Alfred was born at Essen on the 26th of April 1812. His father, Friedrich Krupp (1787 - 1826), had purchased a small forge in that town about 1810, and devoted himself to the problem of manufacturing cast steel; but though that product was put on the market by him in 1815, it commanded but little sale, and the firm was far from prosperous. After his death the works were carried on by his widow, and Alfred, as the eldest son, found himself obliged, a boy of fourteen.
Alfred's father's death forced him to leave school at the age of fourteen and take on responsibility for the steel works.
Alfried assumed the duties of his father, and in 1943 Adolf Hitler issued an unprecedented decree, the Lex Krupp (“Krupp Law”), which, abolishing in this one case the laws of inheritance, preserved the firm as a family property. Alfried now assumed the name of Krupp and became the sole owner of his mother’s vast holdings.
Alfried augmented this empire by seizing property in every country conquered by Germany. Already, in 1943, his salesmen were exporting finished machine products from his new Ukrainian plants and selling them in Bulgaria, Turkey, and Romania. When financier Robert Rothschild refused to sign over his French holdings to Alfried, Rothschild was shipped to the Auschwitz concentration camp and gassed. It was incidents of this kind, together with his exploitation of slave labour, that put Alfried in the prisoners’ dock at the Nürnberg war-crimes trials after the war.
At first the victorious Allies, under the impression that Gustav had been in charge throughout the war, had indicted him. In fact, it was Alfried who had been the head of the family and the firm during the years when the inmates of 138 concentration camps worked for Krupp; Alfried who had built a fuse factory inside Auschwitz to take full advantage of prison labour; and Alfried who had Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz build a howitzer factory in Silesia.
The Nürnberg tribunal sentenced Alfried to 12 years in prison and ordered “forfeiture of all [his] property both real and personal.” Seven months after the outbreak of the Korean War (1950–53), however, John J. McCloy, U.S. high commissioner in American-occupied Germany, granted Alfried amnesty and restored all his holdings. Operating with tremendous skill and zeal, Alfried quickly restored the family firm to its former supremacy. By the early 1960s he was worth more than a billion dollars.
Alfried Krupp’s only son, Arndt, renounced his succession rights and his Krupp name. Thus, when Alfried died in 1967, the company went public, and the Krupp industrial family came to an end.
Alfred expanded his activity, including the purchase of Spanish mines and Dutch shipping, that made Krupp the biggest and richest company in Europe. Essen (the city where he based) became a large company town and Krupp became a de facto state within a state, with "Kruppianer" as loyal to the company and the Krupp family as to the nation and the Hohenzollern family.
Alfred Krupp himself had no particular sense of religion, as is proved by his numerous writings and sayings.
Krupp proclaimed he wished to have "a man come and start a counter-revolution" against Jews, socialists and liberals.
Krupp's marriage was not a happy one. His wife Bertha (not to be confused with their granddaughter), was unwilling to remain in polluted Essen in Villa Hügel, the mansion which Krupp designed. She spent most of their married years in resorts and spas, with their only child, a son.
