The Sunday Gentleman

by Irving Wallace

  The night before the trial, Carroll advised the Krupp family that they could expect no help from the Americans they had retained. At once, Alfried’s younger brother, Berthold, asked Carroll himself to represent the family. “I told him I’d try,” said Carroll. “A special permit was required in order to represent war criminals in court. I applied for the permit. I was turned down. I then filed a notice of appearance. Immediately, the Army sent over an armed guard. I was hustled to an airport and flown out of Frankfurt. I then had my partners in Hayward, California, Tom Foley and John Purchio, apply to defend Krupp. They, too, were rejected. So Krupp went on trial without an American attorney, without any attorney of his own choice. The court foisted a young German named Gunther Geisler on him. In arguing over a legal point, Geisler got angry, refused to apologize to the judges, walked out, and was therefore barred from the courtroom. So Krupp had no red representation at any time.”

  Case Number X, at Nuremberg—United States vs. Krupp—lasted forty-six days. The prosecution, led by Joseph W. Kaufman, of New York, turned up 85 witnesses. The defense presented 141 witnesses. To the first charge—of planning aggressive war–Krupp replied, “As a member of the fifth generation which produced steel, the fourth generation which forged weapons, I should like to add one thing. Never in my parents’ home did I hear one word or experience one act which welcomed or promoted any war, at any place, or at any time. The symbol of our house does not depict a cannon, but three interlocked wheels, emblem of peaceful trade.” On this first charge, Krupp was acquitted.

  Next, Krupp was accused of spoliation—looting and plundering of captive nations. A prosecution witness recalled a scene in 1940—like an exaggerated moment out of an old pacifist play—when he saw Gustav von Bohlen, and three other German industrialists, seated about a large table studying a map of Europe, while a radio blared forth news of German Army advances through Holland and Belgium. The witness said old Gustav pointed to locations on the map, and announced, “We will arrest this owner here, and take his three factories. Over there, I will take over. You will have the other one, and you the third.” On this charge, Krupp was found guilty.

  In the final count, Krupp was accused of harboring and abusing slave labor. The prosecution revealed that the Krupp works had accepted and used 55,000 displaced persons, 18,-000 prisoners of war, and 5,000 inmates from concentration camps. Many of these forced laborers had suffered cruelly. In one case, a captive Russian laborer had tried to pick up a crust of bread instead of metal scrap and had been shot to death by a guard. Later, a Krupp director congratulated the guard.

  Krupp replied that he had been forced, against his wishes, to take on slave labor. Goering and Speer had delivered the prisoners, and moved seventy-five Nazi officials into the works to supervise them. Krupp insisted that he and his father, appalled by the condition of the laborers, had set up special kitchens to feed them.

  In its judgment, the tribunal decided that Krupp employed slave labor “in armament production plants and in unhealthy and dangerous occupations, a number of whom suffered mistreatment in that housing, food, air-raid shelter and medical care were inadequate and that certain physical mistreatments occurred.” On this count, also, Krupp was found guilty.

  The American judges sentenced Krupp to twelve years in the prison at Landsberg. It was at this time that Earl Carroll, returned to Frankfurt as a civilian attorney, re-entered the picture. He approached General Lucius D. Clay, United States High Commissioner in Germany, and asked permission to visit Krupp in prison. Permission was granted. Carroll saw Krupp in 1948, and was retained by Krupp to plead his case further.

  Carroll wrote a brilliant 230-page brief requesting executive clemency for Krupp.

  The lawyer summarized, to me, his reasons why the Americans prosecuted Krupp. “First, American isolation made us ignorant of Germany. The only people in America with any knowledge of Germany were refugees, bitter, filled with hate. We sent them back to administer for us. Three of the Krupp prosecutors were German or Austrian nationals. One admitted that members of his family had been gassed at Auschwitz. I don’t condemn their hate. In their place, I would have felt the same. But, from a purely judicial point of view, there was too much prejudice in Krupp’s trial. Second, in meetings with the Allies, Stalin had insisted that war criminals be punished. And he included industrialists as war criminals. Naturally. As a Communist, he wanted to get rid of as many capitalists as possible. Third, the case against Krupp was prepared two years before the war ended, against Gustav, who was then alive. When Gustav couldn’t be tried, his name was crossed out, his son’s substituted, and this son was accused of the same crimes, even though the accusations made little sense.”

  To the argument that Krupp was lily-white, and railroaded into jail in his father’s place, the prosecutor, Joseph Kaufman, recently replied, “Alfried Krupp was found guilty on the basis of his own personal misdeeds, not his father’s. By special Hitler decree in 1943, Alfried became owner and head of the entire Krupp empire; not even his father enjoyed such ownership, which was vested in his wife, Bertha. Alfried voted for, approved and signed a Krupp resolution to establish a plant at the notorious Auschwitz so that the Krupps could directly employ the slave labor available there. The five hundred Hungarian Jewesses, who were later to disappear and never to be heard of again, except two or three who managed to escape, were slave laborers at Essen itself, where Alfried actively maintained himself as head of the firm.”

  When Carroll presented his defense brief, appealing for clemency, to General Clay, the High Commissioner agreed that clemency was deserved. But before he could set up a board to act, he was replaced by John J. McCloy. “I went to McCloy,” said Carroll. “He studied the brief, and also agreed Krupp deserved clemency. But he felt that he was too new to his appointment to grant it immediately. A year passed. And finally, McCloy released Krupp.”

  Krupp had been a prisoner for six years. “In prison, I read a good deal,” Krupp told me. “Whatever they gave me. Mostly American history and biography. I worked in the locksmith shop making ashtrays and crosses. I had learned this art when I was a student.”

  Immediately after his release, Krupp returned to the Villa Huegel. He took an inventory of the 117 rooms, and then announced that American GI’s and British Tommies had “liberated” from his home one and a half million dollars’ worth of furnishings. He requested that the FBI and Scotland Yard return an assortment of old masters. Gobelin tapestries, Ming vases, Persian carpets, and sterling silverware. No sooner had Scotland Yard begun the hunt than it was revealed that $750,000 worth of Krupp’s belongings had been pilfered by six Germans, who had used the villa as an air-raid shelter. The London press was furious. Roared one English daily, “For impertinence, gall, and unmitigated crust in high places, let the undisputed heavyweight championship be awarded to that scaly millionaire, Mr. A. Krupp.”

  Meanwhile, Krupp, flanked by Carroll and another American attorney from New York, Joseph G. Robinson, went after bigger game. In 1951, Krupp began negotiating to recover his factories. After months of legal gymnastics, Krupp won back his one-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar empire. The Russians wanted Krupp’s holdings confiscated. The British and Americans did not. Justice Jackson had disapproved of confiscation of property, saying, “We have no such penalty, and for historical reasons, that would be extremely unacceptable to the American people.”

  Krupp was returned his empire, on the condition that he get rid of his coal and steel holdings. “Alfried doesn’t get a dime from coal and steel today,” explained Carroll. “What he will get is the proceeds of the forced sale of securities. A banking group has been given five years to liquidate the coal and steel. If they don’t find buyers, the whole thing goes on the auction block.”

  While the lengthy negotiations proceeded, Krupp had a great deal of time on his hands. “I have been active in the works only since March of this year,” he said to me. “In the two years before, while negotiations were going on, I was permitted to do no
thing. Once, just to see the extent of the devastation to my factories, and to let my employees know I was alive, I visited the works. The next day, my manager was called to Duesseldorf by the Allies and ordered to explain what in the devil I had been doing in the plant.”

  On the social side, Krupp was more active. In May, 1952, in the mayor’s office at Berchtesgaden, he married attractive forty-year-old Baroness Vera von Hohenfeldt, an American citizen. It was Krupp’s second marriage and Vera’s fourth. She had come to the United States in 1939, the wife of a German movie director named Frank Wisbar, who now makes television films in Hollywood. She became an American citizen in 1946, and divorced Wisbar three years later. She then went to work as a receptionist for Dr. Sigfried Knauer, a Los Angeles physician, married him, and divorced him in 1952, five months before returning to Germany to marry Krupp. Once, she had sold cosmetics in a Los Angeles department store, and roughed it in a small apartment. After marrying Krupp, she wrote her friends in Hollywood, “Now I carry out no more garbage cans!”

  This year, as his wife busied herself furnishing their new California-style home in the shadow of the old villa, Krupp returned to manage the works. Except for business appointments, he has refused to see outsiders. Especially, he has avoided the foreign press. For two months, I tried to contact him from Paris, but received no reply. Just when I had about given up hope of his granting an interview, I received a telegram: WOULD BE PLEASED TO SEE YOU NEXT WEEK AT MY OFFICE ESSEN ALTENDORFERSTRASSE 103. ALFRIED KRUPP BOHLEN.

  It was a Tuesday morning when I saw Krupp. There were four of us in the spacious room—Krupp, tall and serious; his wife, Vera, bright and brisk in a brown suit; myself; and a large stately oil portrait of great-grandfather Krupp. We gathered at one end of a long directors’ table, and sat and talked through the morning. Krupp’s English was labored but accurate. He said that he had learned it in his German school, during a brief stay in England, and from his American attorneys, since their German was limited to auf Wiedersehen.

  His wife, on the other hand, spoke a breezy American English. She was proud of her American citizenship, said that she visited the States regularly, and that she voted in the last presidential election. She begged me not to refer to her as “a former actress.” She had never been an actress, she said. A girl friend had once got her a bit part in a German movie. In Hollywood, she had not acted at all. She went on to say that she had met Krupp twenty-three years before, “at someone’s home in western Germany.”

  During my talk with Krupp, Vera constantly and gently interrupted her husband, elaborating on or revising statements he made, fearful that everything he said would be misinterpreted. Usually, Krupp ignored her interruptions, and went doggedly on with what he was explaining. I had the overall impression of a man who, right or wrong, was extremely candid. He dodged no questions. I will give one startling example.

  While I was determined to ask him about Adolf Hitler, I was afraid that he would not be direct with me. When the average German is questioned about Hitler today, he assumes an expression which seems to say, “Hitler? How do you spell it?” I expected Krupp to suffer similar amnesia. Consequently, I did not ask him if he knew Hitler. Instead, I told him that I had been reading a book, recently published in London, that recorded all of Hitler’s luncheon conversations, taken down at the command of Martin Bormann. Had Krupp read the book? He said that he had not.

  “Well,” I went on, “this book quotes Hider as saying that he used to enjoy greatly coming down to Essen to see the works and to see you.”

  Immediately, Vera interrupted. “Hitler visited all the plants in Germany, not only Krupp!”

  Krupp did not look at her. He stared at me a moment, then he said, “Of course, I knew Hitler. I would see him when he came here. He was very smart about industry, about technical problems, and about new weapons. He knew absolutely nothing about economics. He had one obsession. With him, everything had to be not just big, but the biggest. I think that is why he liked me, liked to come to Essen. My plant was the biggest. My cannons were the biggest. My villa was the biggest. I remember once in Berlin, he pointed out the Olympic Stadium, which had held the 1936 games, and seated over a hundred thousand people. ‘You know,’ he said to me, ‘if I had built that, I’d have made it really big!’”

  Krupp and I went on to discuss politics. I had a clipping from a London paper. In it, Philip Noel-Baker, a Labourite, had objected to Krupp’s release, remarking that it was dangerous: “The Krupps have never been able to keep their hands off politics.” What did Krupp have to say about that? He shrugged. “It is exaggerated, as those things always are. We are a large firm, so of course we must watch politics, become involved in politics. But we have never been active. Personally, I am not a bit interested in politics. I remember when the Americans were interrogating me at Nuremberg, one of them said, “The trouble with you, Krupp, is that you should have been more interested in politics!’”

  Once during our conversation, Krupp rose and led me to a large window, overlooking the battered blocks surrounding his present plant. The works were only one-fourth their former size. There had been 275 air raids on Essen, and 55 direct hits on the Krupp works. These had caused complete devastation in 33 percent of the area, and heavy damage in 29 percent.

  “The greatest damage came after the war was over,” said Krupp. When the Russians and British moved in, they began dynamiting and dismantling. The Russians carried off 130,-000 tons of valuable machinery, even carting away the entire Borbeck Smelting Plant, which weighed 75,000 tons. They removed the originals of all of Krupp’s steel patents, and enough industrial blueprints and diagrams to paper 30,000 square yards. The British made off with 150,000 tons of scrap iron. “We are limited now,” said Krupp. “We have room for only sixteen thousand workers instead of the prewar 160,000. Still, we will manage.”

  Krupp himself is the complete boss of the works. He explained that he had a large family, however, and that their ties were close, and so all participated in the firm’s earnings. Krupp’s mother. Bertha, now sixty-seven, has returned from Salzburg to live in Essen. Of his four younger brothers, two were lolled during the war. Klaus, a Luftwaffe lieutenant and holder of the Iron Cross, was shot down over the Hürtgen Forest in 1940. And Eckbert, attached to the Italian Army, lost his life in action outside San Marino, Italy, in 1945. Another brother, Haarold, is still a prisoner of war in Russia. “He was sentenced to twenty-five years at hard labor for espionage in Manchuria,” said Krupp. “He’s never been in Manchuria; We send him a parcel every month, and occasionally receive Red Cross cards from him.”

  Krupp spoke at length about his tastes. He dislikes opera, has no time for movies or nightclubs, but enjoys playing host to a few guests at his home. He used to hunt a good deal, and sail (he won third prize in the 1936 Olympics), but no longer has time for either. His only hobby is photography. He has visited Egypt and Israel, but has never seen the United States. He expects to visit it one day soon.

  His enemies distrust him, his employees fear and respect him, and many Germans worship him. I have heard him called a Nazi, a monster, a scoundrel, a liar; and an Englishman said, “Krupp is harder than the steel he makes.” His attorney Carroll loyally insists that Krupp is misunderstood. “I’ve known lots of German industrialists. This man is different. He never commands. He never pushes people around. He spends half his workdays talking to laborers, marking down complaints and problems in the notebook he carries. And, big as he is, he is really modest. He traveled down to Frankfurt once to confer with me. We talked all day. By night, it was raining. He did not feel like returning to Essen. He said, ‘Do you think I can get a room at the Frankfurter Hof?’ That’s the best hotel in town. I smiled. He reached for the phone, called the hotel. He asked for a room, never told them his name. The clerk said that they were all filled up. Krupp turned to me. They’re all filled up. Can you think of another hotel?’ I did not believe that they were filled up. I told my secretary to call them back. She did. She said, ‘H
err Alfried Krupp von Bohlen wants a room.’ Immediately, three clerks were on the phone shouting, ‘Krupp? How many rooms does he wish?’ But he’d never think of telling them his name.”

  This picture of a modest, diligent, peaceful Krupp can hardly be the whole truth. For truth is two-sided. And on the other side is the historical fact that cannons are in the Krupp blood.

  The enigma of Krupp is buried in coal and steel. Would Krupp make coal and steel again? He had told me no, flatly no. I asked his attorney. “Coal and steel?” said Carroll. “Look, he’s had his chances. Both Mexico and Brazil offered him free land, if he’d come over there and build steel factories and manufacture. He could have done it. He did not. He feels that he must stay in Essen. He has an obligation to his workers and to his family.”

  Still, I was not satisfied. Would this obligation continue to anchor him to Essen? Would he or would he not be back in armament again—with American permission or without it? Carroll considered the question, then blinked at me, and slowly replied, “Remember one thing. Alfried Krupp is not allowed to produce coal and steel inside Germany. But it’s a big world. And he is permitted to go anywhere in the world, even to the United States or South America, and produce coal and steel again. This is permitted. And this he may do again—one day.”

  WHAT HAS HAPPENED SINCE…

  Twelve years ago, I asked Earl Carroll, Krupp’s attorney, if his client would one day be back in armament production, with or without American permission. Carroll had replied equivocally that even if Krupp could not produce coal and steel inside Germany, he could do so anywhere else in the world. “This is permitted,” Carroll had said. “And this he may do again—one day.”

  Today, I have a more exact answer to the question I asked Carroll. The “one day” came swiftly. Now, a dozen years later, Alfried Krupp is producing coal and steel not only elsewhere in the world, but inside West Germany as well. And somehow, I must confess, thinking back to my meeting with Krupp, I am not surprised at all.