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The Lex Krupp

The Lex Krupp

Following Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach’s major stroke in 1941 and his evident decline into senility, Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler began to be concerned about the stability of leadership in the Krupp family’s company. With the active cooperation of Gustav and his wife Bertha Krupp, Hitler, Martin Bormann (the chief of the Nazi Party chancellery), and Hans Lammers (the German state secretary) drafted a law transferring ownership of the company from Bertha to her firstborn, Alfried Krupp, who would thereafter manage the company and take the name Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach. This law, known as the Lex Krupp and signed by Hitler on November 12, 1943, also provided for the conversion of the firm from a publicly traded company to an exclusively family-owned corporation. All of Bertha’s corporate shares were transferred to Alfried, as was executive authority for running the company.

After the law was adopted, Alfried played an increasingly active role in the firm’s management. He made extensive use of slave labor, closely coordinating his company’s employee needs with the availability of workers who were imprisoned in Germany’s concentration camps. After World War II, Alfried was tried as a war criminal, charged with engaging in the use and abuse of slave labor and thus of committing crimes against humanity. He was convicted of the offense and sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment, but he was released after only six years.

The Lex Krupp continued to operate as law after the end of World War II. In July, 1967, shortly before his death, Alfried announced that the company, which was heavily in debt, would again become a public corporation. His son Arndt relinquished both inheritance rights and the Krupp name. Hence, the Krupp family’s management of the firm ended by 1968. When Arndt died childless in 1986, the Krupp line, established in Essen, Germany, four centuries before, died out as well.


See Also

Alfred Krupp

Joséphine de Wendel

Basil Zaharoff

Great Lives from History: The Incredibly Wealthy

Bertha Krupp

by Irwin Halfond

German industrialist

For nearly half a century, Krupp was the wealthiest person in Germany, inheriting her father’s vast industrial empire when she was only sixteen. Krupp’s company was the driving force in arming Germany in two world wars, and by the twenty-first century it had merged with Thyssen AG to become one of the world’s leading steel producers.

Sources of wealth: Inheritance; steel; manufacturing

Bequeathal of wealth: Children; relatives

Early Life

Bertha Krupp (BUR-thuh kruhp) von Bohlen und Halbach was born on March 29, 1886, at the Villa Hügel, the three-hundred-room Krupp castle in Essen, Germany. The Krupps first settled in Essen in 1587 and made a huge fortune as arms manufacturers for the king of Prussia. Krupp armaments helped Prussia unite Germany under its auspices in 1871 following three different wars fought during the previous seven years. Bertha was the first child of Friedrich Alfred “Fritz” Krupp (1854-1902) and his wife, Margaret (1854-1931), the daughter of the Prussian baron August Freiherr von Ende. Bertha’s sister Barbara was born in 1887. The family had no other children, and the lack of a male heir became a major problem for the Krupp industrial dynasty.

Friedrich Alfred Krupp, a financial genius, saw his business quickly increase, the result both of the rapid expansion of the German navy in order to challenge Britain’s dominant position and of the royalties the Krupp firm received from the specialized armor plate produced by arms manufacturers worldwide. On November 22, 1902, after playing with his two daughters, Friedrich retired to his bedroom and put a bullet in his head. One week before, the Socialist magazine Vorwärts had written an article exposing Friedrich’s sexual liaisons with local boys and men, as well as with boys obtained from Capri, Italy, and transported to the Bristol Hotel in Berlin.

After her father’s suicide, almost all of the Krupp corporate shares were inherited by Bertha, who was now responsible for the more than sixty-three thousand workers who depended on Krupp armaments and steel manufacturing for a living. Bertha’s sister Barbara received a large cash settlement but was accorded no ownership role in the company. As specified in Friedrich’s will, the family business was converted into a stock corporation in 1903, when it became known as Friedrich Krupp AG. After the conversion, Bertha owned all but a fraction of the firm’s shares. However, until she turned twenty-one, the company’s profits would belong to her mother.

Although Bertha could own a megacorporation, it was not acceptable in early twentieth century Germany even to fantasize that a woman could direct one. It soon became the responsibility of Kaiser William II of Germany to find a suitable husband for Bertha who could manage the industry upon which much of German military power depended. In the spring of 1906, Bertha was sent to Rome to meet the counselor to the Prussian delegation at the Vatican, Gustav von Bohlen und Halbach (1870-1950). Gustav’s mother was the daughter of Henry Bohlen, a U.S. Civil War brigadier general who was killed in battle in 1862. She had married a wealthy German aristocrat who made a fortune in Philadelphia and then decided to return to Germany. Bertha did her duty for country and corporation and accepted the rapid marriage proposal of Gustav, who was sixteen years her senior and a classic case of an obnoxious obsessive-compulsive personality, particularly as it related to punctuality and efficiency. He was also a head shorter than his wife, which made their appearance together in public a bit embarrassing.

First Ventures

Bertha and Gustav were married at Villa Hügel in a wedding presided over by Kaiser William II and attended by everyone who mattered in the German military. At the end of the wedding, the kaiser granted Gustav the right to bear the name Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach and to pass on this name to his successors as owners of the company. However, the kaiser challenged Gustav to be worthy of the name Krupp. After the wedding Gustav was appointed to the supervisory board of Krupp AG, which he chaired from 1909 until the end of 1943. Within a year after their marriage, a son, Alfried (1907-1967), was born to the newly married couple, and the kaiser gladly accepted the honor of being godfather. The couple had seven other children, but only Alfried was legally permitted to bear the surname Krupp.

During their marriage, Bertha functioned as a kind of queen of the Ruhr Valley, with her husband Gustav playing the role of prince consort. She presided over numerous honorary functions both in Essen and at the factory. An annual gathering of workers was held at Villa Hügel, at which Bertha pinned silver and gold trademark medals on the lapels of employees who had worked for the firm for twenty-five and fifty years, respectively. She conducted numerous factory tours to bolster morale and to remind the workers that she was the person for whom they actually worked. She also became famous in Essen for her charitable works, visiting hospitals and nursing homes to provide support for ailing workers. Although many of her actions may have been token efforts, Krupp workers and their families had genuine affection for Bertha.

Mature Wealth

The outbreak of World War I brought a huge increase in armaments production and a further expansion of the company. In order to fulfill government contracts, Krupp AG’s munitions output was doubled in the first year of the war, and by the third year it had reached more than five times its pre-1914 level. The firm constructed many new factories, and the size of its workforce accelerated; by the end of the war, the number of employees totaled 168,000. One of the most famous products of World War I was a mammoth 16.5-inch siege cannon named after Bertha Krupp; Big Bertha could fire a twenty-two-hundred-pound shell with pinpoint accuracy of more than nine miles. A total of twenty-seven of these cannons were built, and at the beginning of the war they were used to decimate Belgian forts, as Germany launched its Schlieffen Plan to capture Paris. At the end of the war, the Allies named Gustav Krupp as one of the German industrialists to be tried as a war criminal, but these trials were never conducted.

Because the manufacture of war-related materials was prohibited under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, the Krupp company was forced to change its production after World War I. Manufacture of locomotives, motor trucks, and agricultural machinery replaced armaments as the mainstay of the firm’s business. The changeover was extremely costly and mandated drastic cutbacks in the company’s workforce. However, under the surface the company secretly continued to manufacture arms, especially after the Allied Commission left Essen in 1926, and the firm also planned for a full-scale resumption of arms manufacturing.

During the French occupation of the Ruhr Valley in 1923, Gustav was imprisoned for resisting French orders. For the first time in his life he became a popular figure. However, Gustav was blamed for violent riots, fined 100 million marks, and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Bertha, who had to suffer the indignity of the French occupation of the Villa Hügel, frequently visited Gustav, who was released after several months.

The Great Depression hit industrial centers hard. More than half of the forty thousand Krupp company workers were unemployed in 1931, and those who were employed usually worked only three days a week. The Depression increased prospects for Adolf Hitler’s rather obscure Nazi Party. In 1930, he toured the Krupp works without much fanfare. Both Gustav and Bertha regarded him as a lower-class upstart and were taken aback when their son Alfried joined the Nazi Party in 1931. By 1933, recognizing that Hitler was good for business, Gustav’s sentiments dramatically changed. Bertha, however, continued to get upset whenever the name “Hitler” was mentioned. The remilitarization of Germany and the outbreak of World War II caused another boom in the Krupps’ business, and the use of Jews and other persecuted persons as slave labor during the war dramatically cut labor costs. The Krupp company built a factory named for Bertha, the Berthaworks in Silesia, where Jews imprisoned at the Auschwitz concentration camp produced Krupp howitzer cannons.

During the war, the Krupps were evicted from the Villa Hügel. World War II resulted in the major destruction of the Krupp factories in Essen and of the city of Essen itself. Bertha’s son Claus (1910-1940) died in battle during the first year of the war, while another son, Eckbert (1922-1945), died during the last year. A third son, Harald (1916-1985), was captured by the Soviets in 1944 and was held captive for the next ten years. Bertha’s eldest son, Alfried, who in 1943 assumed ownership of the Krupp business, was later tried at Nuremberg for war crimes and sentenced to a twelve-year imprisonment. Her husband Gustav was saved from imprisonment by his senility and paralysis from a major stroke.

In 1951, a year after Gustav’s death, Alfried was released from prison after serving only six years of his sentence, his early release due in large part to new priorities stemming from the Cold War. Alfried returned to Essen with Bertha, resumed control of the company, and rapidly restored its important role in German industry. Bertha died in Essen in 1957 and is buried next to Gustav in the family crypt outside the city.

Legacy

Bertha Krupp was heir to an industrial empire and the richest person in Germany for more than two generations. Directed first by her husband Gustav and then by her son Alfried, the Krupp corporation armed Germany to fight two world wars that caused the destruction of tens of millions of lives. A matronly and almost queenlike figure, Bertha is still highly regarded in Essen for her concern about the well-being of Krupp workers.

Further Reading

1 

Batty, Peter. The House of Krupp: The Steel Dynasty That Armed the Nazis. Updated ed. Lanham, Md.: Cooper Square Press, 2002. A concise, critical, and very readable analysis.

2 

Kitchen, Martin. A History of Modern Germany, 1800-2000. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006. The best history, providing general background analysis of the development of modern Germany.

3 

Klass, Gert von. Krupps, the Story of an Industrial Empire. London: Sedgwick and Jackson, 1963. An earlier work, predating Manchester, by a noted German expert on the Krupp family.

4 

Manchester, William. The Arms of Krupp: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Dynasty Which Armed Germany at War. New York: Back Bay Books, 2003. A heavily documented, massive study of the lives and role of the Krupp family in the militarization of Prussia and Germany.

5 

Muhlen, Norbert. The Incredible Krupps: The Rise, Fall, and Comeback of Germany’s Industrial Family. Translated by James Cleugh. New York: Award Books, 1969. A study of the Krupps, based on German archival sources.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Halfond, Irwin. "Bertha Krupp." Great Lives from History: The Incredibly Wealthy, edited by Howard Bromberg, Salem Press, 2010. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GLIW_1234369001234.
APA 7th
Halfond, I. (2010). Bertha Krupp. In H. Bromberg (Ed.), Great Lives from History: The Incredibly Wealthy. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Halfond, Irwin. "Bertha Krupp." Edited by Howard Bromberg. Great Lives from History: The Incredibly Wealthy. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2010. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.