Blood and Irony

THE ARMS OF KRUPP by William Manchester. 976 pages. Little, Brown. $12.50.

They were known as Schlotbarone, smokestack barons of the Ruhr. Bismarck treasured them, and used their shells to break the power of France in Europe. The Kaiser presided over their marriage plans, and misused their steel and submarines to lose the first World War. Hitler was awed by them. Deep in World War II, he took time out to write a special law (the Lex Krupp) to keep their family fortune intact. In the minds of many men in many lands, the Krupp name became synonymous with the cold pursuit of cash, steel and power, indeed, with the shame and fortune of Germany itself. Early in the century, H. G. Wells could place the dynasty "at the very core of evil." At Nuremberg in 1945, the judges condemned the head of the house of Krupp for "crimes against humanity."

Yet today, in Germany at least, the Krupps are remembered as a family of patriots. Munitions making is not really a lovable trade at best. Were the Krupps such ogres as they often appear?

Dwarfs and Dragons. Coming to grips with this question, William Manchester offers exhaustive answers. The product of seven years' research (with interruptions to write and wrangle over Death of a President), his book is the first full-scale account of the Krupps to appear in the U.S. Trying to cope with the complex history of one of the world's richest and strangest families, Manchester inevitably circles back to the origins of the German nation and finally weaves into his narrative much of the history of Germany from 1870 to the present.

The result is an often flawed, some times naive but largely fascinating chronicle whose inflated pretensions as a work of real scholarship are punctured by swarms of errors. As a work of history, the book is marred, too, by an overwrought style and an unbecomingly snide use of irony. Manchester is not fond of the Germans, and he caricatures them either as superefficient and slavishly obedient or as a folk barely removed from dwarfs and dragons, blood feuds and bags of tainted gold.

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.

It was 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.

Like succeeding Krupps, Alfred combined an almost Faustian flair for enterprise with a Teutonic dedication to efficiency. Like his descendants, too, he showed the strain of contrariness and in bred eccentricity that helps make Manchester's series of family portraits a gallery of near-grotesques. Alfred ranted against "speculators, stock-exchange Jews, share swindlers and similar parasites"; then he borrowed from the banker Salomon Oppenheim to meet his payroll. Paranoiacally fearful of Socialist tendencies among his workers, he hired an agent to inspect even the "used toilet paper" for seditious notes. He also located his office above a stable so that he could inhale the "healthgiving" aroma of manure.

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).

Fritz's hobby seems to have been small boys. He transformed a Capri grotto into a scented Sodom, where attendants wore the habit of Franciscan friars and skyrockets were fired to celebrate orgasms. Photographs were taken and circulated. Eventually, reports of the goings on were published in the press. Kaiser Wilhelm rushed to the support of Fritz. But the scandal was too much, and Fritz committed suicide.

Big 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 son. He ran the Konzern until 1943, outdoing the Krupps in ruthless efficiency. Gustav's only diversion seems to have been reading timetables for typographical errors. He allocated precisely 60 minutes a week to playing with his children--for his day was devoted to building the world's first and biggest fleet of U-boats and the famous 420-mm. cannon, sentimentally called "Big Bertha" after his wife. Before World War I, Gustav thriftily licensed Britain's Vickers company to make Krupp time fuses, provided that Vickers paid him one shilling threepence per shell fired. In the turmoil of trench warfare, the shell count was forgotten. But after the bloody defeat, Gustav calculated that the British owed him 60 marks for every dead German soldier. He billed Vickers so, but settled for one-sixth as much as he asked for.

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 and opening production plants near concentration camps to have a ready supply of labor. At Buschmannshof, near Essen, a special Krupp camp was built to house the offspring of slave workers from the east; there were no known survivors, and today, hundreds of numbered gravestones are the children's only memorial.

"Unashamed." In Major Barbara, characterizing the Undershaft family, Shaw drew a composite portrait of Europe's great munitions makers. After explaining the armorers' creed--"To give arms to all men who offer an honest price"--he assigned them as a device, the one word "Unashamed." The word implies at least some contemplation of a moral dilemma. But there is little evidence that the Krupps and people like them ever really considered the possibility of personal guilt. In the best 19th century patriotic tradition, the Krupps--like weapons makers all over Europe--always worked with their own government and backed the Fatherland against the world. When Hitler's acts began to depart from even the tooth and claw morality accepted in earlier times, extending to calculated genocide, they made no moral distinction, possibly, in part, out of sheer inertia. Unlike most Germans, moreover, Alfried was perhaps powerful enough to have restrained the Fuehrer. He did nothing. Long after the Nuremberg tribunal sentenced him to twelve years in prison, he, like Eichmann and the others, protested that he was just doing his duty. Released in 1951 through a controversial act of U.S. clemency, he soon broke his pledge to the Allies never again to produce coal or steel and began selling to new markets, especially in Eastern Europe and Asia. When the Krupp firm finally foundered in 1966, because of overextended credit, it was only because Alfried was clinging to old financial ways. He died soon after, and with him, the dynasty. His son Arndt, a wiK lowy jet-setter, who does not carry the Krupp name, sensibly had no stomach for the Krupp empire.

For Manchester, the Krupps are the personification of German power. He lumps them both together and finds both guilty. He never really grapples with the ultimate and painfully intricate question -- of whether the Krupps and weapons makers generally are a cause or a byproduct of military nationalism. Do they make policy, or simply profit from it? In bringing the question of German culpability up to date, Manchester neglects to mention that most West Germans were born after 1933. Though they bear no guilt for the past, they show grave concern over the profound moral issues raised by the manufacture of weapons and their use in the world. Generally, they have concluded that where moral doubt exists, it is better to abstain from profit. Young Germans are among the world's least militaristic people -- perhaps because they have been profoundly influenced by the example of the past. So too, in part, have the postwar managers of the Krupp works who have consistently refused to produce cannon. The final irony: two months ago, with the last Krupp gone, the company's management announced that it would not produce guns or rockets but would intensify activity in the military sphere, seeking orders for armored vehicles and warship hulls.

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