Word: krupp
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Efficiency and Eccentricity. Though the Krupp family goes back to the 16th century, its modern mold was cast about 150 years ago by Alfred Krupp (great-grandfather of the modern-day Alfried) who, at 14, inherited a nearly bankrupt little ironworks in Essen. By 1851, he had produced the world's largest cast-steel ingot, as well as the first seamless railway wheels, and was soon building a fortune out of the Industrial Revolution and the U.S. railway boom...
...only as a brilliant sideline that he designed the first cast-steel, breech-loading cannon, which gave France, in the War of 1870, its first taste of Krupp-built firepower...
Skyrockets and Suicide. Alfred's son Fritz was turnip-shaped and unprepossessing. But guiding the Konzern from 1887 to 1902, he built Krupp into a world industrial power that sold arms to countries from Chile to China and reaped rewards in ducats, guilders, guldens, livres, maravedis, pounds, schillings and rubles. The unofficial motto of the firm became Wenn Deutschland bluht, bluht Krupp (When Germany flourishes, Krupp flourishes...
...Bertha. The Krupps followed strictest rules of primogeniture, loading the whole of family wealth and power upon the eldest child. Siblings were absorbed into the firm, but only as drab underlings. After Fritz's death in 1902, the succession fell to his daughter, Bertha, and led to the long reign of a king-consort, Gustav von Bohlen und Hal-bach. Hand-picked by the Kaiser to marry the munitions business, he was also granted the right to use the Krupp name and to pass it along, though only for one generation and only to his eldest...
Manchester's book is most detailed when the author evaluates the Krupp responsibility for encouraging Hitler and triggering World War II. As early as 1920, Gustav had put his most talented armorers secretly to work on the weapons that ultimately were used in 1939. But it was Gustav's lonely, introspective son, Alfried, who bears most blame. He joined the Nazi Party and the SS while still a student in 1931, and took over from his senescent father in 1943. During the war, he showed no qualms about confiscating plants in occupied lands, impressing 100,000 slave laborers...