In the entrance hall of Villa Hiigel, the 200-room stone and steel mansion where Alfried Felix Alwyn Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach was born, 500 business, political and labor leaders gathered late last week for the funeral of the last sole ruler of the Ruhr's most powerful industrial dynasty. After the eulogies, a Krupp band struck up a miners' song called Glueck Auf (Good Fortune) and led the way out through a crowd to a hearse waiting in the rain. Behind followed ten Krupp miners bearing the oaken casket. Visibly in tears was Krupp's longtime confidant, Berthold Beitz, 53, a non-Krupp whose task now is to set up a foundation that will oversee the beleaguered empire.
Krupp died as lonely as he had lived. Staffers noticed that his silver-grey Porsche had not appeared at the company's Essen quarters for a month. Krupp, in fact, was dying of bronchial cancer, which had already advanced beyond cure when it was discovered late in June. By mid-July, he was confined to his 28-room "bungalow" near the villa. When he died, his only attendant was a nurse.
Humiliation. An austere man with few friends, Krupp had grown remote and bitter as life delivered its blows. One of these was his six-year imprisonment (1945-51) as a war criminal. Then there was his son Arndt, a limp fellow of 29 who renounced his inheritance last year, leaving the House of Krupp without an heir for the first time in five generations. Arndt's $250,000-a-year allowance (which now goes to $500,000) may have made the decision easy, but two weeks ago he said that the "Krupp tradition" had only "brought my forebears a lot of unhappiness." Moreover, said Arndt, "I am not a man like my father, who sacrifices his whole life for something, not knowing whether it is really worth it in our time."
Still, Krupp's deepest humiliation stemmed from a shocking debacle with his bankers. Alfried had planned some day to turn over his holdings to a foundation, under which the firm would be run as a public company. But Krupp's bankers last spring rebelliously refused more credit to his debt-saddled firm
(TIME, March 17). Alfried Krupp had to seek aid from the government and accept its condition that Krupp go public by 1969. Thus, though the foundation will still be formed, the dignified exit he wanted for the House of Krupp became abject public surrender.
To Alfried Krupp such a humiliation was intolerable. In the years since the firm began as an Essen foundry in 1811, the House of Krupp had been courted by Bismarck, the Kaisers and Hitler. Kaiser Wilhelm I called it a "national institution." Wilhelm II was Alfried's godfather. And at Alfried's birth, his father Gustav wrote to his directors: "May he grow up in the Krupp works, and through practical work acquire the fundamentals he will require to take over the responsibility-laden duties."
Life with Father. Alfried followed the script. He and his seven younger sisters and brothers (none of whom shared his status as a Krupp crown prince) were cared for by tutors and servants on an ordered schedule. For one 50minute period each evening, Alfried was to play with Father, like it or not.