Money & Gunpowder

THE INCREDIBLE KRUPPS (308 pp.)--Norbert Muhlen--Holt ($5).

Cusins: What on earth is the true faith of an Armorer?

Undershaft: To give arms to all men who offer an honest price for them, without respect of persons or principles: to aristocrat and republican, to Nihilist and Tsar, to Capitalist and Socialist . . . all faiths, all follies, all causes and all crimes.--Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara

During the Thirty Years' War, a Krupp sold guns to Protestant and Catholic alike, and from that day to the end of World War II the family was rarely false to the Shavian armorer's creed. The blood-and-iron saga of Kruppdom, including its rise from the ashes of World Wars I and II, is an intrinsically fascinating story. Unfortunately the drama is often dulled by German-born Author Norbert Muhlen's drab style. But he livens his chronicle with a series of personality sketches of the lonely, driven eccentrics who lorded it over the steelworks at Essen, and were lucky at cartels, unlucky at love.

Alchemistic Search. The initial secret of the Krupp success was failure. The founder of modern Kruppdom, Friedrich, was a turn-of-the-19th-century dreamer, prophetically dedicated to an industrialized Germany. He spent his life in a quasi-alchemistic search for "the secret of casting steel," processed more irony than iron in his foundry, the Forge of Good Hope, and died at 39 of dropsy and despair. His son Alfred was later to find and filch the sought-for secret from British forgemasters while posing as a frivolous visiting baron, Herr Schropp. After he set the Essen smokestacks belching, Alfred devoted seven years to casting a cannon in steel instead of the traditional bronze; the weapon later pulverized the French in the six-month war of 1870.

As befitted a king of cannonry, Alfred built a palace (the Villa Huegel), a monstrous Victorian pile of 160 rooms. To avoid drafts, the windows were permanently sealed. Alfred's own den was built over the stables, as he believed that horse-manure fumes stimulated thought. His most pungent effort was the Generalregulativ, a book of rules that established the Fuehrerprinzip at Krupp's a good half century before der Fuehrer. Alfred dictated his workers' lives down to prescribing their off-duty shoes (wooden clogs). His wife took 25 years of the same niggling, then fled. When he died, Alfred left behind him more than 30,000 interoffice memos.

Senile Ghost. Alfred's son Fritz was a pudgy, gourmandizing sybarite, who fattened Kruppdom by gobbling up coal and iron mines and the shipyards at Kiel. But his chief bequest was "the Capri scandal." There, in a Tiberian grotto, guarded by boys garbed as Franciscan friars, he staged Black Masses and homosexual orgies. When his wife protested, he had her locked up as insane. Just when the whole affair broke in the German press, Fritz suffered a fatal stroke and was eulogized by Kaiser Wilhelm II in a state funeral.

Fritz's daughter Bertha, whose ballistic namesake shelled Belgian forts in World War I, needed a prince consort to carry on the firm, and found him in a bayonet-backed, newly titled Prussian named Gustav von Bohlen und Halbach. Taking his wife's dynastic name, Gustav became more Kruppian than the Krupps, rarely heated his office above freezing temperatures in order to keep conferences brief. His great coup was the secret rearming of Germany and the duping of Allied investigation teams after World War I; e.g., "small tractor" meant small tank. Gustav reluctantly knuckled under to Hitler, turned senile toward the end of World War II, when he strolled about like a ghost, collecting shell fragments in a market basket.

When Gustav's son, Alfried Krupp, sat in the Nuremberg dock in 1947 as a "war criminal," says Author Muhlen, he was really being tried for his name rather than his deeds. He bore six years in prison with dignity, and his six-year restoration of the Krupp empire, which had been 30% destroyed and 40% dismantled, ranks as a major industrial miracle (TIME, Aug. 19, 1957). In his own words, he made Krupp an "enlightened monarchy,'' and today's list of products is as amply peaceable as a Sears, Roebuck catalogue. Concludes Author Muhlen hopefully: "As Germany goes, so goes Krupp."

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