30 January 1933, Germany. Adolf Hitler is appointed Chancellor, and German democracy comes to an end. Guided by racist and authoritarian ideas, the Nazis abolish basic freedoms and demand absolute loyalty to a single Führer. The Third Reich quickly becomes a repressive police state, where individuals are subjected to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment.
Through propaganda, the regime wins the support of millions, paving the way for persecution, war, and ultimately the Holocaust. But ideology alone does not build tanks or fire artillery. The Nazi war machine depends on steel, coal, and capital, and on the industrialists who supply weapons, finance expansion, and profit from human suffering.
As the war escalates, forced labour becomes the engine of the German economy and millions of people are forced to work under harsh conditions in factories and mines, where many are worked to death. Among those who benefit most is a man who inherits one of Germany’s greatest industrial empires, personally oversees the use of concentration camp inmates as slave labourers, and deliberately moves production to Auschwitz to exploit concentration camp prisoners and forced labour. His name is Alfried Krupp.
Alfried Felix Alwyn Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach was born on 13 August 1907 in the city of Essen, then part of the German Empire. He grew up in a prominent family, Germany’s leading industrial dynasty of the 19th and 20th centuries. The Krupp family built the cannons, battleships, and steel that powered the German Empire’s rise, and their close ties to the imperial court were sealed when Kaiser Wilhelm II agreed to become Alfried Krupp’s godfather.
The First World War, which lasted from July 1914 to November 1918, ended in German defeat. Krupp was 11 years old when the Kaiser abdicated and the German Empire fell. Economic crisis and political instability followed, and by the early 1930s, the country was in turmoil. On 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg.
By that time, Alfried Krupp had already been a supporting member of the Nazi paramilitary organization the SS for two years. He was also a member of the National Socialist Flyers Corps, a paramilitary aviation organization of the Nazi Party, in which he ultimately held the rank of Standartenführer, an equivalent to a colonel in the U.S. Army.
Krupp studied engineering and in 1935, he joined the family business, Fried. Krupp AG, initially working in the company’s headquarters in Essen. In 1937, Krupp married Annelise Lampert, with whom he had one son – Arndt, but the marriage ended in divorce 4 years later. In December 1938, Krupp became a member of the Nazi Party, joining at the personal request of Adolf Hitler.
The Second World War started on 1 September 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. During the war, Krupp maintained close contacts with Armaments Minister Albert Speer and other high-ranking members of the Nazi regime. He expected economic advantages from his support for the Nazis.
Krupp was part of a business elite that was willing to exploit German war successes and occupation rule for their own benefit. On 16 May 1940, just 6 days after the start of the German invasion of France and the Low Countries, Krupp met with industrialists from the Ruhr region in the city of Düsseldorf to discuss the future of confiscated factories in the occupied territories.
Alfried Krupp was responsible for the dismantling of factories in the territories occupied by the German Army the Wehrmacht and their reconstruction in Germany, and was awarded the War Merit Cross, First and Second Class. Krupp was indispensable to Hitler’s war machine.
The company produced the essential tools of modern warfare: armour plate for tanks and warships, artillery guns, tank hulls and turrets, shells, and parts for fortifications. Its main plant in Essen, the Gusstahlfabrik, was not a single factory but a massive complex of nearly one hundred facilities dedicated to armaments. Krupp also built submarines at its shipyard in the port city of Kiel on the Baltic Sea, and manufactured finished guns and tanks at another plant in the city of Magdeburg.
Without Krupp’s steel and engineering, the German military could not have sustained its rapid invasions or equipped its divisions. The company did not simply follow orders; it designed, developed, and mass-produced the weapons that made Hitler’s aggressive warfare possible. On 22 June 1941, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, the massive invasion of the Soviet Union.
The war on the Eastern Front demanded even greater quantities of weapons, tanks, and artillery, and Krupp’s factories worked around the clock to meet the need. But as German losses mounted and the labour pool at home shrank, the company turned increasingly to a new source of workers: prisoners of war, deported civilians, and concentration camp inmates. According to evidence presented at the Nuremberg trials, the entire Krupp enterprise consisted of about 80 separate plants within greater Germany.
Between 1940 and 1945, the company employed nearly 70,000 foreign civilian workers, almost 5,000 concentration camp inmates, and more than 23,000 prisoners of war. The vast majority were forcibly brought to Germany and detained under compulsion throughout their service. These figures do not include the thousands who died or were worked to death before ever being counted.
The conditions at Krupp’s factories violated nearly every provision of the Geneva Conventions. Prisoners of war were forced to manufacture weapons and ammunition, which was strictly prohibited. They were assigned to heavy labour for which they were physically unfit, and they were denied proper food, rest, and medical care. Russian prisoners of war, in particular, were treated with deliberate cruelty.
Their daily ration consisted of watery soup with cabbage leaves and a few pieces of turnip, with nothing else to sustain them. One Krupp manager reported that “the prisoners returning from work make a completely worn-out and limp impression. Some prisoners just simply totter back into camp.
” Another wrote that “people who live on this diet always break down after a short time and sometimes die.” At one camp, conditions were so desperate that inmates ate mice to survive. At the Dechenschule penal camp, a facility run directly by the Krupp company, guards woke inmates at 4:30 in the morning by shouting “Get up!” and striking anyone who was not fast enough with rubber hoses.
The prisoners were counted not as human beings but as “pieces of human material,” and they were beaten with leather truncheons three-quarters of an inch thick. A Catholic priest who survived the camp later testified that “beatings were a part of life” inside Krupp’s facilities. In one workshop, a Russian prisoner was beaten to death, and no action was ever taken against the culprit. Even the most vulnerable were not spared.
At Camp Voerde, about 30 kilometres from Essen, the Krupp company housed the infants of eastern workers who had been forced into its factories. Of 132 babies received at the camp, 98 died of malnutrition. Older children, some as young as 6 years old, were put to work alongside adults in the Krupp plants.
Perhaps the most shocking example of Krupp’s cruelty involved 520 young women, all of them Jewish, aged between 15 and 25, who had been deported from Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania to Auschwitz. Krupp officials travelled to the camp, personally selected these women, and brought them to Essen, where they were forced to work in a heavy steel mill known as Rolling Mill II.
They received one meal of soup and bread per day, slept on straw on a damp cellar floor, and marched for miles through the streets of Essen in wooden clogs or barefoot, wrapped in torn blankets against the cold. When the Allied armies approached in March 1945, Krupp shipped them to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Their fate after that is unknown. A Krupp guard named Ernst Wirtz was later convicted of his brutality.
The evidence against him included beating eastern workers, both male and female, with a wooden board and a rubber hose, waking them up with a water hose, throwing a French civilian down a stairway, and ruthlessly beating a Russian prisoner of war with a four-edged piece of wood, which resulted in death from head injuries.
Wirtz testified that he was asked by the plant management to beat people, and that it was general knowledge in the plant that the management tried to maintain work discipline through physical maltreatment. On 11 April 1945, less than one month before the end of the Second World War in Europe, American troops arrested Alfried Krupp.
The Allies had originally intended to put Krupp’s father, Gustav, on trial at Nuremberg, but doctors declared the elderly man too ill and weak to stand trial. Instead, the Americans charged Alfried Krupp and eleven senior employees of the company in a separate case known as the Krupp Trial. In 1948, the court found Krupp guilty of using slave labour and plundering economic assets in occupied countries.
He was sentenced to 12 years in prison and the confiscation of all his property. The judges also accused him of planning a war of aggression, but they acquitted him on that charge, ruling that his father had still been in charge of the company before the war. Krupp served only a fraction of his sentence. In January 1951, the U.S.
High Commissioner for Germany reconsidered the case and decided that it was unfair for Krupp to be the only war criminal to have his property confiscated. The order was revoked, his sentence was reduced to six years, and he was awarded £30 million in compensation – an equivalent of 1.5 billion USD today. Krupp walked out of prison a free man—and had the last laugh.
Years later, in an interview with the British newspaper ‘Daily Mail’, a reporter asked Krupp if he felt any sense of guilt. He replied: “What guilt? For what happened under Hitler? No. But it is regrettable that the German people themselves allowed themselves to be so deceived by Hitler.” Following his release from prison, Krupp remarried in 1952.
His new wife, Vera, received a spectacular gift from the family fortune: a 33-carat diamond ring, a jewel purchased with money built on slave labour. Vera later divorced Krupp, kept the ring, and eventually put it up for auction. In 1968, at an auction in New York, Richard Burton, the actor and Elizabeth Taylor’s husband at the time, bought the diamond for $307,000 and gave it to his wife.
Taylor, who was Jewish, later explained why she cherished it. She stated: “This remarkable stone is called the Krupp diamond because it had been owned by Vera Krupp, of the famous munitions family which helped knock off millions of Jews. When it came up for auction in the late 1960s, I thought how perfect it would be if a nice Jewish girl like me were to own it.
” In the hands of Elizabeth Taylor, a symbol of Nazi cruelty became a trophy of survival. After Taylor’s death, the stone formerly known as the Krupp Diamond was renamed “The Elizabeth Taylor Diamond”. Alfried Krupp was 59 years old when he died on 30 July 1967 in Essen, West Germany. The official cause was heart failure resulting from lung cancer.
His funeral was attended by top German politicians, including then Federal President Heinrich Lübke, who apparently saw no contradiction in honouring a convicted Nazi war criminal. Thanks for watching the World History Channel. Be sure to like and subscribe and click the bell notification icon so you don’t miss our next episodes. We thank you and we’ll see you next time on the channel.
