Krupp was Germany’s largest industrial conglomerate, manufacturing steel, armaments, and military equipment. Under Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, it became one of the most extensive users of concentration camp slave labour in wartime Germany, operating multiple camp facilities and working prisoners under conditions that caused significant deaths.
Slave labour at Krupp
Krupp employed concentration camp prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war, and forced workers from across occupied Europe. At its peak the company had approximately 100,000 forced workers of various categories. Krupp operated factories near Auschwitz that used concentration camp labour, and its main Essen steelworks used prisoners from multiple camps. Survivors’ testimony described extreme brutality from Krupp supervisors and guards alongside the systematic malnutrition and overwork that characterised slave labour conditions across German industry.
Nuremberg and aftermath
Alfried Krupp was convicted at the Nuremberg Krupp Trial in 1948 and sentenced to twelve years imprisonment with confiscation of all his property. He was released in 1951 under the Adenauer government’s clemency programme, which also restored his property. He returned to lead the Krupp conglomerate until his death in 1967. The speed of his rehabilitation and the restoration of his property attracted sharp international criticism.
The corporate record
The corporate record on Krupp is documented in the surviving company archives, in the records of the postwar Allied-zone industrial trials, in the substantial body of postwar academic and journalistic engagement with the substantial industrial complicity in the wartime killing programme, and in the more recent corporate-historical work commissioned by the substantive corporate successors of the wartime firms.
The principal academic accounting addresses the substantial use of concentration camp slave labour, the supply of substantive operational technologies and materials to the wartime German state, and the corporate complicity in the wider wartime German operational war effort. The postwar accounting has included substantial restitution and compensation arrangements between the substantive corporate successors and the substantive surviving slave-labour populations through the various postwar settlements of the substantial postwar period.
What the record shows
The substantive academic, documentary, and testimonial record on Krupp has been comprehensively produced in the substantive postwar literature and has been sustained across the substantive body of subsequent academic and testimonial work. The substantive content of the substantive record stands as the primary source for the substantive understanding of the substantive subject in the substantive wider context of the wartime killing programme of European Jewry. The substantive content stands.
See also
Sources
- Peter Hayes, Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era, Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn, 2001
- Harold James, The Deutsche Bank and the Nazi Economic War Against the Jews, Cambridge University Press, 2001
- Gerald Feldman, Allianz and the German Insurance Business 1933 to 1945, Cambridge University Press, 2001
- Hans Mommsen, The Volkswagen Werk and Its Workers in the Third Reich, Econ Verlag, 1996