I’m way out in the middle of reading William Manchester’s The Arms of Krupp 1587-1968. The chronicle is astonishing and a bit frightening, as Manchester recounts the story of the largest armaments merchant in the history of the world (until that time, at least), and the equally frightening schizophrenia the Krupps practiced as they sold cannon and armor-plate indiscriminately to governments around the world for nearly a century, oblivious to the possible political consequences.
Naturally, not everything Krupp sold was weaponry; Alfred Krupp built the firm’s early success on rails and steel tires for railcars and locomotives. But do as you will, the story comes back to the steel cannon that blew the world to tiny pieces in 1914 and again in 1939.
The wonder was that the Krupps succeeded at all. Founder Friedrich Krupp almost ran the company into the ground through wild mismanagement, his son Alfred was an explosive-tempered martinet who alternated bursts of designing and manufacturing genius with idiocies of marketing that should have sunk him a hundred times over, and several times almost did. He wasn’t helped any by the hidebound, reactionary attitudes of military officials everywhere, and particularly in his native Prussia; convinced that only bronze could be suited to making artillery, they wilfully ignored test-range results that showed Krupp’s steel guns literally blowing their bronze competitors off the field. Only the repeated personal intervention of Kaiser Wilhelm I, and later his grandson Wilhelm II (“Kaiser Bill” of World War I) kept Prussia from going down in history as a fourth-rate military power instead of the core of modern Germany.
Alfred wasn’t the only neurotic of the family; his son Friedrich (“Fritz”) was both a Machiavellian manager, far better than his father at getting results that meant orders in Krupp order books, and a flaming queen who was eventually driven to a probable suicide by the threat of exposure and prosecution for homosexuality. (Germany in the late nineteenth century had a double standard for queerness that makes our own double standard look positively enlightened.) After that, the worst happened: there was no male heir, so the oldest daughter was married off to a minor noble of no particular distinction simply to get a man back into the top spot of the company; Wilhelm II himself took responsibility for making the match, and then made each generation’s eldest son in the new family (von Bohlen und Halbach) a Krupp by Royal proclamation. The eldest male heir, and only the heir, was thereafter to be named Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach.
I’m not yet to 1914, so the real sparks haven’t begun to fly, but even at the point where I am now, Manchester makes it abundantly obvious it’s going to be a series of huge crashes from here on.
