End of the Dynasty

In the entrance hall of Villa Hiigel, the 200-room stone and steel mansion where Alfried Felix Alwyn Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach was born, 500 business, political and labor leaders gathered late last week for the funeral of the last sole ruler of the Ruhr's most powerful industrial dynasty. After the eulogies, a Krupp band struck up a miners' song called Glueck Auf (Good Fortune) and led the way out through a crowd to a hearse waiting in the rain. Behind followed ten Krupp miners bearing the oaken casket. Visibly in tears was Krupp's longtime confidant, Berthold Beitz, 53, a non-Krupp whose task now is to set up a foundation that will oversee the beleaguered empire.

Krupp died as lonely as he had lived. Staffers noticed that his silver-grey Porsche had not appeared at the company's Essen quarters for a month. Krupp, in fact, was dying of bronchial cancer, which had already advanced beyond cure when it was discovered late in June. By mid-July, he was confined to his 28-room "bungalow" near the villa. When he died, his only attendant was a nurse.

Humiliation. An austere man with few friends, Krupp had grown remote and bitter as life delivered its blows. One of these was his six-year imprisonment (1945-51) as a war criminal. Then there was his son Arndt, a limp fellow of 29 who renounced his inheritance last year, leaving the House of Krupp without an heir for the first time in five generations. Arndt's $250,000-a-year allowance (which now goes to $500,000) may have made the decision easy, but two weeks ago he said that the "Krupp tradition" had only "brought my forebears a lot of unhappiness." Moreover, said Arndt, "I am not a man like my father, who sacrifices his whole life for something, not knowing whether it is really worth it in our time."

Still, Krupp's deepest humiliation stemmed from a shocking debacle with his bankers. Alfried had planned some day to turn over his holdings to a foundation, under which the firm would be run as a public company. But Krupp's bankers last spring rebelliously refused more credit to his debt-saddled firm

(TIME, March 17). Alfried Krupp had to seek aid from the government and accept its condition that Krupp go public by 1969. Thus, though the foundation will still be formed, the dignified exit he wanted for the House of Krupp became abject public surrender.

To Alfried Krupp such a humiliation was intolerable. In the years since the firm began as an Essen foundry in 1811, the House of Krupp had been courted by Bismarck, the Kaisers and Hitler. Kaiser Wilhelm I called it a "national institution." Wilhelm II was Alfried's godfather. And at Alfried's birth, his father Gustav wrote to his directors: "May he grow up in the Krupp works, and through practical work acquire the fundamentals he will require to take over the responsibility-laden duties."

Life with Father. Alfried followed the script. He and his seven younger sisters and brothers (none of whom shared his status as a Krupp crown prince) were cared for by tutors and servants on an ordered schedule. For one 50minute period each evening, Alfried was to play with Father, like it or not.

He graduated from an Essen Gymnasium at 17, then dutifully went off to Munich, and later Aachen, to study engineering. Only once did he rebel against his father, by marrying blonde, once-divorced Anneliese Bahr in 1937.

The marriage, which produced Arndt, ended in 1941, after Gustav threatened Alfried with disinheritance. Alfried's second marriage, to thrice-divorced Vera Hossenfeldt 15 months after his prison release in 1951, lasted five years.

When the legacy finally came, it was bitter. Ailing and verging on senility at 73, Gustav turned all over to his son, then 37, in 1943--shortly after Allied bombers began the raids that eventually turned a third of Krupp's Essen plants to rubble. After the Allied victory Alfried took the rap for Gustav, by then mentally incompetent, and was sentenced at Niirnberg to twelve years for using slave labor and "plundering occupied territory." Later, the U.S. acknowledged the injustice of the Niirnberg sentence, released Krupp and allowed him to take control of his firm once again.

Nowhere did Germany's famed--if now faded--postwar Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) shine more brightly than at Krupp. Under expansive, gregarious Berthold Beitz, whom Krupp brought in as his general manager in 1953, Krupp returned to the very top rank of German industrial companies. Sales have tripled since 1944 to last year's $1.35 billion, and the 3,000 items Krupp produces include almost everything but armaments, which Alfried banned.

Proud & Impracticable. Unfortunately for the company, that was about the only Krupp tradition he forsook. Because the third or fourth generation Kruppianer might be turned out of work, Krupp refused to close down money-losing locomotive works and coal and steel operations. The resulting debt of $600 million--highest of any German company--gave the edge last spring to the bankers, who then, in effect, ordained the end of the House of Krupp. Alfried's death was thus only a postscript.

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