Background
Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach was born in the The Hague, Holland, on 7 August 1870 into a prominent banking family.
Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach was born in the The Hague, Holland, on 7 August 1870 into a prominent banking family.
After studying law at Heidelberg, he served as a diplomat in a number of German embassies abroad before marrying Bertha Krupp in 1906 and gradually taking over the Friedrich Krupp Works in Essen, Kiel, Magdeburg and Berlin.
Head of the leading armaments firm in Germany and Europe (which had played a key role in World War I) and from 1931 Chairman of the Association of German Industry.
In May 1933 Krupp von Bohlen was appointed as Chairman of the Adolf Hitler Spende in Berlin, an industrialists’ fund administered by Martin Bormann which contributed liberally to the Nazi Party in return for special favours in the economic sphere. After 1933, the Krupp family contributed more than ten million marks annually to Hitler and the Nazi Party as well as additional sums to the ‘Circle of Friends of Heinrich Himmler’ who financed ‘special tasks of the SS’.
During World War II the giant Krupp Works benefited extensively from the German conquest of territories in the East, employing approximately 100,0 slave labourers, including Russian prisoners of war in fifty-seven labour camps in the Essen area, which were guarded by barbed wire and SS guards. Atrocious sanitary conditions (lack of medical supplies, water, toilets, overcrowding that bred disease, etc.), inadequate clothing and extremely meagre food characterized these Krupp labour camps which were scarcely surpassed by the Polish death camps. An estimated 70-80,000 slave labourers died as a result of the cruel methods of coercion employed in the Krupp Works. Krupps also built a large fuse factory at Auschwitz where Jews were worked to exhaustion and later gassed to death.
After the war Krupp von Bohlen was regarded by the Allies as a major war criminal and was indicted at Nuremberg for complicity in Hitler’s war of aggression. The older Krupp von Bohlen. however, did not stand trial because of his ‘physical and mental condition', after having been examined by a medical panel selected by the American military tribunal. It concluded that he was suffering from senility after a stroke and would not be able to follow the proceedings.
Gustav Krupp von Bohlen died in Bluhnbach bei Salzburg on 16 January 1950.
The ‘King of the munition makers’ was initially a ‘violent opponent' of Hitler, according to his fellow industralist, Fritz Thyssen. Krupp von Bohlen even warned President von Hindenburg on 29 January 1933 - the day before Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor-against the folly of such a step.
Yet within a short time he became in Thyssen's words ‘a super Nazi' following a meeting at Goering’s Reichstag President's Palace on 20 February 1933 which was hosted by Hjalmar Schacht.
At this meeting, where three million marks were collected from leading industrialists on behalf of the Nazi Party, Hitler promised to eliminate the Marxists and restore the Wehrmacht - a point of special interest to Krupp von Bohlen as the largest producer of guns, tanks and ammunition in Germany. Goering drove home the point by emphasizing that the Third Reich would end disarmament and irksome democratic controls- the forthcoming elections would be the last in Germany for at least ten years and ‘probably even for the next hundred years’.
Hitler kept his promise by restoring Krupp von Bohlen and other industrialists to leadership positions in the employers’ associations and dismissing Nazi ‘radicals’ who had tried to seize control of the economy.