The Sunday Gentleman (59 page)

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 The Allies had come to agree with West German chancellors and economic ministers that the old sell-off order was now “out of date.”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 entirely 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.

16

The Seven Secret

Prison Cells

Several weeks ago, a taxi bumped over the uneven cobbled pavement of the Wilhelmstrasse, in the outskirts of Berlin, and came to a halt before the towering red-brick walls of the most heavily guarded and most highly secretive prison in the world.

The German cabdriver turned from his wheel, “
Hier ist was Sie suchen, mein Herr
. Spandau Prison!”

The American reporter, in the rear seat, stepped out of the taxi. “
Danke schoen
. Hold it a few minutes. I want to look around.”

Crossing the street, the American saw four large brick houses facing him across the narrow thoroughfare. These were the permanent billets for the director, wardens, and guards from Soviet Russia, Great Britain, France, and the United States, the four powers in charge of running the incredible German jail. Directly behind the houses rose the prison itself, with its blue-steel entrance door, and its medieval-styled twenty-foot-high walls.

Determined to have a closer look, the American reporter walked around one of the billets to the side wall of Spandau. A sign, in both English and in German, greeted him:

WARNING—DANGER—DO NOT APPROACH THIS FENCE. GUARDS HAVE ORDERS TO SHOOT.

Between the sign and the prison proper, he saw a series of obstacles that made Alcatraz and Devil’s Island seem, by comparison, invitingly accessible. A massive roll of concertina wire lay coiled and menacing in front of a wickedly barbed barrier about ten feet high. Behind this, fiendishly modem, gleamed an electrically charged fence set in a cement base. To the rear of that stretched another roll of concertina wire, and then three yards of green grass, and finally, the crimson-colored giant solid wall enclosing the buildings of Spandau.

Atop this wall, on a wooden platform fitted out with two immense searchlights and a cubicle with three large glass windows, an unsmiling British Tommy, rifle slung over his shoulder, moved slowly round and round.

Studying the layout of the block-square prison, the American reporter counted six of these sentry lofts perched along the high wall. He jotted, on the back of an envelope, a note about this and other penal refinements. Then, stuffing the envelope in one pocket, he pulled a camera out of the other and brought it up to his eye.

That moment, the roof fell on him. Or so it felt.

For in a split second, the entire area seemed to swarm with wild life—wild-eyed life, that is. Two large, angry men, one in civvies, one in a blue uniform, came charging out of the prison toward him. Two other men, even larger and angrier, tumbled out of the brick building beside him. The total effect, the American reporter recalled later, was that of being run over by a stampede of charging rhinoceroses.

There was a brief, silent, panting skirmish over the camera. The two from the prison heatedly crowded the American, while the two from the building held back, watching and listening sullenly.

“You’re in trouble, brother,” the blue-uniformed guard was saying. “This is a security area. Top secret.”

“Nothing in that sign says you can’t look or take pictures—from the outside.”

The guard was not interested in technicalities. “Two more steps and you’d have been shot dead. What’s your nationality? What are you doing here?”

The American handed over his green passport, and his army travel orders for Berlin, three of them written in English and one in Russian. A vigorous fifteen minutes of argument followed. The air was blued, the notes studied, the camera film confiscated.

“Lucky for you we’re Americans,” the guard said. “The others wouldn’t have let you off.” He lowered his voice. “See those two over there. The ones from the building. They’re two of the eight permanent Russian guards here. They spotted you from an upstairs window. They reported to the prison that you were taking notes. At the same time, the British sentry up there phoned back that you looked suspicious. Listen, pal, this is a four-power jail. Inside, we’ve got seven of the biggest criminals in the world. We can’t be too careful. Haven’t you heard about Spandau? No pictures. No stories. No outsiders. No
nothing
. Get it? We hate to talk to you like this, but we’ve got to. As it is, those Russians are taking in everything—they know you’re an American, and we’ll have to explain about you at the next four-power prison directors’ meeting. So take off fast, while you can. Last week, a German photographer did what you were doing. He’s still in jail.”