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He graduated from an Essen Gymnasium at 17, then dutifully went off to Munich, and later Aachen, to study engineering. Only once did he rebel against his father, by marrying blonde, once-divorced Anneliese Bahr in 1937.
The marriage, which produced Arndt, ended in 1941, after Gustav threatened Alfried with disinheritance. Alfried's second marriage, to thrice-divorced Vera Hossenfeldt 15 months after his prison release in 1951, lasted five years.
When the legacy finally came, it was bitter. Ailing and verging on senility at 73, Gustav turned all over to his son, then 37, in 1943—shortly after Allied bombers began the raids that eventually turned a third of Krupp's Essen plants to rubble. After the Allied victory Alfried took the rap for Gustav, by then mentally incompetent, and was sentenced at Niirnberg to twelve years for using slave labor and "plundering occupied territory." Later, the U.S. acknowledged the injustice of the Niirnberg sentence, released Krupp and allowed him to take control of his firm once again.
Nowhere did Germany's famed—if now faded—postwar Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) shine more brightly than at Krupp. Under expansive, gregarious Berthold Beitz, whom Krupp brought in as his general manager in 1953, Krupp returned to the very top rank of German industrial companies. Sales have tripled since 1944 to last year's $1.35 billion, and the 3,000 items Krupp produces include almost everything but armaments, which Alfried banned.
Proud & Impracticable. Unfortunately for the company, that was about the only Krupp tradition he forsook. Because the third or fourth generation Kruppianer might be turned out of work, Krupp refused to close down money-losing locomotive works and coal and steel operations. The resulting debt of $600 million—highest of any German company—gave the edge last spring to the bankers, who then, in effect, ordained the end of the House of Krupp. Alfried's death was thus only a postscript.