The Krupp Family
—Chrissie

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This topic was prompted by the story of Bertha Krupp, whose marriage arrangements were overseen by Kaiser Wilhelm II because it would have been unseemly for a daughter to inherit the family business.

            If you’ve heard the name Krupp, you have likely associated it with two things: German industrial manufacturing or their contributions to the German military in World War II, but the company goes back much, much further. It began with Arndt Krupp in 1587, who made the family fortune buying up and reselling houses and property around the independent city-state of Essen, part of the Holy Roman Empire, in the western part of the modern state of Germany. His son, Anton, put money into producing guns during the Thirty Years’ War, beginning an association between the Krupps and the German War machine that lasted over three centuries.

The family’s primary income stayed with real estate and trade until the late 1700s when they got involved in coal and iron mining, and held ownership over some cloth mills and a factory that produced tobacco in the form of snus. In 1800, the family purchased an iron forge, allowing them to process the iron they were mining in-house. These large and lucrative investments were all done under the leadership of Helene Amalie Ascherfeld-Krupp, better known as the Widow Krupp, a status she acquired at the age of 25 in 1757. It was not as unusual as we tend to think for a woman to take over the family business, particularly the widow of the owner. She maintained control of most of it until her death in 1810. The family and company were so successful under her leadership that she is credited with the foundation of the Krupp industrial dynasty, despite it having been begun under her great-great grandfather Arndt.

Her successor, her grandson Friedrich, was not as successful. In his first foray into business, at age 19, he caused a previously profitable iron forge to become so unprofitable as to require his grandmother to sell it less than two years after he began running it. Friedrich did have a purpose in mind with some of the money he spent, however: to figure out the process of casting steel. He was moderately successful, produced smelted, rather than cast, steel by 1816. While he was chasing this, his wife, Therese, was making sure the company stayed afloat. When Friedrich died in 1826, the company passed to his fourteen-year-old son Alfried, but was actually run by Therese. They barely broke even until 1841, when another of her sons, Hermann, invented and patented the spoon-roller; sales of this brought in enough money to expand to cast-steel products.

The company became more associated with weapons manufacture at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, where they showed the first cannon made entirely of cast steel and the largest cast steel ingot produced to that point. In that same year, Krupp began producing railway parts, exporting a massive number to the United States. This business provided the money that allowed Alfried to focus on weaponry. He developed a breech-loading cannon that earned Krupp a contract to supply the Prussian military beginning in 1859. These proved their worth in the Franco-Prussian War, which inadvertently became a contest between Krupp’s breach-loading steel cannons and traditional bronze ones.

Alfried Krupp established the company as a sole proprietorship, the ownership of which was to be passed by primogeniture, meaning it goes to the firstborn son. He also put into practice strict oversight of employees, which was “mitigated” by the social benefits that came with employment by Krupp. He made Essen a company town, with the company providing housing and schools. Employees had insurance in case of their death, and widows were given rent-free accommodations. This was intended to offset and distract from requirements like an oath of loyalty to the company over all else. Alfried Krupp was devoted to his work, not his wife, and so she spent most of their marriage away from Essen, with their son Friedrich Alfred (known as Fritz).

When Fritz inherited in 1887, he continued to focus on weaponry and railroad parts, but also put a great deal of money into research and development. From this, the company created nickel steel, which they then used to produce warships and U-boats through Krupp’s purchase of the main warship manufacturing company in Germany. This success made Fritz part of powerful circles: he was a member of Prussia’s House of Lords and then the German Reichstag. He counted Kaiser Wilhelm II as a friend. His powerful public position and reputation allowed him cover for his personal life, where he expressed his otherwise closeted homosexuality, which was illegal in Germany. When he was outed in the German press, the Kaiser defended him, including supporting him in a lawsuit against one of the papers. In 1902, Krupp’s wife Margarethe was sent anonymous letters and photographs exposing her husband. She  asked the Kaiser for help in the matter, and found herself committed to an asylum for her trouble. Further allegations, and demands that he be arrested, were published in October and November of 1902. Fritz Krupp was found dead on 22 November 1902 in an alleged suicide.

Fritz and Margarethe had two daughters and no sons, so ownership of the company passed to his eldest daughter, Bertha. This was the third time a woman had inherited control of the company, but the first time it was perceived to be a problem. Admittedly, Bertha was only sixteen when her father died, but the problem had more to do with the social climate of turn-of-the-century Germany. Influenced greatly by Kaiser Wilhelm, the company was removed from her sole proprietorship and incorporated, but Bertha retained a controlling stock with only four of the company’s shares out of her hands. The Kaiser then began a search for a husband for Bertha, to assure that those shares would be correctly handled. He found Gustav von Bolen und Halbach, an established member of the diplomatic corps and the grandson of General Henry Bohlen, who fought on the Union side of the American Civil War. In his speech at the wedding, the Kaiser announced that Gustav would be allowed/required the unusual instance of taking his wife’s name. Their eldest son, Alfried, inherited both his mother’s surname Krupp and his father’s, Bolen und Halbach, the rest of their seven children had only their father’s surname. Bertha’s opinions on the matter were not recorded.

At the beginning of World War I, Krupp redirected most of its manufacturing to arms, providing so much that Gustav was named a war criminal, though he was never tried. After the war, prevented by the Treaty of Versailles from producing arms, the company shifted to consumer products and some industrial steel; the Chrysler Building was capped with Krupp-made steel in 1929. They did also do some arms development (in violation of the treaty) which was handled by a Swedish intermediary company.

As the Nazis grew more powerful, Gustav became enamored with Nazi ideology, but he (and Bertha) disliked Hitler personally. Even so, when Hitler offered Gustav the position of Chairman of the Reich Federation of German Industry , he took it. With this authority, he removed Jewish people from its sub-organizations and made sure that Krupp was a key part of Hitler’s secret rearmament programs. Despite the potential benefit, Gustav was critical of Hitler’s expansionist foreign policy, particularly after he violated the Munich Agreement. By the time the war began in 1939, Gustav had been displaced in the company by his son, Alfried. He was a true believer in Nazism, to the point of holding a purchased position in the SS. Hitler arranged that the company go back into a sole proprietorship, and all of Bertha’s holdings were transferred to her son. Gustav remained involved in the day-to-day operations, regularly spending his days at the office, but with greatly decreased authority after a stroke caused a decline in his cognitive abilities.

As Germany occupied more and more of Europe, Krupp took over related industrial sites, essentially as spoils of war. Alfried also actively and willingly employed slave labor collected from concentration camps. The Krupp operations were almost completely destroyed in Allied bombing, and the city of Essen ended up in the British Occupation Zone at the end of the war. Both Alfried and Gustav were accused of war crimes and brought to Nuremburg for trial; Gustav was excused on the basis of dementia, but was the only German to be accused of war crimes in both world wars. Alfried was convicted of crimes against humanity, with a sentence of twelve years in prison and the loss of all of his property. He served only two years of that sentence, however, because he was granted amnesty by the High Commissioner of the American Zone in 1951 on the basis that he and the Krupp company were useful to the rebuilding of Europe.

Krupp spent the postwar years focusing on the more profitable elements of the business, buying up related companies around the world and using advertising and public relations in hopes that people would forget the Krupp name was stamped on much of the Nazi war machine. By the end of the 1950s, Alfried Krupp was the richest man in Europe. His son, Arndt, had no interest in running the company, so it was reorganized and again incorporated. A research foundation was added under the same name. Krupp merged with Thyssen in 1999 and still produces steel and industrial products.