Part Two: The Man Who Invented The Military-Industrial Complex

Robert is joined again by Alison Stevenson to continue to discuss Alfred Krupp.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hmm. Welcome back to the horse Shittingest Podcast and all
the Land behind the Bastards. This is part two of
our episode on Alfred Prupp, Faimed Arms, Maven and horse
poop Lover. Uh. My guests as in part one is
Alison Stevenson, writer and comedian Alison How are you doing today? Uh?

(00:24):
You know, excited to hear more about horseshit. Yeah, there's
definitely more horse ship in this. Also, a lot of
people get killed. Um and uh spoiler, we get a Germany. Okay,
ready to learn how Germany came about? Yeah, man, let's
do it. Yeah. It's one of those things that has
nothing but positive consequences. Thank god. Can you imagine life

(00:46):
without Germany? How different history would have been. That's facts,
that's bad. I'd have more relatives, problems, you would. You
would definitely have more a lot of a staggering amount
of people. A lot of Germans would have more relatives
if there had never been a Germany. Actually I will
say there would be too many English people. Um, yeah,

(01:08):
don't want that. So all the historic events we've discussed
so far, we're happening during a mostly forgotten by modern standards,
but very violent period called the Wars of German Unification.
So for most of the last few centuries, Germany hadn't
been a thing. It had been a patchwork of often
warring and always quarreling kingdoms, and the kind of thing

(01:30):
that became Germany started to gradually coalesce, together with the
birth of the German Common Market, which we talked about
last episode in the German Confederation. But Germans being Germans,
it was going to take a series of wars to
actually seal the deal. One of those wars, in eighteen
sixty four involved Prussia and Austria allying to fight Denmark,
which at the time controlled a chunk of land and
what we now would consider northern Germany. Um, Denmark used

(01:53):
to have possessions outside that weird little fucking is the
most or whatever the fun you want to call it,
sticking out of the top of Europe. They owned a
bunch of the continent, and the Germans were like, but
that should be ours, and so they had they had
a war. Now, when this war kicked off in eighteen
sixty four, the Danish army was small but extremely experienced.
It included one of the highest proportions of combat veterans

(02:14):
and continental Europe, and in the past that had made
all of the difference in European wars, you know, more
than minor difference differences in musketry or cannon was whether
or not your your troops were veteran, because like guns sucked,
and cannons also kind of sucked. Um, So what really
mattered was if you had a bunch of guys who
were able to like stand together when they got shot
at and then charged the other guys with sharpened sticks

(02:35):
like that was kind of what determined battles. Um. And
the Danes had that, and the German army was like
completely inexperienced. Um, they were well drilled in everything, but
they had never actually been in battle, and so everyone
kind of when this started assumed that the Danish army
was going to win. But for this war, the Danes
were armed with brass cannons and muzzle loading muskets, while

(02:56):
the Prussians and the Austrians had been armed by Kroop
with breach steel cannons. They also had drice needle guns,
which were essentially the first bolt bolt action rifles. So
both the Prussian and Austrian armies were again made up
of guys who had never fought before. But that didn't
wind up mattering, because with their advanced cannons and rifles,
they cut the Danish army to pieces without breaking a

(03:17):
sweat thanks to their advanced firepower. This was the first
time that a European war had been decided purely by
arms technology, and it would not be the last. So obviously,
like you look at European conquest of of you know,
North America, South America, Africa which is kind of starting
in this period, Southeast Asia, they always have a technological
advantage on their opponents, but in European wars, they'd all

(03:39):
been equal enough that what had mattered was like quality
of generals and like how good your troops were. This
is the first time that one European army goes up
against another with such an advantage in technology that nothing
else matters. Um. Yeah, and it kind of freaks people
out because they'd always assumed that, like, well, we're all equal, right,
Like when we fight these other people who aren't white,

(04:01):
we always have an edge, but when we fight each other,
we're all on the same And now, yeah, suddenly that
isn't true anymore. And yeah, so for the first time,
you know, people start flipping out about this. Both Austria
and Prussia start putting in orders for more guns, and
of course Alfred was happy to sell to them both.

(04:21):
And this actually kind of piste off the King of Prussia,
who was presently in the process of getting into a
war with his former ally Austria. So Austria and Prussia
fight den Or fight the Danes and win and take
a big chunk of Germany. Um. And then they go
to war with each other. In By eighteen sixty six,
both nations were mobilizing to fight, and Krupp had penning
orders from both sides. And since Essen was in Prussia,

(04:42):
like he's under the King of Prussia, who's not happy
about the fact that he's arming the guys, they're about
to go fight. So the Kings is this kind of
the first time that this sort of thing is happens, Yes,
this is the first time that this is happening. Um,
which is again yet another like uh thing that we
can thank al Ford Krupp for. Yeah, thank you, Yeah,

(05:02):
thanks buddy. So the King's war minister sends Alfred a
letter I venture to ask you whether you are willing
out of patriotic regard to present political conditions to undertake
not to supply any guns to Austria without the consent
of the King's government. Now, at this point, Alfred Krupp
had put a lot of stock into being a patriotic gunmaker,
and this was a pretty hobbiest conflict of interest between

(05:24):
his nation and his business. Alfred did the right thing, though,
and avoided responding for nearly a week. When he finally
did reply, he wrote that he knew very little about
the political conditions and planned to go on working quietly.
He pointed out that Vienna wouldn't get their new cannons
until June, and that the King could impound krup shipments
if he wished, so, like, what was the big deal? Like?
It probably won't get there in time to kill your soldiers?

(05:46):
Why are you complaining? This? Piste off the King of Prussia,
and he called Krupp in for a special meeting with
himself and his right hand man, Otto von Bismarck. It
says a lot about how valued Krupp was that the
King was afraid to offend him, merely urging him not
to fulfill Austria's order too quickly. But Alfred was irritated
by even this, insisting that he had to fulfill his obligations. Then,

(06:08):
sensing an opportunity for a sale, he warned the King
that Prussia's defenses were inadequate. Um. So yeah, so he
he tells the King like basically like, I'm not going
to stop selling guns to your enemies. And then he's like, hey,
by the way, your current guns aren't good enough and
you might get your ass kicked in this war, maybe
you should buy some more guns, which freaks out the
King of Prussia. Um, but Alfred is happy about that.

(06:30):
He writes home to his employees that evidently startled him,
which was what I wanted. Um. And then, after all
of this, because again Alfred cannot read a room, he
asks for a loan from the crown. So he's like, yeah,
kind of kind of bad at reading people. This k yeah. Obviously,

(06:51):
the King says no, and Alfred is flummixed as to why. So.
Over in France, the Emperor Napoleon the Third had been
pretty psyched that Prussia and Austria were going to war.
German unification terrified the French, and he had been relieved
at because he thought that they were going to have
like a long and bloody war that would exhaust them
both and that would make France safer. But the opposite happened.
The war lasted only seven weeks because you know, mainly

(07:13):
the Prussians had a hell of a lot better guns
than the Austrians, and a lot more of them. Krup
cannons functioned mostly marvelously, but there were flaws with the
design that only revealed themselves under battle. A handful of
flawed guns exploded and killed their crews, and the sent
Alfred into a depressive spiral. It provided an opportunity for
the war King's war minister, a kind of unhinged advocate
of brass cannons, to start demanding that preuscious switched away

(07:36):
from steel guns and back to brass. Now desperate, Krupp
offered to give the army hundreds of free guns. He
found himself so anxious over the whole debacle that he
fled to be with his wife in a spa town
where he was incredibly out of place, and wound up
embarrassing her in front of her friends. And you kind
of assume, based on the context, the men that she
was cheating on him with, Like he sort of shows
up out of nowhere in this like crowd of people

(07:57):
that she's like friends with and fucking and he's like
bummed because his guns killed their their gunners, and it's
just it's a very awkward situation. Um Thankfully, he proves
himself incapable of relaxation and assumed back at home and
his fifth Palace, trying to sell guns to another one
of his nation's enemies, France, because he's also a man
who never learns anything. Damn. In eighteen sixty eight, he

(08:19):
showed up but yet another Paris exhibition with a brand
new fourteen inch gun, which he described as a monster
such as the world has never seen. The barrel alone
weighed fifty tons. The powder charge for each shell was
a hundred pounds. Emperor Napoleon the Third awarded krup the
highest honor of the exhibition, and a bunch of fancy
French military awards. He started talking about buying from Krupp

(08:39):
and Bulk, and Alfred sent France a catalog of his wares.
The Emperor kept Krups hopes, hope hopes up for months,
but his generals were convinced that brass cannons were all
that French France needed. The Emperor, who had written a
book about the use of artillery, decided not to buy
from Krupp after all and gave him a terse rejection.
Alfred sank into yet another depression. He sent the giant

(09:00):
canyon cannon he'd bought brought to the exhibition to the
King of Prussia, and he sent an identical gun to
the Czar in order to keep his biggest client happy.
Alfred was a lot more popular internationally than he was
within the bounds of Prussia. Representatives from the United States
offered to let him move to Alabama and start a
factory there. He turned them down. Japan and Sweden sent
members of their royal families to tour his factories. Turkey, Brazil, Belgium,

(09:22):
and Russia all showered him with awards. None of this
meant much to Alfred. The only international acclaim he valued, was,
of course, money and interestring So like he's in this
interesting situation because the Prussian government is like constantly the
actual military is constantly pushing back on buying more of
his guns. But the king gets locked into an agreement
with Alfred to where Prussia won't buy weapons from any

(09:44):
other company. At the same time, Krupp is like, like,
and this is because crup basically threatens them. He's like,
if you buy guns from anybody else, then I will
sell my guns to all of your enemies. And this
is kind of weird because he's also actively trying to
sell his guns to all of he's still do doing it.
It's kind of weird that it works. Um, but it does. Uh,

(10:04):
And it doesn't seem to matter to the Prussian government
because Kreup at this point is tens of thousands of
workers and like it's described as a state within a state,
Like it's become as powerful in some ways as the
government of Prussia. And this is again the first time
that happens photo capitalism. Yeah, this is early capitalism. This

(10:25):
is the first massive international arms concern, and it's so
big that it's able to get the government to agree
not to buy from anyone else while they're selling to
all of the government's enemies. Like, that's very interesting that
Alfred is able to do this, And it's because the
cannons are that much better than anyone else's guns. M now,
and around this same time, Alfred started designing a new

(10:46):
home for himself. His factory had polluted essence so badly
by this point that it was no longer fit for
human habitation. His workers would continue to live there, of course,
but Alfred wanted fresh country air. He interviewed dozens of architects,
but decided in the end to go with himself. He
designed a building based around three main concerns. Number one,
he believed that standing or sleeping in one room for

(11:07):
too long was toxic. He would consume all of the
air and suffocate, so his house had to have hundreds
of rooms. Number two, he was terrified of fire, so
the entire building needed to be made from stone. And
number three, he was absolutely in love with the smell
of poor ship, so the hare house had to be
built so that it waked the feces at all times. Beautiful,
it's it's an amazing house, and it's crazy. In the sixties,

(11:30):
when this book that I was one of the big
sources for this, was written, they didn't know how many
rooms it had. Like the counts of the number of
rooms in this mansion varied by up to a hundred
like nobody was quite sure. Because he had god, he
liked to spy on people, so it had hundreds of
secret passageways in and behind the rooms that he could
crawl through and watch people while they were in his houts.

(11:50):
People would just like wake up in the morning and
he would have notes in their bedroom about their behavior
the day before. Yeah, he's he rules, Uh, you gotta
love Alfred, but I want to about in the making. Yeah.
So from the arms of quote, he gave a lot

(12:11):
of thought to this, this being how to get as
much horseshit smell into the house as possible. And then
it came to him in in a flash, what an idea.
He could build his study directly over the stable with
shafts to waf the scent upward. And that is precisely
what he decided to do, crowing so to speak on
his private dunghill. Jeez, fucking dude loves horseshit. And it's

(12:33):
funny because like damn, all these kings and queens come
to visit him and stay at his house, and like
they all comment that like fucking smells like ship here
when it's wronger this guy, and thank you, it does smell,
and they can't do anything, like they can't not go
because he's the guy with the guns you have. It's
it's it's a very strange situation, but it is an

(12:55):
evidence that if you're rich and successful enough, you can
make everybody indulge your like very bizarre our whims. Eighteen
seventy came and in June of that year, Prince Leopold
of Holands all Learned decided to accept the job of
being Spain's king, because apparently that's how royalty worked in
those days. This really pissed France off because they didn't
like the idea of being surrounded on both sides by
Germanic monarchs. The Fridge Foreign Minister threatened Berlin, and the

(13:18):
King of Prussia backed down and asked his son to
not accept the offer to be the king of Spain.
But this was not enough for France. France in fact
demanded a royal apology from the King of Prussia. This
was a bridge too far for the King of Prussia
and he refused. He drafted up a telegram and he
handed it to Otto von Bismarck, who was basically like
Ottos like the prime minister. He's like basically the guy

(13:38):
running the country for the king. And Otto decides that
this this telegram isn't defensive enough and so he edits
It to make it basically a declaration of war because
there was a bunch of French territory he'd been eyeing
a while he wanted to like take it over for Germany.
And he also wanted to test out the German military
because at this point, France is the pre eminent military
force in Europe. A generation or so earlier, they've taken

(14:01):
on the entire rest of the continent, and one for
the most part right up until the end. And Bismarck
wanted to prove that Germany was now the stronger military force,
and he calculated that France was not as strong as
she thought she was, particularly in the crucial realm of artillery.
And he also kind of thought that this war would
be a good opportunity to finally unify Germany as a
single political entity for the first time in history. Bismarck

(14:24):
was the guy who had orchestrated Prussia kind of gobbling
up all of these German kingdoms, and he saw war
with France is basically the same. Like so for Bismarck
in this period, he spent his whole life cobbling together
this what what becomes Germany, and he sees war with
France is like the equivalent of a dude with a
low rider sees a fiesta parking lot like it's a
place to show off this Germany that he's built. So

(14:46):
that's that's kind of what Bismarck does. And so what
is basically starts as one king asking another to apologize
and the other king saying no, turns into a war
that kills hundreds of thousands of people as a result
of all this, which is awesome, okay, okay, worth it, Yeah,
totally worth it. So at the time, everyone expects France
to win. Newspapers, all right, that the Prussian causes doomed.

(15:09):
German peasants cut their corn down early, certain that French
invaders would soon be stomping through their fields. Instead, what
followed was a slaughter. The French had better rifles, but
they had brass cannons and the Germans had steel, crooked cannons,
and that turned out to be all that really mattered.
The whole war came down to a siege in a
city called Mets, and I'm gonna write about read about

(15:30):
that from an article in World Crunch that kind of
contextualizes this battle. Modern warfare began in eighteen seventy at
the Siege of Metz, the first the final battle in
the Franco Prussian War. It was the first time that
the true scale of industrial metallurgical death revealed its true potential.
Over two months, the Prussian artillery bombarded French troops hold
up in the city's fortifications. The Wheach army had the

(15:52):
same number of cannons the bronze artillery of Napoleon the
Third's army was no match for the range, accuracy, and
durability of pruscious steel cannon. Some hundred and ninety three
thousand French soldiers were killed to the Prussians five thousand,
seven hundred and forty casualties. After mess came to Siege
of Paris, the collapse of the Napoleonic dynasty, the unification
of Germany, and the birth of the Second Reich. So

(16:15):
this battle is very we don't like nobody fucking talks
about the eighteen seventy Franco Prussian War. It's one of
the most important wars in history. Because Germany comes out
of it. They declare Germany in Versailles. The reason that
World War One ends with the Treaty of Versailles is
because the Germans humiliate the French here in eighteen seventy
sign a treaty in Versailles that leads to the creation

(16:35):
of Germany, and fucking two generations later, the French want
to do the same thing in Versailles when they beat Germany.
Like that's that's why that all happens. It all starts here.
And this is the first modern battle and the first
modern death toll. Right before then, a hundred three thousand
was like an insane number of people to die in
a in a war, let alone, like a long battle. Um.

(16:58):
And in here it's like one part of the war. Um.
It's just like this, this tremendous death toll that had
not been seen earlier in the same kind of time frame.
It's just it's it's it's a fucking nightmare. Um And yeah,
like it's uh, this is like where the modern world
is kind of borne out of this battle, and it's
born because of krupt cannons, because there was so much

(17:19):
better than the brass cannons the French had. It really
did just come down to that. Now France had been
on the cusp of building its own steel cannons via
its own giant Arms company Schneider, but their production was
halted before they could get out in time for the
war because of a communist strike, and so you can
actually say that communism helped lead to the birth of
the German state as a result of this, which is
another interesting little tidbits. Yeah, so corrupt guns would get

(17:45):
another chance to impress the world and kill a funkload
of people after the actual fighting had mostly ended. See,
the emperor himself was captured, you know, in the battles
before this, and his army routed, but the city of
Paris refused to surrender, and there was kind of like
a revolution in this city. Is like we're going to
take back France on our own, like funk our emperor
and stuff like we'll we'll fight the Germans um, which

(18:07):
is of course like a swell. It's pretty suicidal because
Krupp has these you know, we've been talking about these
giant guns he's been building just to show off. Well,
now they get used and they're not any use on
a battlefield because they have ranges that are measured in miles,
but they're long enough away that you can be outside
of a city and level the city from like five

(18:27):
miles away and that had never been done before. So
what you see with the Siege of Paris is a
sneak peek to how Warwood looks seventy years later, when
you have you know, bombers reigning down bombs on cities
from miles up. This is the same thing, but with
artillery on the ground, just blowing the ship up out
of Paris without troops ever entering the city. Oh god, yeah,

(18:47):
it's the first time that happens, thanks to Alfred Krupp. Okay, okay, yeah,
it's good stuff. We're gonna talk a little bit more
about how he murdered a whole on to people. But first,
you know, who doesn't shell Paris from five miles away?
Who the products and services that support this podcast. We're

(19:16):
back and we're talking about the siege of Paris. So
again as saying, this is like the first time that
a city is destroyed from a distance without troops ever entering.
It as like a military tactic, and it was very
controversial at the time. Bismarck was immediately like, yeah, just
just kill everybody in Paris if they resist, and his
generals were like, well, that's a that's a crime, sir um.

(19:37):
But eventually they decided to do it. And yeah, I'm
going to read a quote from Hate Winds. Yeah, yeah,
it always does. Um, so I'm gonna find I'm gonna
read a quote from a collection of eyewitness accounts from
the Siege of Paris that were gathered by Salem College.
Quote a Colonel Heitzler and his wife. We're giving breakfast
at Avrone to several friends. A servant being in the room.

(19:59):
One of the guests was laughing with the hostess and said, no, butters, certainly,
but there may be a shell in its place. And
as he spoke, a shell burst in the room, killed
six of the party and wounded severely the host and hostess,
and only the doctor of the regiment and the servant
got off unscathed. The remains of the six came just
now to valde Grass Hospital, but it was such a
human ruin that no individuality could be recognized. Prussians are

(20:22):
firing with eight e guns, some of them being hundred
and twelve pounders, ranging from three miles to half three
miles and a half to four miles. So they're just
killing anybody and everybody. Yeah, they're just showing. They're dropping
hundred and twelve pound explosive shells on a city, blindly
shooting into it. Jesus until people don't want to fight anymore. Yeah,

(20:42):
as terrifying. Yeah again, this would not have been possible
without Alfred Krupp's invention, and this would become the norm.
This is the Norman warfare. Now you talk about the
Siege of Rocca, it was U S artillery pounding Rocca
from miles away in order to clear out the Islamic state.
And also all of the civilians who happened to me,
I watched some of this ship happened in Moses like
this has been war ever since, and it starts here

(21:03):
in eighteen seventy thanks to the steel canons of Krupp.
That's sad. It's cool ship. It is cool ship. Archibald Forbes,
of war correspondent with the London Daily News, had this
to say. He was there in Paris at the time
and he had seen like bunches of wars previous to this,
but they've been like the little bit of European wars.
We have like a bunch of lines of guys shoot

(21:24):
at each other with shitty rifles and like a couple
of hundred die and then your war is done right now,
he's in the middle of the first modern slaughter. And
here's what he writes. The terrible ghastliness of those dead
transcended anything I had ever seen or even dreamed of
in the shuddering nightmare after my first battlefield. Remember how
they had been slain. Not with the nimble bullet of
the needle gun that drills a minute hole through a

(21:46):
man and leaves him undisfigured unless it has chanced to
strike his face, Not with the sharp stab of the bayonet,
but slaughtered with missiles of terrible weight, shattered into fragments
by explosions of many pounds of powder, mangled and torn
by massive fragments of iron. Huh. Yeah, it's the first
modern modern deaths. That's how everybody dies. Now. It's good stuff. Yeah, yeah,

(22:13):
it's fucking rules. So cities have been ravaged by war before,
but eighteen seventy marked the first time one was wrecked
by soldiers who never even entered the city's borders. Far
from horrifying the planet, it ignited a tremendous hunger for
krupt guns. So people see this fucking slaughter instead of
being like, you guys just murdered a bunch of civilians
and broke all the laws of war. They're like, I
gotta get some of those fucking cannons. I need some

(22:34):
of that ship. Give me those, Give me those motherfucker's. Yeah,
this guy is really good at making guns. Look at
how many dead people there are in Paris. It's great. Sucks.
This is not one of our more optimistic about people episodes.
It sure isn't. At least government suck and a lot

(22:56):
of the tists. Yeah. So from the arms of Krupt
quote krup cannon became the new status symbol of nations.
Turkey used them to guard the Bosphorus Romania to protect
the forty bastions of Bucharest. According to legend, Tiny and
Dora bought a long range gun and then discovered that
it couldn't be fired without hitting French soil. In eighteen

(23:16):
seventy three, the Corrupt Work payroll was half again as
large as in eighteen seventy. The firm had surpassed the
peak of its wartime production. Then came the Sino Japanese
War Scare of eighteen seventy four. In eighteen seventy five,
the first in a long series of plums which fell
into Alfred's lap. Tokyo had purchased cannon from Schneider, and
the Chinese warlords had been buying from Armstrong, but by
now memoirs of men who had fought at Sadan Mets

(23:38):
in Paris those are all battles from eighteen seventy were
being read over the globe. When Krupp wrote flattering letters
to Lee Hong Chang, the Bismarck of Asia, and sent
him a model railroad. Lee responded by ordering two hundred
seventy five field guns, another hundred fifty cannon to arm
the Taku fort guarding the approach to Tiensen, and a
complete armament for eight warships. And gratitude. Alfred hung over
the head of his bed a portrait of Lee, despite

(24:00):
his fear of combustible combustible objects in the castle. Word,
if his Chinese coup reached Potstam, Krupp tells governments what
they must buy. If governments were poor enough, He really did.
Backward countries were given shipments of obsolete weapons despite the
huge bill paid by Asia's Bismarck. Li Hong Cheng didn't
receive Essen's latest model, which was being delivered to St. Petersburg.

(24:20):
That winter, the Taku forts got outdated cannon and a
handsome order from bang Hawk was filled. From the same prescription,
Alfred wrote, tartly Chinese and Siamese can blow their enemies
to bits well enough with these. Wow. Yeah, send the
shitty guns that explode sometimes to the Asians. They're not white, damn. Yeah,
he's a real piece of ship. Yep. Yeah, he's a

(24:43):
terrible Person's a piece of horse ship. Sorry, yeah, no,
don't say that. He that's that's a compliment. Yeah, he
would love to hear that. You tell him he's a
piece of horse. He would say thank you, yes. But
to everyone else, yeah, except for they have to pretend
it to like it, because they want his guns fair enough, Krupp.
One of the things I guess that is kind of
heartening here is that as successful as he was, Krupp

(25:05):
was fundamentally incapable of taking any pleasure in his success.
He always found new things to worry about. And in
the Yeah, as the eighteen seventies rolled on, this thing
was communism. So in eighteen seventy one, like, I love
that there's no like guilty conscious going on. It's like
it's not worried about how his guns are gonna sell.
He is incapable. The only thing he ever feels guilt

(25:25):
about is when his guns blow up and kill German crews.
M M yeah, Um, he's a good dude, so he
starts flipping out about He thought communism was pretty funny
in eighteen seventy when the French went on strike and
they didn't get their steel cannons in time. But in
eighteen seventy one, the Social Democratic Party goes on strike
in Germany and threatens to shut down the minds that

(25:47):
brought Krupp his iron and coal. Alfred was furious. He
issued a company directive that neither now nor at any
future time would a former striker be allowed to work
for Krupp. He was kind of enough to recognize that
strikes and communist sympathy among workers were caused by the
fact that a lot of workers were miserable and desperate.
He decided to address this by issuing a groundbreaking list

(26:07):
that he called his General Regulations. These guaranteed his permanent
employees a pension, healthcare, old age care, and a variety
of other benefits that we now look together as part
of a social safety net. He invents welfare. Basically, he's
he's the first company to do a pension. Is see
if this was to be made into a movie, that's
the only thing that they would yeah, that they would

(26:29):
say about him and ignoring all the weapons ship well
and where it's not as good as it sounds. So
he sends out a list of these benefits to his
employees in part to make sure that they won't strike.
But the list aren't mostly benefits. They're mostly a list
of obligations that the workers have to the company. Yeah,

(26:51):
so he like really focuses on what the companies owe
the firm, and he liberally threatens his workers throughout the document.
As in this passage, the full force of a of
authority must be used to to suppress disloyalty and conspiracy.
Those who commit unworthy acts must never be permitted to
feel safe, must never escape public disgrace. Good, like wickedness,
should be examined through a microscope, for their truth is

(27:13):
to be found. Even as a seed bears fruit and
direct ratio to the nourishment or poison it is given.
So it is that from the spirit that an act
benigner evil arises. And again the act that is evil.
He's talking about is like unionizing um, which is yeah. Now,
the more corrupt played with the idea of his general regulations,
the more they turned into a corporate dictatorship. He decided

(27:36):
that his company was entitled because he was now paying
them pensions and stuff. His company was entitled to an
employee's full and undivided energy, and he gradually came to
feel that that meant CRUP should be the entire focus
of a CRUP employees life. To that end, he developed
housing colonies for his employees, each building named after a
CRUP ancestor. He built a bread factory, a wine store,

(27:57):
a butcher plant, and even a hotel. This city of
Essen turned into an extension of Alfred Krupp's personal property.
From his vantage point, the best thing about providing all
of these services to his employees was that he could
take them away from workers who did things he's disproved
of and destroy their entire lives. A dismissed employee lost everything,
even his pension and of course his company home. Alfred

(28:19):
wrote to the Kaiser that this system would quote be
useful for the prevention of socialistic errors, because you lose
your whole life if you get fired now. Damn kind
of true today. Yeah, thanks, Alfred, Yeah, not not much different.
He's a trailblazer, not not like an Alfred Right now.

(28:40):
To help further prevent those errors, Krupp instituted a program
of snooping, the first centralized workplace espionage program. Yeah, you
talk about like the night early nineteen late eight hundred,
early night, like the eighteen nineties through the nineteen twenties.
This is huge in the United States. The Pinkerton's are
a big deal. Kruff is doing this in the early
eighteen seventies. He's he's the first company to have an

(29:01):
organized program of spy. Yeah, yeah, very ahead of his time. Today,
companies like the Pinkerton's provide corporations like Amazon with surveillance
of workers who might win a unionize. And that starts
with Krupp, who ordered, quote a constant, quiet observation of
the spirit of our workers, so that we cannot miss
the beginning of any ferment anywhere. And I must demand

(29:22):
that if the cleverest and best workman or foreman even
looks as though he wants to raise objections or belongs
to one of those unions, he shall be discharged as
quickly as practicable without consideration of whether he can be spared. Wow. Wow,
he's a fucking cool dude. Let's just go to ads
and not think too much about any of this. We're back.

(29:47):
I love not thinking too deeply about history. Um So again,
a lot of as nice as some of these social
welfare things sound on the surface, a lot of them
are really very negative and abusive. But I do have
to give Alfred credit for something which is that inspired
by the rules that Alfred puts in for his company

(30:08):
and the social like welfare that he gives his workers,
Otto von Bismarck introduces a series of landmark German social
welfare legislation that is like based on the general regulations
that Alfred writes, and those become the backbone of all
German social security to this day. The entire German welfare
state starts because of Alfred Krupp, like he he inspired,

(30:30):
like writes down the initial laws that become the backbone
of everything that has done later, which is like something
you have to make note of. I guess he doesn't
do it for a good reason, but he does do it.
So yeah, wow right, yeah, it's it's it's fun. Um Now, Obviously,

(30:52):
even that is more problematic than it might sound. Um,
And I'm going to quote from the arms of Krupp here.
In nineteen eleven, the Reich's workman Insurance Code was extended
to all laborhoods. Extended to was to extend to all
labors the rights that Krupp had given his men nearly
four decades before. And the following year Kaiser Wilhelm the
Second declared an essen that the Iron Chancellor Bismarck had

(31:14):
been prodded by Krupp. Echoes of the general regulations were
to be heard in the third Reich. Hitler wrote in
Mind comp that his own program had begun with a
study of Bismarck's social reforms, and the slogan of the
Fewer's Labor Front leader Robert Ley community spirit must be drilled,
was taken almost verbatim from Alfred's fourth article, So both
the Kaiser. Long after Alfred's death, both the Kaiser and

(31:37):
Hitler copy his labor reforms not because they care about
the workers, but because they're a good way to prevent
communism from taking place, because they provide just enough security
that it makes people not want to unionize. And yeah,
a little more complacent, and the Nazis recognized this and
almost copy him word for word in some pet places

(31:57):
like yeah, it's good stuff. Good stuff would have made
a pretty good dictator. He would have made it. He
was basically a dictator, and he would have made a
fantastic Nazi. I mean his his his son was an
amazing like his like grandson, I guess was an amazing Nazi.
So yeah, yeah, his grandson was a huge Nazi, big,

(32:17):
big solid Nazi. Uh great, a solid Nazi. Did he
inherit the horseship thing? Or was that just no? I
think that was just Alfred. Yeah, yeah, it's a little peculiar.
Still stuff, it's weird. So Krupp himself never lived to

(32:39):
see the lot rise of the Third Reich, but his
descendants loved it, and there's no reason I think he
wouldn't also have loved it. He Yeah. He wrote this
in reference to the German Social Democratic Party, which, in
spite of his best efforts, rose throughout Germany. In his
later life, I wish somebody with great gifts would start
a counter revolution for the best of the people, with
flying columns, labor battalions of young men. He's saying, he

(33:01):
wants a Nazi party. Like that's what that statement is, is, like,
there's too many fucking liberals. I wish somebody would start
a counter revolution with like flying columns of young men
ready to beat the ship out of socialists. Yeah, that's
definitely what humanity needs as a solution to things. Yeah. Yeah,
when he's crying out for somebody with great gifts, he's

(33:21):
he's crying out for Hitler, Like that's who he Like,
he doesn't know it at the time, but that's who
he's begging for. What if he like built Hitler himself
out of like a bunch of horseshit. Yeah, I mean,
in a way, he kind of did. He certainly was
one of the people made Yeah, he was one of
the people who made you know, Hitler possible. Obviously, you know,

(33:43):
you don't get a Hitler without a lot of people
wanting a Hitler and a lot of ground work had
to be laid. But Alfred's one of the guys who's
down there plugging away to make Germany ready for a Hitler.
That is absolutely fair to say. Alfred was a staunch
opponent of democracy. He wanted the abolishment of universal human stuff,
Ridge and the franchise to vote withdrawn from people without property.

(34:03):
He urged his workers to ignore politics and put up
notices in his factory that a vote for the Social
Democratic Party was a vote for the idle, dissolute, and incompetent.
He went on to advise them, enjoy what you have
when work is over. Stay in the circle of your family,
with your wife, children and the old people, and think
about the household problems and education. Let that be your politics.
Then you will be happy. But spare yourself the excitement

(34:25):
of big cut. Questions of national policy, issues of high
policy require more time and knowledge than the workman has
at his command. You're too dumb to think about politics. Yeah,
when the Social Democrats, yeah, he's not. He himself is
a pretty smart guy. When the Social Democrats won seats
in the reichs doug anyway, he fired thirty men for
suspicion of socialism. Now in his late sixties, Crupp became

(34:49):
a tyrant, cracking down or rationally on anything that seemed
like the scent. Periodically he would flee Essen and his
company for weeks at a time, hiding in his terrible
house and sending missives out. He would invite p belover
and then refused to see them, spying on them secretly
through hidden chambers in his home and leaving them notes
critiquing their behavior. Once, when an unmarried couple flirted in
his home, they woke up to find a sheet of

(35:10):
paper with his handwriting on it in their bedroom telling
them that a carriage was ready to take them away
because they kissing and ship. Yeah, he's a weird dude.
In short, Alfred Krupp lost his damn mind. His wild
success brought him a kind of megalomania. He mortgaged the
company near the breaking point to buy up almost every
mine in Germany on the notion that he must secure
for his descendants a hundred years worth of raw materials

(35:32):
to keep the company running. He threatened to sue employees
who left Krupp for another company, and even attempted to
have it made illegal for people to switch employers. Like,
oh my god, Yeah, he's out of his damn mind
by the time he's like in his fifties and sixties. Um,
I'm gonna quote from the arms of Krupp again here.
Since he was providing his employees with homes, schools, hospitals,

(35:54):
and food, he reasoned that they're hours away from work
belonged to him too. It is an astonishing fact that
most of them agreed, or at any rate right displayed
no signs of mutiny. There is no evidence that he
provoked either indignation or amusement with what was, by any yardstick,
his most extraordinary order to the men of my works.
He had been thinking it over, he said, it had
come to the conclusion that a faithful workman's place of

(36:14):
work included the marriage bed. Just as the sole proprietor
was acquiring enough raw materials to last the house of
Krupp for the next ninety nine years, so must every
conscientious CRUP employee strive to provide the state with plenty
of loyal subjects and to develop a special breed of
men for the works. In other words, you owe me
a duty to have kids so that I have employees

(36:34):
in the future and my children have employees. Damn, this
is messed up. Yeah, it's it's really bad. He's terrible,
and a lot like Jeff Bezas. He's just open homeless
shelters for Amazon employees. So the continued success of the
social Democrats through Alfred into a constant rage in his
waning years, he ran for election and lost amidst a

(36:57):
massive leftward swing that saw the SPD. The Social Democratic
Party allied with the Centrist Party to try and block
a landmark military appropriations bill that would have been a
lot of money for Alfred. Alfred became incredibly invested in
that year's elections, pushing his employees to vote for an
approved mandate and going so far as to have the
local elections Commission, which he controlled, issue marked ballots so

(37:17):
he could punish any employee who voted the wrong way.
And yet still his candidate, who was his son at
this point, lost and the Social Democrats gained seats. Alfred
threatened to dynamite his entire factory and had to be
argued down by his employees, who pointed out that the
Nationalists were still in charge and we're still going to
pass the appropriations bill, so it was kind of stupid
to blow up his entire factory just because they were

(37:39):
slightly less overwhelmingly in charge than they had been before.
But he's that kind of guy, like, you're still in power,
but other people have had political success, so you want
to blow up your own factory. Like he's yeah, he
is kind of trumpy um, and the fact that the
SPD still existed and seemed to be gaining ground kind

(37:59):
of bro Alfred. He posted a note in his shop
that stated, the next time I go through the works,
I want to feel at home, and I would rather
see the place empty than to find some fellow with
venom in his heart, such as every social democrat is.
Oh boy, it's like maybe a little bit of it
might be putting that a little bit, uh, projecting a
little bit there, buddy, Like yeah. So next he hired

(38:22):
inspectors to go through all the trash and his workshops
and his worker housing projects and comb for literature critical
of either company management or the German government. An old
man who had worked as a corrupt night watchman for
thirty three years was fired, so was a worker whose
landlady had wrapped his lunch in a newspaper Alfred disliked.
Alfred considered this program a great success, and so he
hired a new inspector to go through the used toilet

(38:44):
paper to see if socialists had left any notes in
the bathroom Like it's he's fucking out of his mind
at this point, um, And it's weird because like the
left never harmed his business in any way. In fact,
the last decade or so of his life was the
most profitable period in CRUP history to date. At least
fifteen little wars broke out and involving countries he sold

(39:05):
arms to. Sometimes his clients even fought. Yeah, yeah, and
he loved this. Yeah. So the Russio Turkish War happens
from eighteen seventy to eighteen seventy eight, and Krupp had
sold guns to both sides, and so he starts asking
both sides for testimonials both so he can improve the
killing power of his weapons. And he takes these like
testimonials from Russians and from Turks about how deadly his

(39:27):
guns are, and he sends them to every member of
the English House of Commons, and he's like, why are
you guys buying British guns when my guns are so
much better? Like look at how good, look at how
good they are at killing my customers, Like you should
be buying guns for me. Geez, like drawing little pictures
like everything hurt this guy. Yeah, boom nico boom on him. Yeah,

(39:49):
he's a little bit, it's just yeah, he's kind of
obsessed with England. Too, so he's very frustrated that they
never do buy his weapons. By the late eighteen eighties,
Alfred was constantly ill in more than half mad. He
spent his twilight years constructing and attempting to sell what
was basically an enormous stationary tank. It was just a
giant armored gun that couldn't move and was wrapped in

(40:11):
so much armor that it was basically destructible. During demonstrations,
Alfred would sit inside it and wait while his own
gunners shot him with artillery shells. Despite this display, nobody
bought a single one of his guns. He hatched hatched
another scheme to create hollow islands topped by armored guns
that he was going to use to blow up boats.
But everyone was like, these are crazy, And eventually his
son instructed the factory to ignore any further communications from

(40:34):
his father because he had just gone mad. Uh Krupp
finally ceased to rule the arms factory that had been
his entire life's work, and he died almost immediately after that,
on July seven, from a heart attack. And that's the
story of Alfred Krupp. Wow, Yeah, he lived so long
for a horseshit guy, for a guy who breathed in

(40:55):
nothing but industrial poisons and horseshit his whole life. Maybe
there's something too that ship thing. Yeah, maybe he wasn't wrong.
I'm gonna not try that, but let me know how
that goes. Yeah yeah, somebody else wouldn't have to try it. Yeah, yep, yep, yep.
So that's the story of the man who made everything

(41:19):
else that happened in the twentieth century possible damn good. Yeah,
and the guy who helped in invent Germany. So him
and Bertha did have a kid, Yeah, no, he had.
He had a couple of kids with her, and the
kids mostly Actually, the reason they finally split is in
two she asks him to um like she comes to him,
he's like, hey, our son wants to get married. And

(41:39):
it was to a woman that Alfred didn't like because
he didn't like anybody, and he was like no, and
she packed up all of her ship and left for
good and it broke his heart and she never talked
to him again, even though he like let his kid
get married after that. Um because he's again just like
a like a cussed piece of ship who was incapable
of like hated being with himself and as a result,

(41:59):
it was miserable to be around, and so nobody could
be with him, and he just spent his entire waning
years designing increasingly impossible weapons. Jeez, all he could think
about as an old man because he had nothing else.
All he could think about as an old man was
how to make more ways for other people to kill
each other. What a life for in existence? Could have
been the train track guy, Alfred, But instead you're the

(42:21):
guy who people killed. What a waste of being a
smart person. Yeah, if he just made better ways for
people to travel, everybody, Alfred crap, the train guy. What
a cool dude. Yeah yeah, but no, that is not
the way the story ends. So how are you feeling

(42:41):
taking it all in, absorbing all of these facts. Yeah,
I had no idea. Yeah, yeah, this is definitely a
little bit more German history nerd uh for our podcast.
I should also state for the record that Alfred was
pretty anti Semitic, but also so was everyone at the time.
Like I don't get the sense that like he was

(43:02):
different from literally every other person in German and that
right right right, Like he like everybody's racist against Jewish
people in Germany in the eighteen seventies. You know, history
has shown it's pretty easy to be Anicomitic. They were
that racist in France and England, in America too, something
about us in Russia, Turkey, everywhere, but China pretty it

(43:27):
wasn't anti China. China was good about In fact, there
was there was I forget which city, but one of
the coastal cities in China had like a huge Jewish
population by the time World War two broke out, because
like the Chinese actually liked having Jewish people in their cities,
and then of course the Japanese killed all those people
to please the Germans, and it was just like this
horrible thing, and that's why we eat Chinese food on Christmas.

(43:48):
And the China after that massacre, after like the city
was retaken, China build a giant monument to the murdered
Jews of that city because they felt bad about it.
Because yeah, there's that, there's that, but everybody else unbelievably
racist against juan people. But yeah, Krupp is not like
a trailblazer in his as. Yeah, yeah, he's just kind

(44:13):
of like joining the mob on that one. Yeah, at
this point in time, anti Semitism is like liking Rick
and Morty. It's just not at all worth acknowledging. Okay,
so Alison, you've got any pluggables to plug? I mean
I will speaking of Jews, plug my uitable original like Mother.

(44:38):
It's very Jewish. I mean, I will say that's the
that's the most positive statement that's ever come after the
words speaking of juice. Normally that does not lead to
something good. Well, here we go. I'll give it to you.
Uh if you want to listen to a mother daughter
comedy called Like Mother that starts me and comedy legend

(45:04):
Susie Esman, then there you go. There you go, check
out that, check out everything and check out I don't know, cannons.
I feel like that's a bad thing to check out. Cannons.
Don't check out horseshit. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I like
to be honest, I much prefer people have a lot

(45:24):
of horseshit than a lot of cannons. I mean, fair
enough at the point, Yeah, what about cannons, but instead
of like cannon balls, it's big horseship balls. He didn't
come up with that, just fling horseshit at the enemy
to try to give them better ideas. Yeah, weirdo what
a fucking weirdo,