Krupp

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Friedrich Krupp founded a small, struggling cast steel works in Essen in 1811 that nearly failed within his own lifetime; it was his son Alfred, who took over the firm at fourteen after his father's death and ran it for six decades, who built Krupp into an industrial empire, earning the nickname Kanonenkonig, the Cannon King, for the artillery that became the firm's signature product. Alfred Krupp pioneered the Bessemer-era mass production of cast steel in Germany and relentlessly pursued technical innovation, from seamless railway wheel tires to ever larger and more powerful guns, selling artillery to governments across Europe and beyond, including, at various points, more than one side of the same conflict. Encyclopaedia Britannica's account of the family and firm describes a business that fused industrial paternalism, extensive worker housing, health insurance and pensions decades before German state welfare programs required it, with an increasingly close relationship to the German state, particularly under Alfred's son and heirs, as Krupp steel and Krupp guns became central to German military power through unification, the World Wars and the arms buildups between them. What began as one family's small workshop became, within three generations, one of the largest industrial concerns in Europe and a name synonymous, for better and for worse, with German heavy industry itself.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's record of the postwar Krupp Trial documents a darker chapter the firm's celebratory industrial history tends to leave out. Under Alfried Krupp, great-grandson of the Cannon King, the company became one of Nazi Germany's largest users of forced and slave labour during the Second World War, operating factories that relied on concentration camp prisoners, prisoners of war and civilians deported from occupied territories under brutal conditions, alongside its central role manufacturing tanks, artillery and other weapons for the German war effort. Alfried Krupp and eleven other company directors were tried by a United States military tribunal at Nuremberg in 1947 and 1948 in what became known as the Krupp Trial, charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity connected to the use of forced labour and the plunder of occupied industry; Alfried Krupp was convicted and sentenced to twelve years imprisonment and the confiscation of his property. He served only a few years: United States High Commissioner John J. McCloy commuted the sentence and restored much of his property in 1951 amid the early Cold War push to rebuild West German industry, and Krupp resumed control of the firm, which continued operating for decades afterward. The episode remains one of the clearest documented cases of a major industrial dynasty prosecuted, however incompletely, for its direct role in Nazi-era forced labour.