Gustav Krupp Von Bohlen Und Halbach Gustav Krupp (Gustav von Bohlen) was born in the Hague on 7th August, 1870. Krupp studied law at Heidelberg before entering a diplomatic career on the staff of a number of German embassies.In 1899, he was posted to Washington as Legationssekretär, moving on to the Prussian Legation to the Vatican in 1904. He married Bertha Krupp, the daughter of Friedrich Alfred Krupp, the arms manufacturer, in October, 1906.He was immediately given permission by Wilhelm II to change his name to Krupp..he became a board member that year, and was appointed chairman in 1909. Krupp took over the running of the company and by the outbreak of the First World War had gained the monopoly of German arms manufacture. He manufactured high angle heavy calibre howitzer called Big Bertha (named after his wife). The gun that was used for the shelling of the fortress of Liege in Belgium. His company also produced the Paris Canone, the long barrel gun that could fire up to 120km in distance. Before the war Krupp had leased a fuse patent to the British armaments company, Vickers. After the Armistice Vickers paid Krupp a large sum of money based on the number of German artillery casualties. This led to Krupp family being attacked from profiting from Germany's war dead. Within weeks of the Armistice he introduced a new company slogan, Wir machen Alles, or We make everything. He converted Krupp factories to the production of consumer goods such as baby carriages and type writers. The company was still permitted to produce and export steel, however, which was the foundation of any armaments industry, and it remained in the heavy industrial business through the manufacture of railway engines and lorries. Starting from its first engine in 1919, Krupp had produced over 2000 locomotives by the late 1930s. But Krupp was an arms business, and with the secret assistance of the government and the army it set about getting around the terms of Versailles treaty. In the 1920s, Krupp artillery design teams were move to Sweden and the Netherlands, where they continued to develop new weapons. By the late 1920s, the Allied control commissions had left Germany, and it was safe for the design teams to return home. Krupp survived the depression making steel, trains and trucks, but with the accession of Adolf Hitler to power it was soon back doing what it knew best - building guns - Thanks to the secret work in the 1920s the concern had advanced new weapons in production in an astonishingly short time. Krupp was initially hostile to the policies of Nazi Party. However, after a meeting on 20th February, 1933, he was persuaded by Adolf Hitler and Hjalmar Schacht that the Nazi government would destroy the trade unions and the political left in Germany. Schacht also pointed out that a Hitler government would considerably increase expenditure on armaments. Once converted, Krupp, as chairman of the Association of German Industrialists, was in a good position to encourage other business leaders to contribute to Hitler's election fund. In May 1933 Hitler appointed Krupp as Chairman of the Adolf Hitler Spende, an industrialist fund administered by Martin Bormann. The money went to the Nazi government in return for special favours for the industrialists who had contributed. As a result of the terms of the Versailles Treaty Krupp had turned to the production of agricultural machinery after the First World War. However, in 1933, he began producing tanks in what was officially part of the Agricultural Tractor Scheme. He also built submarines in Holland and new weapons were developed and tested in Sweden. After the outbreak of the Second World War Krupp built factories in German occupied countries and used the labour of over 100,000 inmates of concentration camps.Krupp controlled 87 major factories and industrial plants and 110 companies in Germany alone: the firm also had interests all over the world, having a controlling interest in more than 40 overseas companies. During the war Krupp was the main supplier of heavy weaponry to the Wehrmacht and the Kriegsmarine. The factories included a fuse factory inside Auschwitz. Inmates were also moved to Silesia to build a howitzer factory. It is estimated that around 70,000 of those working for Krupp died as a result of the methods employed by the guards of the camps. Gustav Krupp suffered a severe stroke in 1941, and although nominally in charge of the company, for the next two years he was little more than a figurehead. In 1943 Gustav handed control to his elder son Alfried, just as the Krupp company was returned from public ownership to the family, Gustav was senile by the end of the war and so escaped being tried for war crimes at Nuremburg. He died at Bluhnbach on 16 January 1950. http://alpha.uni-sw.gwdg.de/~hessman/MONET/images/BerthaGustav.jpg http://www.one35th.com/model/k5/k5_krupp.htm http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/Holocaust/Krupp.html http://www.dhm.de/lemo/objekte/pict/f52_3124/index.html http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWkrupp.htm
We are all proud of having thus contributed to the heretofore magnificent successes of our army. Gustav Krupp Gustav Krupp Quotes
War is cruel... Perhaps the most cynical salute to profit is Krupp's ultimate negotiation of a £40,000 settlement in 1926 for patent royalties from Vickers for 640,000 shells the Brits fired at Germans in WW1 (Gustav insisted 4,160,000 shells were fired -- killing 2,080,000 German soldiers -- and £260,000 was due). Thus Krupp, the preeminent German weapons firm, was paid for the death of German soldiers in a lost war. Amazon.com: The Arms of Krupp: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Dynasty That Armed Germany at War (9780316529402): William Manchester: Books
