April 26, 1812: Birth of Krupp, the ‘Cannon King’
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1812: Alfred Krupp is born in Essen, Germany.
While the Krupp Konzern has always manufactured machinery and machine components from high-grade cast steel, the company is best known for producing perhaps the finest artillery ever seen in warfare.
It was Alfred Krupp, a staunch patriot at a time when Germany was struggling toward unification, who set the tone. The artillery produced by the Konzern was excellent, both in terms of its component quality and its accuracy, earning Alfred the sobriquet der Kanonenkonig, or “Cannon King.”
By the time of Krupp’s death in 1887, roughly half of the company’s business was tied up in armaments production. By then, the firm employed 20,000 workers, making it the largest industrial company on earth.
It was Krupp’s breech-loading cannon that annihilated the French army at Sedan in the Franco-Prussian War, Krupp’s “Kaiser Wilhelm” gun that shelled Paris from an incredible 75 miles away in 1918, and the versatile Krupp-made 88mm gun that, during World War II, was equally effective as an artillery piece, a tank killer and an anti-aircraft weapon.
But Alfred was as loyal to his business as he was to his country, so Krupp artillery pieces found their way into armies the world over. As William Manchester observed in his exhaustive saga of the munitions family, The Arms of Krupp, plenty of German soldiers were killed by Allied shells bearing the imprint of Krupp of Essen.
After a complete collapse at the end of World War II, Krupp rebounded during the German post-war “economic miracle” and continued in the steel business. The firm merged with its old rival, Thyssen, in 1999 to form ThyssenKrupp.
Source: The Arms of Krupp, by William Manchester; ThyssenKrupp.com
Photo: Alfred and Bertha Krupp with son Friedrich Alfred. Courtesy ThyssenKrupp
This article first appeared on Wired.com April 26, 2007.
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