The Sunday Gentleman (56 page)

When I asked him if he had any ambition or wish for the future, Dr. Locard replied that he had but one. “To die in peace,” he said. “At eighty-six, that is the unique perspective.”

15

Tycoon

At seven-thirty every morning, a lean, tall, somewhat hunched and preoccupied man, with receding hairline, shaggy eyebrows and angular Teutonic face, hurriedly leaves his modest seven-room house in suburban Werden, Germany, folds himself into a small Porsche sedan, and speeds toward the industrial city of Essen.

By eight o’clock, he is piloting his tiny car through the gray, grubby, broken streets of the Ruhr metropolis, past a wildly jagged landscape etched by 275 Allied bomber raids, to the rubble and ruin surrounding a towering office building at 103 Altendorferstrasse, the headquarters of the world-famous Krupp works. Parking his Porsche before the building, he quickly strides inside, catches the open-faced cubicle of a nonstop rotating elevator, and is carried up to the third floor.

As he moves toward his office, his eyes are introspective and worried. His face is furrowed beyond his forty-six years. His brown suit is undistinguished. To the busy employees who brush past him in the corridor, he looks like just another anonymous min or executive, rushing to reach his overcrowded desk on time. Passing him, few recognize him—yet all know and fear his name, depend upon him as serfs once depended upon feudal lords, and speak of him as one of the few hopes for a reborn and virile Fatherland.

For the name of this seemingly pedestrian figure is the name of the most powerful man in Germany today, one of the strongest men in all Western Europe, one of the richest human beings on earth—and the center of a great storm of international controversy. His family name—synonymous with the wholesale merchandising of death—has hung over generations of Americans and Europeans, like a massive dagger. It is Krupp—and he is Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, of Essen.’

Commonplace though his appearance may be, and his habits, his background is incredible. His great-grandfather made cannon for Bismarck, his grandfather made U-boats for the Kaiser, his father made Tiger tanks for Hitler. His mother, Bertha, still dwelling near him in Essen, gave her name to the Big Bertha gun, which shelled Paris in World War I. Alfried Krupp himself was raised in a home with 117 rooms—the guest house had 60 rooms—and the family was attended by 125 servants. Often, as many as 600 guests came to dinner. Ten years ago, when he took over “the works,” as he likes to call the family factories, it covered five square miles, employed 160,000 laborers, and kept the Reich’s war machine rolling.

At war’s end, Krupp was imprisoned, tried as a war criminal (for planning aggressive war, plundering captive nations, using slave labor), and sentenced by three American judges to twelve years in Landsberg prison (where Hitler wrote
Mein Kampf
). Two years ago, after serving only half his term, Krupp was pardoned, all his wealth—and power—returned to him. Except for having to give his promise to stay out of coal and steel production, he was back in business as usual.

Once again, Krupp controls his shipyards in Bremen and Kiel, as well as his factories in Essen which produce locomotives, Diesel trucks, tools, home fixtures; his real estate holdings which embrace 10,000 houses; his chain of hotels; his 120 food shops; and in addition, any moneys to be received from the enforced sale of nine Ruhr coal mines and five iron mines. His coal mines, which produce 7,000,000 tons a year, and his steel plants, which produce 1,500,000 tons a year, would gross him about fifty million dollars if they are sold. His other property is worth about ninety-five million dollars, and it now enriches him with a profit of three and a half million dollars each year.

When his fortune was returned to Krupp, the great controversy began—and rages still. In commuting Krupp’s sentence and restoring his property, John I. McCloy, then United States High Commissioner in Germany, stated, “I can find no personal guilt in the defendant Krupp sufficient to distinguish him above all others sentenced by the Nuremberg courts.” Immediately, from Moscow, Russia’s Izvestia screamed, “The release of the Nazi leader once more confirms that the American aggressors are recruiting Fascist specialists in mass murder to help prepare a new war. Washington is no longer satisfied with using Wehrmacht generals for drilling Eisenhower’s divisions. They need the Fascist manufacturers of gas vans, the builders of the devilish ovens of the Auschwitz, the merchants in guns, bombs and poison gas.” From France, the newspaper
Franc-Tireur
, after alleging that Krupp had remarked, “There are good and bad moments in life,” commented, “But the good moments for a Krupp, let us add, correspond to the bad moments for the people.”

From England came the most mixed reaction. Six members of Parliament, Labourites, regarded Krupp’s return to the family business as “a betrayal of the men and women who laid down their lives in two World Wars. It will encourage the re-emergence of Nazi elements.” On the other hand, a correspondent for a staid London daily reported, “United States officials claim that the present danger is not that Krupp may sneak back into arms manufacturing, but that he may refuse point blank to do so. Allied officials here in Germany take the view that the production of arms Ln the Ruhr would not only add to the military security of Western Europe, but would also divert dangerous German competition from overseas trade and markets.”

Even now, Krupp continues to remain a subject of disagreement among the Western Allies. Actually, the United States is firmly resisting the use of Krupp in the European armament race—fearing his factories, rebuilt for arms, might one day fall into the hands of the onrushing Reds.

On the other hand, Great Britain feels Krupp should make guns and tanks, but only under rigid controls. As one British official explained, “The sooner Krupp pitches in to do his share in rearming against Russia, the better. We don’t like to see Krupp capturing all the civilian export markets, while the rest of us struggle to produce arms for the common defense.”

As the Allies debate their future policy toward him, Alfried Krupp insists he is fully honoring his agreement He is cooperating in arrangements for the eventual sale of his entire coal and steel holdings. He is avoiding armament production. “I will repeat what I said two years ago,” he told me. “I am not interested in producing armament.” There are some cynics who question this statement—feeling he will jump at the opportunity to make guns, if we permit him to—and will one day make them anyway, even if we don’t permit him. They point to the activities of his father, who promised the Allies not to help Germany rearm after World War I—but later, bragged that he had “duped” the Allies by milking money from the United States for his “peace industries.” Actually, he was designing rockets and setting up a dummy submarine firm in Holland that drafted blueprints for U-boats, which later saved the Nazis “from two to four years” in production time.

But, at the moment, there is every evidence Alfried Krupp is engaged solely in peaceful pursuits. His factories in Essen are again booming. He is occupied with supplying South Africa with five million dollars’ worth of locomotives, India with thirty-one million dollars’ worth of blast furnaces, and Yugoslavia with expensive mining machinery.

While United States government representatives in Western Germany continue to confine Krupp to locomotives and blast furnaces, there are certain American Army men who agree with the conservative British elements. They want to see Krupp helping us rearm Europe against Communism. And they regularly make overtures to Krupp—unofficially.

Recently, the United States Army asked Krupp to repair American tanks. He flatly refused. Angrily, an American ambassador reminded Krupp that he could be forced to cooperate. Blandly, Krupp replied, “First, you put me in jail for making arms, and now you threaten me if I don’t make them. What do you want me to do?”

American officials don’t know what they want Krupp to do—simply because they don’t know the real Krupp at all. They don’t know if they can trust him. They don’t know if he is honest. They don’t know what he thinks, feels, or believes. For that matter, the majority of people in Europe do not know anything about him, either.

Few important men in our time, possessing so fully the power to affect the futures of so many the earth over, remain as little-known and mysterious as Herr Krupp. Primarily to solve this mystery—to learn the kind of security risk Alfried Krupp really is, to learn if the dynasty that made cannons for Bismarck and Hitler should be encouraged to make them for the democracies—I traveled the road to Essen, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt-am-Main. I observed, questioned, listened—listened to the elusive Krupp himself, to his second wife, his attorneys, his workmen, his friends, his American overseers, his British and French critics.

I realized, immediately, that to understand Herr Krupp one must understand his colorful ancestry. The Krupps of Essen, I discovered, have always been a dynasty dealing in death. It all began in 1587, when a wine merchant named Arndt Krupe married a wealthy German girl whose family made suits of armor. In the years after, Krupe became Krupp and prospered mightily due to the Thirty Years’ War. By 1812, when the United States was locked in its sea conflict with Britain, the Krupps had begun to produce modern arms and feed them to Napoleon for his invasion of Russia. After Waterloo, the Krupp fortunes waned.

In 1850, Alfried’s great-grandfather, a stem, towering, spade-bearded gentleman, perfected a formula in Essen for casting steel cannons. At once, the family’s wealth was reestablished. In 1866, Krupp cannons were cheerfully sold to both sides during the Austro-Prussian War, and in 1870, Krupp cannon backed Bismarck’s blood-and-iron Reich in the Franco-Prussian War.

By 1902, the Krupp family had monopolized German armament production. When the patriarch of the family died that year, the Kaiser himself walked behind the coffin.

At the outset of World War I, the legal head of the firm was a female. Bertha Krupp. Ten years earlier, in Holland, Bertha had met a German career diplomat, Gustav von Bohlen, whose grandfather had fought for the North in the American Civil War and whose cousin is Charles “Chip” Bohlen, then United States Ambassador to Russia. At the age of nineteen, Gustav von Bohlen had served in the German Embassy, at Washington, D.C., in Peking, and in Vatican City. After marrying Bertha in 1906, he served Krupp.

In 1909, holding power of attorney from Bertha, and ordered by Kaiser Wilhelm to adopt the Krupp name, he took over management of the booming Krupp works. As World War I progressed, he produced the first U-boat, a great quantity of battleships, the most lethal mortar in the world (which he named “Big Bertha,” after his wife—the Allies later applied the same nickname to the outsized cannon that bombarded Paris), and seven heirs, the eldest of whom was named Alfried Krupp von Bohlen.

Alfried was raised in the ancestral home of the Krupp family, a mammoth mausoleum outside Essen called Villa Huegel, which was built at a cost of one and a half million dollars by his grandfather in 1871. Alfried rattled about the 117 rooms of the three-story pile, riding the silent elevators, using the indoor swimming pool, poking about the electric kitchens. “It wasn’t built for comfort,” a friend of the family commented. “Old Krupp built the villa as a showcase. He was in the export business, and his business depended upon international good will. He didn’t trust the stiff-necked Prussian government to entertain foreigners properly. He thought he could do it better under his own roof. Often, when Alfried sat down to dinner, there were between four hundred and six hundred persons at the tables. He met kings, ambassadors, bankers, celebrities of every kind. He still remembers meeting and worshiping Henry Ford. And in the villa he met the Duke of Windsor, who remains a close friend.”

Recently, it was announced that Alfried Krupp had given up Villa Huegel and was donating it to various German scientific and cultural societies. I asked him why he had done this. “Because it’s too big,” he said. “People just don’t live like that any more. The upkeep is enormous. Good servants are impossible to get. Besides, it’s not an agreeable place. I was raised there, but it never felt like a home. I always dreamed of having a small modem house in the garden of the estate. And now I have it, and I’m happier.”

Until he was fourteen, Alfried had private tutors. He remembers learning French before German. Then, after three years at a private school in Essen, he attended the University of Munich, specializing in meteorology. He graduated a Diploma Engineer. Had he ever thought of any other career? “No,” he admitted. “I’m a fifth-generation Krupp. I was educated to take over the works. I joined the firm in 1936, as a junior executive, signing letters. But I didn’t enjoy management, and was transferred to the technical end.”

Alfried’s father, Gustav, did enjoy management, but faced countless political difficulties. Today, the Krupp family maintains that in 1933, Gustav contributed over a million marks to von Hindenburg in an effort to defeat “that upstart” Hitler. This may be true. On the other hand, records prove that Gustav, in that same year, definitely contributed to Hitler’s election fund. Through the years, he continued to back Hitler. In 1941, Gustav wrote and published an article which stated, “After the assumption of power by Adolf Hitler, I had the satisfaction of being able to report to the Fuehrer that Krupp stood ready, after a short warming-up period, to begin the rearmament of the German people without any gaps of experience.” During World War II, besides serving as Hitler’s main source of armament production, Gustav manufactured armor for the highly effective Tiger tanks and created the Sevastopol gun, the world’s largest mortar which hurled seven-ton shells at the Russians. Early in 1943, Gustav von Bohlen became half paralyzed and wholly bedridden. Bertha insisted that he retire. In April, 1943, Alfried Krupp was promoted to chairman of the board and, early in 1944, assumed full control of the works.

A year and a half later, as the Nazi war machine disintegrated and the Allies closed in on the Berlin bunker. Hitler ordered Krupp to report to him. Krupp refused. Hitler sent the Gestapo to arrest him. The Allies got to Krupp first. Krupp recalls that he was in the villa, pacing, waiting, the night Germany surrendered. Krupp gave himself up to a British Tommy. He was kept locked in the villa for thirty days, then shipped to Frankfurt-am-Main, where he was placed in a military guardhouse. Shortly thereafter, he was delivered to Nuremberg, to be tried as a major war criminal.