pomeranian businessman named Berthold Beitz. The new director’s biography was splendid. He had resisted joining the Nazi party. He had survived the Second World War by managing oil fields in Poland for the Reich. After the war, he had served as an oil company executive, a banker, and the moving force behind a prospering insurance firm. While I was in Essen, hardly anyone mentioned Beitz to me. Presumably, the impact of his energy had not yet been felt. But in the years since, Beitz, whose annual salary is $300,000, has been the dynamic force behind Krupp’s fantastic revival and expansion.
Someone once remarked that it was Beitz who introduced Alfried Krupp to the twentieth century. I would suggest that Beitz did not “introduce” but rather, to phrase it inelegantly, “dragged” Krupp into the twentieth century. Beitz, breezy, unceremonious, daring, contemptuous of bowing and heel-clicking, affectionate toward first names and New Orleans jazz, was not unexpectedly nicknamed “the American.” It was Beitz who conducted the day-to-day affairs in the works; it was Krupp who made the final decisions. As a result of this collaboration between the forty-eight-year-old Berthold Beitz and the fifty-eight-year-old Alfried Krupp, the Krupp works are today bigger, more influential, more powerful than they have ever been in their entire dramatic history.
Recently, I had a look at a Krupp sales catalog of products and services. There were over four thousand of these items to be found within a patent-leather-covered book as large as a good-sized telephone directory. If an interested customer wanted to buy a locomotive, an oil tanker, a prefabricated city, a set of false teeth, a heavy truck, a child’s toy, a harbor, a crane, a dredge, a time clock, a suspension bridge, he could find one and all in the Krupp catalog.
As his attorney reminded me, Krupp could go anywhere on earth to produce or sell his wares. In these past years, he has done this. Krupp has sold Diesel engines to Brazil, built a twenty-five-million-dollar steel plant in Pakistan, sold trucks to Arabia, licensed and supervised an eight-mile-long monorail in Japan, constructed an oil refinery in Greece, dredged up a pharaoh from the mud of the Nile in Egypt, guided the hunt for uranium in Australia, and erected a steel factory—together with a city to house 100,000 laborers nearby—in India.
Even Soviet Russia, Red China, and the United States have become cautious Krupp customers. Krupp sold a synthetic fiber and chemical plant to Russia, sold industrial equipment to Red China, and in a single year did thirty million dollars’ worth of business with the combined Communist nations. To show his political impartiality, Krupp also, to use his own words, “built a carloading facility for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway at Presque Isle” in the United States. In a recent interview, Krupp stated that 55 percent of his exports went to the free nations of Europe, 10 percent to Latin America, 7 percent to the United States, 9 percent to Asia, 7 percent to India, 1 percent to Russia and Red China, and the other 11 percent elsewhere. Krupp predicted that in years to come, most of his export trade would be with Africa, India, Latin America, and Indonesia.
However, the real strength of Krupp’s power remains in his domestic production of coal and steel. This may seem confusing to the reader who has just finished my 1953 article, in which I explained that Krupp was released as a war criminal under the condition that he sell his “entire coal and steel holdings.” At the time of our interview, Krupp had said to me, “I will repeat…I am not interested in producing armament.” Yet, today, Krupp has not only failed to divest himself of his coal and steel holdings; he has enlarged them. Chronic skeptics may not be surprised. Big money has its own private planet, its own international citizenship, its own code of morality, and its own super-laws which transcend mere national governments. The language of this super-one-world is profit—profit made possible by the frailty of lesser mortals who believe in expediency and self-preservation. This may soun
d old-fashioned. Nevertheless, I suggest it is still true. Yet even the most cynical may wonder—how did Krupp do it?
Well, it was quite simple, really. In 1953, after his release from prison, Alfried Krupp signed the “Mehlen Accord” with the Western powers. He agreed to break up his coal and steel empire and sell off his various holdings at “a fair price,” and all within five years. To promote good will, Krupp gradually sold a number of his companies to relatives and friends, among the latter his munitions colleague. Dr. Axel Wenner-Gren, the Swedish industrialist. But as his vast remaining coal and steel holdings increased in value, Krupp complained to the Allied commission that he could not find buyers outside of his family who could afford his coal and steel plants. After five years, he still possessed them, and began to apply to the Allies for time extensions on their sale. Annual extensions were granted, and have continued to be granted ever since.
There is little doubt that the charitable attitude of the United States, and its European friends, was dictated by political concern. Post-Hitler West Germany had become an ally of the West, one that must be strengthened, not weakened. To keep Krupp intact and muscular was a means of keeping a new ally intact and muscular. The Allies had come to agree with West German chancellors and economic ministers that the old sell-off order was now “out of date.” By 1964, Alfried Krupp again owned the Westfaelische Draht Industrien, the last segment to be repurchased of the coal and steel empire Krupp had begun to dismember. The pretense remains that “no qualified buyer” has ever appeared. Divest himself of his coal and steel? Never. As the Associated Press reported not long ago: “The expectation prevails that no serious attempt will ever be made to force Mr. Krupp to comply.”
Further evidence of Krupp über the Allies was submitted by the North American Newspaper Alliance, in a story from West Germany published in February of 1965:
“Bonn government officials say Krupp’s general manager was able to convince the Johnson Administration that nothing could be gained by forcing Krupp to divest itself of its steelmaking capacity—but that a great deal could be gained for the Western cause by helping Krupp pioneer ‘capitalist-communist’ production partnerships.
“Beitz…had appointments in Washington with Vice-President Humphrey, Undersecretary of State George Ball, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and other top Administration figures. In Germany, there is amazement—and relief—at his enthusiastic reception in Washington.”
In Holiday magazine, Manchester quoted “Alfried’s chief lieutenant”—presumably Beitz—as saying that Krupp would never liquidate his coal and steel holdings, for a Krupp without steel and coal is like “a woman cut off at the navel.” On this anatomical truism, both Soviet Russia and the United States appear, for once, to be in full agreement.
Encouraged by all this benign permissiveness, Alfried Krupp has gradually begun to involve himself more directly in armament manufacture, or at least in manufacturing products that may one day lead to his again making weapons of destruction. In 1963, Krupp, already active in building up a West German air force for NATO, joined with United Aircraft and two other companies to acquire the Focke-Wulf aircraft company of Bremen. Besides making fighter planes, Krupp specialists have completed an atomic reactor and engaged themselves in the burgeoning space program. Will Krupp produce nuclear weapons? Only if he must, Krupp said recently. And then he added, “We must not forget reality.”
Krupp’s comeback is complete. His works in Essen, and his subsidiary firms, are worth over a billion dollars. His annual profits are so enormous that he is said to retain a million dollars a year for his own support and limited pleasures.
Except for his family situation, there have been few important changes in Krupp’s personal life in the last dozen years. He still refuses to live in his one-and-a-half-million-dollar ancestral castle. Villa Huegel, but uses it instead for large social functions such as receptions for one or two hundred guests or the entertainment of notables like the King of Greece, the President of Brazil, the Chancellor of Germany, and assorted American ambassadors. He dwells modestly in a fifteen-room house near the villa. He still drives a Porsche to the office early every morning, and returns home late.
When I saw him, Krupp was confining his activities largely to Essen. Today, he has become mobile. He travels abroad two or three months of each year. He makes these trips in his private plane, which he often pilots himself. In the last decade, he has visited Canada, Venezuela, Turkey, India, Egypt, and Australia (where, alighting in inhospitable Melbourne, he was met by pickets carrying signs emblazoned with “Butcher” and “Jew-killer”). And, although convicted war criminals are banned from entry into the United States, a news magazine announced in 1957 that Alfried Krupp’s passport had at last been approved to receive an American visa.
Barring travel, his pleasures are as austere as ever. An airplane, yes. A schooner, still. But, mainly, after hours and on weekends, he devotes himself to photography, card games, Scotch, and solitary meditation. He is a stranger to books.
Nor does Krupp find solace in a large and closely knit family. One of his two surviving brothers, Berthold, who had been an artillery officer in occupied Romania during the Second World War, spends much of his time with his wife and offspring in an old castle on the Rhine River. Alfried’s other living brother, Haarold, whom he had told me about when I was in Essen, remained a Russian prisoner of war in the Urals for two more years after our talk. Through the intervention of West Germany’s President Adenauer, Haarold was released by the Russians in 1955, after serving eleven years of his twenty-five-year sentence. Haarold is now a partner with brother, Berthold, in a German chemical company,, and also in a German automotive-parts firm. One of Alfried’s sisters, Irmgard, lives with her six children in Bavaria; the other sister, Waldtraut, has acquired a new mate and a new home in Argentina.
While these five children of the elder Krupp have survived, the family ranks have nevertheless been reduced by two. In the years since I saw him, Alfried Krupp has lost both his mother and his wife. His legendary mother, Bertha Krupp, died at the age of seventy-one in Essen during September, 1957. His second wife. Vera von Hohenfeldt Langer Wisbar Knauer Krupp, onetime “actress,” naturalized American citizen, had already left him in 1956.
I was surprised to learn the last, recollecting how loyal to her husband Vera Krupp had appeared to be during my interview. I can see now, more clearly than I did then, that her attendance at our meeting had not been motivated by Krupp’s social dependence upon her but by his desire to have another American in the room, one who was on his side.
Krupp is now a bachelor again, and perhaps he was always meant to be one. His first marriage, which had taken place in 1937, was to Anneliese Bahr, the daughter of a German manufacturer. She had been a divorcee, and Krupp’s dominant father had disapproved. Obediently, Krupp had divorced her in 1941. He had been more his own man when he married for the second time in 1952. I am told that Vera quickly found Essen too restricting and boring, found her mother-in-law too much in evidence, found that the works were her husband’s only real interest, and after four years her attorneys informed Krupp that she wished a divorce. According to Norbert Muhlen, a Krupp biographer, “it was hinted that she could disclose quite a few secret foreign accounts and even more secret political schemes of her husband.” At any rate, there was a settlement made behind closed doors—Krupp’s biographer says that Vera received a five-million-dollar settlement and a $250,000-a-year income for life’. Thereafter, Vera Krupp, free agent, cropped up in the more frivolous gossip columns from time to time as a glamorous female personage reportedly being escorted by male celebrities to social affairs at fashionable resorts, and to the intimate gatherings of cafe society. Eventually, Vera found her way to Las Vegas, Nevada, where she was said to have invested $185,000 in the New Frontier Hotel. When last heard from, she was living on a 400,000-acre ranch outside Las Vegas.
Since the Krupp works have never been a publicly owned corporation, or even a limited partnership, but ent
irely a one-man business, and remain such today, it is natural to speculate on the royal line of succession. Who are Krupp’s heirs? The direct blood heir is his handsome, tall son, Arndt, presented to Krupp by his first wife in 1940. Arndt Krupp was educated in Switzerland, attended Albert Ludwig University in Freiburg, and later, studied business courses at the University of Cologne. After he had indulged in his brief postgraduate fling at nightclub life with German beauties, Arndt was shipped off to Japan in 1959 for indoctrination in a Krupp subsidiary. Recently, he was at work for his father in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Today, Krupp remains alone, sole master of what H. G. Wells characterized as “Kruppism, this sordid, enormous trade in the instruments of death.” Perhaps Krupp’s main love and only family are the 100,000 laborers upon whom he bestows a lavish paternalism and who, in turn, have never staged a strike against him. He has their devotion and loyalty completely. They will defend him, unto death, against all enemies, and they will defend his humanity, present and past. As William Manchester remarked in 1964: “They insist that he was jailed only because Krupp made guns; the fact that Krupp also supplied dog whips and steel truncheons to drive spindly chattels through the streets of Essen is passed over in silence.”
But not passed over in silence by Alfried Krupp. I was relieved to read the other day that Krupp has agreed to compensate the Jewish slave laborers who survived their sentences to the works. It seemed a little late, this gesture, but it was nice because it was so in character. It proved that Alfried Krupp is still his father’s son: a tycoon who can tell himself money is everything, and there is no man who cannot be bought, not even a broken one, not even a dead one.
The Sunday Gentleman Page 46