The Sunday Gentleman (58 page)

Krupp and I went on to discuss politics. I had a clipping from a London paper. In it, Philip Noel-Baker, a Labourite, had objected to Krupp’s release, remarking that it was dangerous: “The Krupps have never been able to keep their hands off politics.” What did Krupp have to say about that? He shrugged. “It is exaggerated, as those things always are. We are a large firm, so of course we must watch politics, become involved in politics. But we have never been active. Personally, I am not a bit interested in politics. I remember when the Americans were interrogating me at Nuremberg, one of them said, “The trouble with you, Krupp, is that you should have been more interested in politics!’”

Once during our conversation, Krupp rose and led me to a large window, overlooking the battered blocks surrounding his present plant. The works were only one-fourth their former size. There had been 275 air raids on Essen, and 55 direct hits on the Krupp works. These had caused complete devastation in 33 percent of the area, and heavy damage in 29 percent.

“The greatest damage came after the war was over,” said Krupp. When the Russians and British moved in, they began dynamiting and dismantling. The Russians carried off 130,-000 tons of valuable machinery, even carting away the entire Borbeck Smelting Plant, which weighed 75,000 tons. They removed the originals of all of Krupp’s steel patents, and enough industrial blueprints and diagrams to paper 30,000 square yards. The British made off with 150,000 tons of scrap iron. “We are limited now,” said Krupp. “We have room for only sixteen thousand workers instead of the prewar 160,000. Still, we will manage.”

Krupp himself is the complete boss of the works. He explained that he had a large family, however, and that their ties were close, and so all participated in the firm’s earnings. Krupp’s mother. Bertha, now sixty-seven, has returned from Salzburg to live in Essen. Of his four younger brothers, two were lolled during the war. Klaus, a Luftwaffe lieutenant and holder of the Iron Cross, was shot down over the Hürtgen Forest in 1940. And Eckbert, attached to the Italian Army, lost his life in action outside San Marino, Italy, in 1945. Another brother, Haarold, is still a prisoner of war in Russia. “He was sentenced to twenty-five years at hard labor for espionage in Manchuria,” said Krupp. “He’s never been in Manchuria; We send him a parcel every month, and occasionally receive Red Cross cards from him.”

Krupp spoke at length about his tastes. He dislikes opera, has no time for movies or nightclubs, but enjoys playing host to a few guests at his home. He used to hunt a good deal, and sail (he won third prize in the 1936 Olympics), but no longer has time for either. His only hobby is photography. He has visited Egypt and Israel, but has never seen the United States. He expects to visit it one day soon.

His enemies distrust him, his employees fear and respect him, and many Germans worship him. I have heard him called a Nazi, a monster, a scoundrel, a liar; and an Englishman said, “Krupp is harder than the steel he makes.” His attorney Carroll loyally insists that Krupp is misunderstood. “I’ve known lots of German industrialists. This man is different. He never commands. He never pushes people around. He spends half his workdays talking to laborers, marking down complaints and problems in the notebook he carries. And, big as he is, he is really modest. He traveled down to Frankfurt once to confer with me. We talked all day. By night, it was raining. He did not feel like returning to Essen. He said, ‘Do you think I can get a room at the Frankfurter Hof?’ That’s the best hotel in town. I smiled. He reached for the phone, called the hotel. He asked for a room, never told them his name. The clerk said that they were all filled up. Krupp turned to me. They’re all filled up. Can you think of another hotel?’ I did not believe that they were filled up. I told my secretary to call them back. She did. She said, ‘Herr Alfried Krupp von Bohlen wants a room.’ Immediately, three clerks were on the phone shouting, ‘Krupp? How many rooms does he wish?’ But he’d never think of telling them his name.”

This picture of a modest, diligent, peaceful Krupp can hardly be the whole truth. For truth is two-sided. And on the other side is the historical fact that cannons are in the Krupp blood.

The enigma of Krupp is buried in coal and steel. Would Krupp make coal and steel again? He had told me no, flatly no. I asked his attorney. “Coal and steel?” said Carroll. “Look, he’s had his chances. Both Mexico and Brazil offered him free land, if he’d come over there and build steel factories and manufacture. He could have done it. He did not. He feels that he must stay in Essen. He has an obligation to his workers and to his family.”

Still, I was not satisfied. Would this obligation continue to anchor him to Essen? Would he or would he not be back in armament again—with American permission or without it? Carroll considered the question, then blinked at me, and slowly replied, “Remember one thing. Alfried Krupp is not allowed to produce coal and steel inside Germany. But it’s a big world. And he is permitted to go anywhere in the world, even to the United States or South America, and produce coal and steel again. This is permitted. And this he may do again—one day.”

WHAT HAS HAPPENED SINCE…

Twelve years ago, I asked Earl Carroll, Krupp’s attorney, if his client would one day be back in armament production, with or without American permission. Carroll had replied equivocally that even if Krupp could not produce coal and steel inside Germany, he could do so anywhere else in the world. “This is permitted,” Carroll had said. “And this he may do again—one day.”

Today, I have a more exact answer to the question I asked Carroll. The “one day” came swiftly. Now, a dozen years later, Alfried Krupp is producing coal and steel not only elsewhere in the world, but inside West Germany as well. And somehow, I must confess, thinking back to my meeting with Krupp, I am not surprised at all.

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 sound old-fashioned. Nevertheless, I suggest it is still true. Yet even the most cynical may wonder—how did Krupp do it?