Books: Blood and Irony

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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 Führer. 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.