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Like succeeding Krupps, Alfred combined an almost Faustian flair for enterprise with a Teutonic dedication to efficiency. Like his descendants, too, he showed the strain of contrariness and in bred eccentricity that helps make Manchester's series of family portraits a gallery of near-grotesques. Alfred ranted against "speculators, stock-exchange Jews, share swindlers and similar parasites"; then he borrowed from the banker Salomon Oppenheim to meet his payroll. Paranoiacally fearful of Socialist tendencies among his workers, he hired an agent to inspect even the "used toilet paper" for seditious notes. He also located his office above a stable so that he could inhale the "healthgiving" aroma of manure.
Skyrockets and Suicide. Alfred's son Fritz was turnip-shaped and unprepossessing. But guiding the Konzern from 1887 to 1902, he built Krupp into a world industrial power that sold arms to countries from Chile to China and reaped rewards in ducats, guilders, guldens, livres, maravedis, pounds, schillings and rubles. The unofficial motto of the firm became Wenn Deutschland bluht, bluht Krupp (When Germany flourishes, Krupp flourishes).
Fritz's hobby seems to have been small boys. He transformed a Capri grotto into a scented Sodom, where attendants wore the habit of Franciscan friars and skyrockets were fired to celebrate orgasms. Photographs were taken and circulated. Eventually, reports of the goings on were published in the press. Kaiser Wilhelm rushed to the support of Fritz. But the scandal was too much, and Fritz committed suicide.
Big Bertha. The Krupps followed strictest rules of primogeniture, loading the whole of family wealth and power upon the eldest child. Siblings were absorbed into the firm, but only as drab underlings. After Fritz's death in 1902, the succession fell to his daughter, Bertha, and led to the long reign of a king-consort, Gustav von Bohlen und Hal-bach. Hand-picked by the Kaiser to marry the munitions business, he was also granted the right to use the Krupp name and to pass it along, though only for one generation and only to his eldest son. He ran the Konzern until 1943, outdoing the Krupps in ruthless efficiency. Gustav's only diversion seems to have been reading timetables for typographical errors. He allocated precisely 60 minutes a week to playing with his children—for his day was devoted to building the world's first and biggest fleet of U-boats and the famous 420-mm. cannon, sentimentally called "Big Bertha" after his wife. Before World War I, Gustav thriftily licensed Britain's Vickers company to make Krupp time fuses, provided that Vickers paid him one shilling threepence per shell fired. In the turmoil of trench warfare, the shell count was forgotten. But after the bloody defeat, Gustav calculated that the British owed him 60 marks for every dead German soldier. He billed Vickers so, but settled for one-sixth as much as he asked for.