“The Arms of Krupp, 1587-1968”, by William Manchester

 

976 pages, Little, Brown and Company, ISBN-13: 978-0316544900

Ah, John K. King Books, how I love ya. This massive used bookstore in downtown Detroit was one of my go-to places before life took over and I had to do stuff – like work, but I have no doubt that I shall return to prowl the musty stacks of old books for lost treasures – like this one, The Arms of Krupp, 1587-1968 by William Manchester, an exhaustive history of clan Krupp that traces these arms merchants extraordinaire from their beginnings in Essen to the mid-20^th Century, when this book was published. Considering the family history, it should come as no surprise that the family patriarch, Arndt Krupp, prospered during the Black Death as his friends and neighbors died all around him. Nice.

From then on, the Krupp’s history would become entwined with Germany’s, as this family from the Ruhr transformed their backyard into one of the preeminent industrial centers in the world. We read as their fortune was confirmed by the Thirty Years’ War, increased while Europeans battled each other almost incessantly, were lifted up and ennobled by the German Kaisers, weaponized the Third Reich and were thence protected by the Lex Krupp, weathered occupation by the Western Allies and became indispensable to the government in Bonn. But “Krupp” is not a disembodied corporation making weapons and passing laws from on high; it was first a family, and the members pass under Manchester’s critical eye: Arndt Krupp is “a shrewd chandler with a keen eye for the main chance”, while Friedrich Krupp is, c. 1806 “Essen’s uncrowned king”. This is perhaps the book’s greatest flaw, as Manchester can’t help but find some negative trait in every Krupp he comes across.

Another aspect of the book is Manchester’s focusing on the 20^th Century and the Second World War; understandable, perhaps, seeing as there were mountains of information available after the Nazi war machine was finally vanquished. There can be no question that Krupp profited mightily from the war, from the profits earned in making armaments to their seizing of industrial assists all over Europe. Worse, seeing as German women were viewed as breeders of the next generation of übermenschen and, thus, disqualified as industrial laborers, Krupp employed slave labor in their factories, along with the rest of German industry. But Krupp went whole-hog into the abyss by owning and operating their own concentration camps and leasing slaves from the SS at the cost of one Reichsmark per day, said slaves being taken directly from extermination or POW camps and forced to produce weapons to be used against their own nations. Naturally, after the war, Alfried Krupp was convicted of crimes against humanity.

The Arms of Krupp, then, is peculiar: it is exhaustive in its research and written with a light hand, but uneven, as so much is dedicated to one (understandably important) chapter of their history. The Krupps may or may not have been as ruthless and weird as Manchester maintains, but the family saw a business opportunity, took and stuck with it, and got rich doing so. Such a description says more about the human condition than it does about one German family.