Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Man Who Invented The Military-Industrial Complex

Episode Date: February 16, 2021

Robert is joined by Alison Stevenson to discuss Alfred Krupp.Footnotes: https://www.amazon.com/Torpedo-Inventing-Military-Industrial-Complex-Britain/dp/0674725263/?tag=saloncom08-20  https://worldcrunch.com/world-affairs/egypt-where-colonialism-meets-military-industrial-complex   https://www.jstor.org/stable/26061939?read-now=1&seq=11#page_scan_tab_contents  https://www.dw.com/en/the-krupp-dynasty-glorified-and-vilified/a-15867835  https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/ex-army-contractor-vows-to-overthrow-egypts-sisi/1647390  https://www.wired.com/2011/04/0426alfred-krupp-birthday-germany-cannon-king/  https://salemcc.instructure.com/courses/451/pages/eyewitness-account-of-the-siege-of-paris-1870-71  https://www.amazon.com/Arms-Krupp-Industrial-Dynasty-Germany/dp/0316529400 Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I'm Robert Evans, another introduction in the bag. How do we do, Sophie? Are we solid? That was a 3 out of 10. Are we going to win a potty? A potty. I wish that's what it was called. Yeah, that's the imaginary podcast award I invented. I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards, a terrible podcast about terrible people that's made incompetently by me.

I hope everybody's doing all right. Our guest today is Allison Stevenson. Allison is a writer, a comedian, and creator of the Audible Original Like Mother. Allison, how are you doing today? I'm doing not so bad. Not so bad is excellent in 2020 terms. It literally is as good as you can be doing. Allison, how do you feel about Germans?

Let's just say this. I am a Jew. Let me be more to the point. How do you feel about the existence of the German state? I've been dying to go to Berlin. It's a great town. I've had some rough patches a while ago. Some sort of wall or something. Yeah, we're going to be talking today about a lot of stuff. The guy that we're chatting about is a fellow named Alfred Krupp.

Does the name Krupp mean anything to you? I don't know. I don't think so. Does it? Yeah, without Krupp, there's no Germany. No German state ever comes into existence without Alfred Krupp. And also no World War One and also probably no World War Two. And also maybe no international arms trade today. He's that guy. He's that kind of dude. Yeah, he's a fascinating character.

And today we're going to chat about him. But we're going to start by talking about something that happened on October 1st, 2017. When a submarine built in Germany by the Tyson Krupp shipyard in Kiel, North Germany, set sail for Egypt. It was the fourth submarine the Egyptian government had ordered from Tyson Krupp since the start of the Arab Spring, and its total cost was 1.4 billion euros. On its way to Egypt, it stopped at the port city of Emden, where it met a French-made Corvette class attack ship, which was also built for the Egyptian Navy. Now, the hundreds of millions of euros in profit that these boats represented came from the taxes and natural wealth

that, on paper, ought to belong to the people of Egypt. But they don't because Egypt is owned by the dictator who took power there in 2014 after a military coup, Abdul Fattah al-Sisi. During his six years in power, Sisi has brutally cracked down on free speech, fought an unsuccessful but horrifically bloody counter-insurgency against Islamic extremists, and repeatedly murdered moderate protesters. Under his reign, food prices have risen and poverty in Egypt has soared. 33% of the country is now in poverty. So, things aren't going great in Egypt, and one factor is that the country is basically owned by the military, which is grafting tax money in order to buy weapons from Germany.

And, of course, a significant amount of the money that's paid to Tyson Krupp winds up in the pockets of al-Sisi and of his buddies, because that's just the way that military appropriations work in the global south. This is happening not just in Egypt, but all over the world, but particularly in Egypt, because no country on earth buys more German weapons than Egypt. And this actually has been going on a lot longer than you might think. We'll talk about that a little bit later. Also, as a note, Tyson Krupp makes all of the elevators you've ever been in. So, yeah, big company. You know, this is freaky, but like, I was, for some reason, I was thinking about elevators.

But I was thinking about Schindler elevators. I mean, we won't be talking about it super much this episode, but Alfred Krupp's descendants absolutely were responsible for tens of thousands of slave laborers in concentration camps to make German submachine guns. They're cool dudes, the Krupp's. Okay, okay. Yeah, no. This family's got some history to it. And yeah, so I started with that story because I think it illustrates kind of a weird continuity because the relationship between Germany and Egypt

and the selling of weapons actually started in the 18 hundreds. And it's continued without break ever since through two World Wars and like three or four different regimes. And it's kind of a mark of how even though, you know, you've got guys like the Kaiser guys like Hitler, the leaders at the top change, the people actually making the weapons and in a lot of ways driving the conflicts don't change. Because for one thing, the Krupp, who was in charge of German arms production during World War Two, got arrested and sentenced at Nuremberg and did three years of a 12 year sentence and died the wealthiest man in Europe because the allies needed him to make weapons for the Cold War. These are the guys who are who never get punished. Like right, we throw all the blame at the Hitler's and the Goebbels and stuff and like obviously those guys are fucking monsters.

But the dudes who made the weaponry that allowed them to do what they did and same thing with World War One, those guys never get punished because everyone wants them to make guns. They have a posse and everybody wants what they have, which is the ability to make more fucking guns. It's good shit. Yeah, it's great. Yeah, it's like great. That sounds like that's exactly how I describe that. Yeah, it fucking rules.

So Alfred Krupp, it would be fair to call him like he's kind of like the real Tony Stark, right? If you want the actual guy, like he's he's he's a brilliant engineer, inventor, innovator who sold weapons to everyone on the planet. And who had and who was like a visionary. He's not just a businessman. He's a guy who's able to like innovate killing machines. And in fact, after a certain point, the only thing he was really capable of thinking about was how to build better guns to murder people with. That's basically all this man ever did. Yeah, yeah, he's got some musky quality to him.

Yeah, although unlike Elon Musk, Alfred was talented. So yeah, before we talk about Alfred, we've got to learn a little bit about his family because the Kreps go back quite a bit in Germany. The first information we have on the family, the first Krupp that we know about was a fellow named aren't Krupp, who moved to a city called Essen sometime in the late 1500s. Now, Essen is located in the Rur, which is a coal rich region. That's the center of German industry. But at the time it was a sleepy small city. And we know very little about aren't because but that he was a man of means. We know it was rich because he signed his name in a book that was held in the city like Hall.

And if you had a signature back in the 1500s, you were rich. Like nobody was signing shit unless you had money back then. Now, our most important source for this episode is the book The Arms of Krupp, which was written in the 1960s by a guy named William Manchester, who was a British man who'd actually fought against Krupp guns as a young English soldier. And I don't normally gush about the books that we have on this show, but I feel the need to here because the while The Arms of Krupp is preposterously long. It is a massive, massive book. It's very readable. William is a really, really funny writer and I enjoyed every page of this book and I absolutely recommend reading it if you want to learn about the arms trade that currently dominates the world.

Because it's kind of about how it all got started. And for an example of William's writing style, I'm going to quote here how he explains that he knew Art Krupp was probably fat because this is funny. Well, the record indicates nothing beyond a faceless blob. It is safe to hazard something about the first Krupp's physiognomy. First, almost certainly, he lacked the gauntness of later Krupps. Art was a 16th century German merchant and we know quite a lot about the customs of that class. They were above all dedicated glutton's. Geirth was proof of prosperity.

The man who could out eat his neighbors was admired everywhere. One performer devoured 30 eggs, a pound of cheese and a large quantity of bread in a single sitting. He then fell dead and became a national hero. Seven hour meetings were not uncommon. It has been estimated that the well-to-do spent half their waking hours either masticating or defecating. In these circumstances, only an abnormal metabolic rate could prevent a rich man from becoming obese, which I did not know and find fascinating. That's so weird. I kind of feel like we should bring that back a little.

Yeah. It would be easier to chase down Jeff Bezos if he wasn't strong. You're right. I just find that amazing that becoming a national hero back then was like, yeah, he ate himself to death. What a guy. Died a hero. But my kids grow up to eat themselves to death one day. So what little we do know for sure about Arnt suggests that he embodied what would come to be one of the key crop family characteristics, the ability to profit from tragedy. Twelve years or so after he moved to Essen, the bubonic plague struck and about half the town died.

Corpses were piled up with no one to bury them. Whole neighborhoods became graveyards. All the good plague shit. You know the good plague shit. We're there now. Yeah. Classic. Classic plague. So while other men sold their property and drank themselves to death before the plague could get them, Arnt bet that he would live through the plague and he bought up their abandoned property.

So all these guys are like, we're all going to die. Let's sell our homes and buy liquor. And Arnt's like, yeah, I'll buy your fucking houses. I don't think I'm going to die. And that's how the crop family first ends up super rich because they buy up all of these people's property when the plague hits. It's always property. It's always property. Land's the only thing that's valuable.

Oh my God. I say ignoring the real estate collapse that happened like 10 years ago. I just like the first Superman movie. Anyway, we don't know much about the crops who immediately followed Arnt other than that they survived the 30 years war of 1618 to 1648 with their wealth and property intact. This would not have been easy. The area Essen was in was invaded by Danes, Swedes, Spaniards, Bohemians and worst of all the French. And about two thirds of the population of Germany died during that war. So again, and also there's no Germany during this.

Like I'm saying Germany because people roughly know the geographic area. Germany doesn't exist at this point. Like it's a bunch of warring kingdoms. Like you've got the Prussians and the Austrians and the fucking Bohemians and Bohemians, filthy Bohemians. Yeah. All these different, all these different people. They're all and they're always shooting each other to and they're getting shot by everybody else. And they're they're kind of one of the things that's interesting about the Germans in this period is that they're like famously.

Famously polite and humble because they get their asses kicked so much, which is a reputation that changes because of the things that we're about to talk about in this episode. Yeah, like I think I know. They stopped being humble after a while. Yeah. Yeah. So the Krupp family basically despite all of this disaster, they managed to expand their land holdings and expand their wealth. And that suggests that they they all kind of inherited aren't straight of profiting from disaster.

We know that one of our sons was a fellow named Anton Krupp, who is the first member of the family we have decent documentary information on. We know, for example, that at one point he received a significant municipal fine for quote, beating Dr. Hasselman in the street, which I think rules. You just got into a fist fight with a doctor. I think he got like a bad diagnosis or something. Yeah, I mean, doctors then weren't really doctors. They were just they were drug dealers, which only about half of doctors are out today. Penicillin pushers.

They didn't have penicillin back then. It was just opium and scotch. Oh, even better. And mercury. They were like the original 7-Eleven. Yeah. Yeah. Well, they were the original guy in front of the 7-Eleven who has a really bulgy coat.

So in 1612, Anton married a guy who was at the time one of Essen's most prominent gunsmiths. And Anton got into the gunmaking business. He was selling about a thousand barrels per year during the 30 Years War, and he was described in a town council meeting as our highly honored Patriot Lord. Now, the Krupps didn't get straight into the arms business from there. And in fact, after Anton, they stopped for decades. The family made most of its money because they owned a large store and they collected rent from properties. And this was enough to make sure that the family's wealth grew every year.

In the mid 1600s, a Krupp named Matthias bought fields east of the town wall that would become the site of the Krupp gunworks that later armed Germany through two World Wars. By the late 1600s, one writer described the family as the uncrowned kings of Essen. When Matthias died in 1673, the town left his position, the office of town clerk, unfilled until his oldest son was old enough to take the job. So that's how big a deal this family is in the late 1600s. Now, Krupp fortunes waned throughout the 1700s as frivolous family members and bad luck whittled them down from the family that owned the town to just another kind of rich family who weren't as rich as they used to be. They bought a large steel foundry at one point, but they sold it in the early 1800s.

And this leads us to Friedrich Krupp. In short, Friedrich was ambitious, but either dumb or unlucky. He liked to spend money and he had no real talent for making more of it. In 1810, he inherited the modern equivalent of a million dollars. Friedrich had other siblings, but the Krupp family tradition was for the oldest son to get everything. And this is how the family succeeded in holding on to all of their wealth and influence over the years. But it put them at a disadvantage when a real dummy happened to fall out of a Krupp lady's womb first. And that's what happened with Friedrich.

Yeah, his first decision was to scrap the business like the store that his ancestors had made all of their money with and instead invest in an exciting new venture, cast steel. Now, at the time, people are real shitty at making metal. OK, so like metals hard, right? Like you've got bronze, which is pretty easy to make and kind of durable. But it sucks when it comes to making cannons. Like if you're trying to blow things up through bronze, you can only make shoot things that are like projectiles so large. It can only handle so much powder without exploding. So it's not your word for it.

Yeah, it's just not a great thing to make cannons out of. It was the only thing to do it. Yeah. So like at the time, steel had existed for a while. And in fact, some people will suggest like, you know, the Spartans, everybody talks about how they were like famously good warriors. There's actually a school of thought among historians that suggests like they weren't any better at fighting than anyone else. But the nature of the iron that was in there that was like in near Sparta was very easy to kind of accidentally turn into steel. And steel is a thousand times better than any kind of like ancient metal than bronze or than just straight iron.

It's just much more durable. And so the Spartans had steel blades and that's why like they were famous just because they had better technology. And that's kind of what everyone was looking for in the Napoleonic era, right? Like no one's good at metal yet. People have started to figure out how to make steel, but they haven't gotten good at it. And cast steel is like modern steel. It's like the shit that you can make skyscrapers with. It's the shit that you can make battleship cannons with.

It's like kind of the necessary precursor to the modern world. You can't have the modern world without quality steel. And people had started to figure it out, particularly the British had kind of started to figure out how to reliably make modern steel, which again is cast steel. When I talk about cast steel, that's what I'm talking about. But no one was very good at it. And Friedrich Krupp becomes obsessed with making cast steel. He thinks that's how he's going to revive the family fortunes.

And I'm going to quote now from a passage in the arms of Krupp. In the Napoleonic era, cast steel had a special cachet. It was the nuclear fission of its day, mysterious, glamorous, seemingly limitless in its possibilities. Steel, low carbon iron, tough and malleable is not a natural phenomenon. And in a time when chemistry was poorly understood, it was regarded as a marvel. In the past, smelters had produced small quantities of it by manipulating ore and carbon with rods. Meantime regulating the flow of air through bellows. To produce the metal they worked on, its feel, on its appearance, on hunches and on slights and arcana,

handled down from fathers to sons. Until the 19th century, these hit or miss methods were good enough. But now, in the spring of the machine age, Europe was crying for big chunks of high quality steel. The old smiths couldn't help, nor could the operators of blast furnaces. Furnaces produced only cast iron, which, with its high carbon content, was too brittle to be satisfactory. Attempts were made to fuse several small ingots of steel and cast them as a single block. The smiths were frustrated because the oxygen in the air combined with the carbon in the steel, ruining the whole batch.

Yet some men could bring the thing off. The secret existed and had been discovered. To the great annoyance of Napoleon, the discoverers were Englishmen. Not only had the British cornered Castile, they held their monopoly of it for 70 years. So the British figure out Castile and no one on the continent has it. And this is one of Britain's main military advantages, is they have good steel. And Napoleon wants it, because he's still fucking around with brass cannons, which are trash. And so, you know, Napoleon is at this point fucking Napoleon.

He's the he's the emperor and Germany is just like a bunch of little warring states. So everyone kind of is looking to Napoleon, even the people outside of his borders. Young Friedrich Krupp became obsessed with the idea of figuring out how to cast steel for himself and his people. And yeah, Napoleon announced a prize to whoever could figure out how to cast steel for continental Europe. He was going to give them like thousands and thousands of pieces of gold and shit. It was just a fortune worth a fucking French money. And so in 1811, Friedrich Krupp founded the cast steel works with the ambition of like winning the prize that Napoleon had set out. Now, this was an ambitious goal because Friedrich had no idea what he was doing.

He grew increasingly obsessed with trying to puzzle out the secrets of cast steel and burnt through his entire inheritance to buy by property and equipment. Well, at the same time, neglecting the store that had brought his family most of their wealth. His eyes were always on the prize the emperor had promised and he began making loud public boasts about how he basically already figured out how to make cast steel. In December of 1811, he declared his loyalty to the emperor of France. This was bad timing since it was at the precise moment that Friedrich declared his fealty to France that the emperor lost his entire army in Russia. So Friedrich like declares himself loyal to the French crown and then the French crown loses all of its power by getting massacred in the frozen steps of Russia. Bad timing for Friedrich. Yeah. So he basically his loyalty wound up guaranteeing him a doomed job digging trenches for a French army that got its ass handed to it by pressure while Napoleon was running away from the Cossacks.

And the good news is that nationalism didn't exist back then. So most people in essence felt as much loyalty to France as they did to pressure because again, no one's really German then. So as soon as pressure took over and Napoleon's empire collapsed, nobody like got revenge on Friedrich, which is what would have happened later. So he got to keep his ancestral house. He's poor now. He's got no money. Yeah. Yeah. He's broke now. Yeah. He's broke as shit. Yeah. He loses all of his money trying to make Castile. He fails. The emperor he was hoping to get a reward from is no longer the emperor.

And it's just, yeah, trash luck and also kind of a dumb guy. So, yeah, Friedrich wasn't completely like a failure. He succeeded in getting the Krupp family's first military contract, which was just like supplying steel bayonets. And he sold quality tools and dies, but he was never able to make enough money fast enough to like make up for all of the debts he'd incurred trying to figure out how to make Castile. And of course, the other family business failed. So Friedrich did throw a bunch of money into making a big machine shop, which was finished in 1819, but only worked about half the year because he fucked up on like it would rely on the local river in order to be able to function because you don't have like electricity then. So people will use rivers to like move the different wheels and shit that need to anyway. It's a bad he makes a bad bet and his fucking machine shop doesn't work.

And he spends the last two years of his life impoverished in bedridden, ranting and coherently about his ruined life and fortune. He dies at age 39. Damn. Yeah. So kind of a bummer of a story. Yeah. Wow. So don't always chase your dreams. Don't ever chase your dreams.

Never ever chase your dreams. If there's one lesson of this podcast is that dreams are a bad idea. It's OK to give up. Yeah. If everyone would just sit alone in a dark room until they died, we would have no Hitler's, no Stalin's, no Saddam Hussein's. No penicillin either. So it's a mixed bag. Yeah, but we're not leaving our house.

But we're not leaving our houses. How are you going to get sick? We're not getting syphilis. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. Enter Alfred Krupp.

So Alfred Krupp was Friedrich's son and he was 14 years old when his dad died. But that was enough to make him a man by the standards of the time. And he was to say the least an odd child. He was terrified of fire, which is like not unreasonable. But if your entire family business is operating a forge, it's kind of weird that you're scared of fire. He was fascinated by smells and particularly the smell of horseshit, which he loved more than anything in the entire world. OK. His entire life loves horseshit, like cannot get enough of it.

OK. Thinks that it like inspires him and like sets his mind going and gives him his best ideas. And it's great for his health. What? Like he absolutely loves horseshit. Wait, is there anything behind this? Or is it just? We don't.

I don't know. But it's his entire life. We'll talk about horseshit a few times in this episode. I hope so. OK. Because he's fucking loves horse poop. Damn. Yeah.

It's very strange. He was equally insistent as much as he loved horse poop. He was insistent that his own breath was poisonous. And so he moved around constantly in order to avoid breathing it in. He was convinced that if he stayed in the same room for too long, he'd breathe in all the oxygen and die. So weird ass dude. He's a very weird dude. So weird ass guy.

I don't know. So like as a result of this sleep was a nightmare for him. He couldn't really sleep. He had chronic insomnia his whole life. Like he's just a miserable neurotic wreck of a man who loves horseshit. It's awesome. Damn. Yeah.

Yeah. He's a very strange dude. And I'm going to quote William Manchester writing a little bit more about him here. What? Can I ask real quick? Yeah. So was he like carrying horseshit with him? He just made sure horseshit surrounded all of his homes.

And also later in life made sure that his homes had specific like ducts to take the smell of horseshit up into his rooms. He wanted everything around him to smell like horseshit at all times. He loved you. He could not get enough horseshit. This is really making me want to smell horseshit. I'm very curious. It's not great. Like it's not as bad as normal shit because they're vegetarians, right?

Like they don't eat meat. Like I grew up with like cows and horses and shit on like pastures and like it's not as bad as. You know, dog shit or something. But it's not a pleasant smell. It's shit. You know. All right. Yeah.

Anyway, here's William Manchester writing about this weird ass poop loving dude. Yet his chronic insomnia, which would have crippled another executive, actually may have made Alfred more efficient. He was such a bundle of neurotic quirks that they seem to have supported one another. At night, for example, he wrote Business Memoranda, a compulsive writer over 30,000 of his letters and notes are extant. He trained himself to scribble in the dark, crouched, sweating under his Eiderdown. After dawn, flushed his workers from their beds, they would find cropped, scrawled, praise or scorn. He propped on their benches. To them, his energy was a marvel.

To us, the greater marvel is that he kept this up for over 50 years without once being institutionalized. So he's a bizarre man. And yeah. No fucking shit, Robert. No fucking shit. He's so weird. Anyway, this is the man who helps invent the military industrial complex and creates Germany. He's a fun, fun dude.

What a fantastic way to introduce this episode. I mean, honestly. So Alfred inherited a tremendous amount of debt and a broken business because again, his dad was kind of a dumbass. But Alfred was not dumb. One thing you like, again, unlike Elon Musk, he's legitimately a genius. And he was very shrewd and he was shrewd enough to see what assets he had. The forges he'd inherited were substantial. And while his father never unlocked the secrets of cast steel, they were good enough to make stuff people could use.

And so for four years, Alfred toiled learning through trial and error how to make stronger and more useful steel and also developing an eye for business. He broke even for the first time in 1830 and from then on, his career moved steadily upward. He'd inherited four workers from his father and thanks to a family loan in 1830, he hired five more employees that year. Alfred was inherited workers. Yeah. Yeah, workers come with the company. They're still kind of like like their peasants still at this period. So it's kind of like it's it's it's not you don't quite own them because they can quit and go find other work.

But it's really uncommon. You tend to work for the same people your dad worked for, right? That's kind of the norm. Yeah, this is not that far from medieval times, right? Yeah, yeah. Alfred actually is responsible for kind of turning crop into one of the first like modern style businesses in the world. Like he invents the pension, among other things. Yeah, he's a weird dude.

So yeah, Alfred was obsessive. He wrote his workers relentlessly to ensure the steel they produced was as close to perfect as possible. He toured with samples of his products all through central Germany and returned home after three months with pockets filled with orders. In his first sales trip abroad, Alfred had found his first true talent, salesmanship. In 1834, when the 36 Germanic states of Europe established their first common market, which abolished all the internal tariffs, Alfred pompously sent the government a letter declaring that he would meet all of the German Union's steel needs on his own. This was a lie. He couldn't do anything near this.

But it got his name and people in government's ears. And that was his goal. So as Alfred developed new methods of making better and better steel, he grew equally paranoid about corporate espionage. He started requiring all of his employees to swear personal oaths of loyalty. And he started locking them into the works when they were doing their job. He's again, kind of a dick. That seems to be a theme is like paranoia with these types of people. Yeah, I mean, one could argue it's not doesn't make them bad at their jobs.

Yeah, you know, so he hired a bunch more people. He brought in his close relatives to help him manage the growing plant. And in 1838, he felt comfortable enough to leave on his first international sales trip to France and England. France had a lot of business to offer. And most days he returned to his hotel, Tramford, with more steel orders to send back home. But on the rare occasions when he was turned down, Alfred collapsed entirely. At one point he was bedridden for five days after a French company refused to buy his product. So yeah, he's neurotic again.

On the whole, the trip was a success. But when he left France for England, his goal was not to make more sales. Because English steel was still the best in the game. Alfred was kind of verging on cast steel, but he wasn't as good or consistent as what the English could make. And England was the most industrialized nation in Europe at this point. Krupp had nothing that they wanted, so he couldn't sell anything to them. But he wasn't there to sell. He was there to engage in corporate espionage.

And thankfully for the English steel industry, he was terrible at it. His first plan was to enter England on a fake passport with the name that he thought based on nothing. Nothing sounded English. Alfred Krupp, C-R-U-P, instead of K-R-U-P-P. He thought that that would make him pass. He bought a pair of spurs, which English gentlemen wore in those days. And he teamed up with another Germanic merchant with the idea that they would pretend to be British people looking to learn the secrets of fine steel production.

What if some sort of accent give them away? Well, the other thing that would give them away is that neither of them spoke English. It wasn't even that they had an accent, they only spoke German. Alfred had memorized a couple of pleasantries from a phrase book, but he could not talk to people. He'd figured that the dozen words he knew and his fake name would let him pretend to be an Englishman who just spent time on the continent for a while, and it did not work. Everyone who met him immediately realized he was German, but they did not care either. They weren't scared that he would spy on them.

And he was so bad at espionage that some of the English steel makers he met even figured out that he was Alfred Krupp without saying him saying a word. And they still gave him tours of their factories because they're like, he's not going to figure it out by just walking around the factory floor. And he didn't. He was terrible at spying on people. He stayed there for five months and he learned nothing and he also sold nothing. And it didn't matter anyway because before much longer, Krupp figured out how to make cast steel of their own. And once he was home, he set to work figuring out how to take advantage of the fact that

now he made pretty much the best steel outside of England. And the obvious answer was the armaments industry. On his way home from England, Alfred had developed a dream of making a new steel cannon. And this was very controversial at the time. At this point in Europe, all cannons were bronze. And for complex metallurgical reasons, I don't understand. Bronze cannons, number one, were only really short range cannons. Like the big guns that you had in World War One that could bombard cities from miles away.

You couldn't make those out of bronze. They had to be steel because they would explode under the pressures that those big guns did. And bronze cannons couldn't be breach loading cannons. This is an important but kind of like, I don't know, nuanced gun difference. So barrel loading cannons work the way they sound, right? You jam a bunch of powder into the barrel, then you shove a cannonball in there and you light it from behind and it shoots the cannonball out, right? That's the cannons you see in all the pirate movies.

Yeah, totally. Yeah, a breach loading cannon loads the way that like a double barreled shotgun does today where you put the round in at the back of the gun. This has a bunch of advantages. It makes it fire a lot faster. It allows for more advanced kind of gunnery. It allows for like shells that are instead of just like a cannonball, it allows for explosive shells to be fired. It's kind of in order to have a modern artillery, you have to have a breach loading gun. People had been dreaming about them for a while.

Leonardo da Vinci had sketched breach loading guns. People had tried to make them for centuries, but they'd always exploded and killed the people manning them. So folks had just figured it's impossible to do. Not great. Yeah. So Krupp has a dream that he can make this like a steel cannon that will allow him to do all this fun kind of cannon stuff that he wants. What a dream. What a way to envision your future.

Yeah, I mean, it makes sense at the time. I'm going to get this gun right. Yeah, I'm going to make the best gun anybody's ever made so that Europeans can kill each other better. That's that's this whole this guy's whole entire life. And yeah, it was you couldn't really have like because brass cannons were the only cannons that existed, you couldn't really have big guns. Even Napoleon like Napoleon was a famous artillery man, but his guns actually were pretty tiny compared to like what we now consider modern artillery to be. Well, they were big. They were big compared to him.

Yeah, they were big compared to him. That's that's very funny. Actually, you know, thank you so much. No go ahead with this. I would think it means he's pretty confident in his masculinity. Yeah. I mean, he had he had reason to be. He did.

He did almost beat all of Europe and in several wars. You know what, you know, you know who didn't beat Europe in several wars, it's it's time for an ad break. And that's my really bad. Are we not sponsored by the Emperor Napoleon? No, no, no, he is not sponsoring this episode. Unfortunately, that is no longer with us. Unfortunate. I have geared this entire episode to winning the Emperor's favor.

Well, I guess we'll try to get Zaris Russia as a sponsor. Until then, here's some ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And on the gun badass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back and I'm being informed that some tragedy seems to have befallen the Romanov dynasty. So I don't think we're going to be getting a sponsorship from the czar either. Yeah. And that is a real bummer. I'm so sorry you're just learning this. I'm hearing good things about this linen character, though, so we might be able to I think he might like adds a lot. Seems like a real products and services kind of do.

So funny. We'll figure it out. So yeah, bronze cannons are kind of the standard in Europe at the time. And this dream of like the fact that that Alfred Krupp is wants to make steel guns is not just like it's not just seen as like it's not seen as like a revolutionary thing. It's seen as madness because people had tried to make steel cannons and wrought iron cannons and they'd always been disasters. And in fact, in 1844, the United States had built a 12 inch wrought iron smoothbore cannon for the USS Princeton. And on the ship's gala voyage, they tried to fire it and it exploded, killing the secretary of the state and secretary of Navy. So people aren't just like, this won't work.

People are like, it's reckless to even try to make these guns. You fucking idiot. And another reason why people are obsessed with bronze cannon at the time is that Napoleon had been beaten by Wellington with bronze cannons, right? Like Wellington, like bronze guns had beaten Napoleon 40 something years ago and people are like, why would we need to change? If it was good enough to fight Napoleon, it's good enough for anything we could possibly use it as. And it's kind of worth noting here that at this point, you know, it's been decades since Napoleon's defeat, like more than a generation and artillery had not changed at all. Like if you could imagine if we were still using the exact same weaponry that like we'd used in Vietnam or Korea, like that's kind of the situation Europe is in in the in 1850. Because things just didn't advance as quickly back then.

So it's it's it's seen as kind of odd. In 1850, Krupp and his workers put together a three pound cannon for an exhibition in London. And these exhibitions were like the arms trade shows of the day. There were places where all of the rich industrialists and scientists would come and bring all of their latest innovations and achievements and stuff. This is like the birth of the this is the Industrial Revolution, the birth of the steel age. So people are figuring out new shit every year and like every year they'll gather in a new city to show off the cool shit that they've invented. And most of it's like it's like a violent science fair. Yeah, it's not all guns.

A lot of it is like agricultural people are showing off plows and shit. But the guns like in Krupp is kind of the first person to realize that like well, most of the products there are like tractors and plows and light bulbs. The thing that people actually shit that feeds people. Yeah, guns are what people care about. Journalists don't write about the boring shit. They write about the guns. Everybody thinks the guns are neat.

So he built this cannon a little bit earlier, this first steel cannon and nobody wanted to buy it. But he figured like maybe if I take it to this exhibition because people just fucking love weapons, that will build up enough buzz that I can start selling some of this shit. Now he brought more than just a cannon to show off his company's new capabilities. He's had his workers slather together what was been the largest bar of cast steel ever produced. It weighed thousands and thousands of pounds. And yeah, so he just like he brought this giant lump of metal and a cannon to this show. And his enormous steel ingot actually won the expedition because that was like for years in the 1850s,

every one of these exhibitions, the product that would win would be like an increasingly large lumps of metal. Because people would be like, look at how much metal I can make. Now I can make more metal. And most of this is because like railroads are the big thing at the time, right? So by making like by making like a 10,000 pound piece of steel, you're saying like I could make a fucking railroad for your ass real goddamn quick. That's the whole that's the whole deal, you know? Wow.

Yeah, it's a weird time. So he wins the exhibition because of his steel ingot and the judges completely ignore his steel cannon. And Alfred was frustrated at first because again, his cannon had been ignored by all the people he'd wanted to buy it to. But journalists were drawn to the gun. And at first the press piled on about what a bad idea a steel cannon would be. The observers, the London Observer wrote, the brittleness of steel is so great that we doubt whether it would resist any successive charges of powder. But press within the London News and the Daily News had to admit that the cannon was almost hypnotizingly beautiful. One reporter regretted that Krupp hadn't shown devices for, quote,

grinding corn or surgical instruments or something more appropriate to this peaceful age and to the exhibition than a modern field piece. I mean, did he test it out? Yeah, yeah, they fired it and stuff. Oh, OK. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, like people just kind of doubted that it would continue working and stuff. But again, most of them came around because they just thought it was so beautiful. And there's this one British journalist who writes that it's kind of fucked up that we're trying to do this show about the advance of technology.

You don't come here with new farming implements or new surgical tools, but you bring a giant gun. But that guy was actually kind of the one who misjudged what people wanted at the time. Because the United States section of the fair, to show you how different things were, the U.S., all we brought was a massive plow. No, we brought, like, farming equipment. Yeah, farming equipment, a bunch of paintings of farms and shit. And everyone ignored it. Everyone ignored it in favor of the big German gun. And that taught Alfred a lesson, which is that people don't give a shit if you make stuff that will improve their lives.

They like killing machines. Tom. Yeah, it's good. It's true. It's good. Yeah, absolutely. I don't buy a bunch of old cannons, you know? Or a bunch of old... I don't buy a bunch of old farming implements.

I buy antique German handguns. It's weird. That's what people do. I would if I could afford it. Yeah, they're beautiful. And fucking plows are lame for nerds. Or am I going to put a plow in my apartment? Yeah.

Am I going to put a plow in my apartment? What are you talking about? So Alfred Krupp was the only man at the time who really, like, realized this. That you could basically, at this point in time, weapons technology was entirely driven by militaries. And there were outside firms who would make weaponry for them. But it was basically like, hey, we need this kind of gun. And they'd try to figure out how to make it. Alfred was the first person to be like, I'm going to make something they don't want.

And I'm going to force them to want it. That was new. And he was the first guy to figure this out. OK, OK. It was slow going at first. Generals and admirals and secretaries of war are inherently conservative men and changed frighten them. They wanted to stick with what had worked before and brass cannons had worked before. It was almost impossible to get a new weapon system going.

But journalists love new shiny things and they love weapons and so did their readers. And basically Krupp figured out that he could stoke in nations' demand for guns by playing to the fact that people are drawn to guns kind of inherently. And he took a lot of advantage of that. People suck. Yeah, they're not great. It's kind of a bummer, but it works very well for him. Although it is a bit of a slow burn.

So at the time, advertising was not really a thing that existed in its modern concept. Like there were ads, but like the ad industry did not exist. And so yeah, Krupp like knew that these exhibitions, like even if no one bought his product, bringing it there could still be a success because it would generate interest and that would generate buzz and that would eventually lead to sales. Now, by this point in the 1850s, Krupp became had become a fairly large and successful steel company. He had thousands of employees by this point.

And what they made their money on was making cast steel axles and springs for trains and train tires, like what are called train tires, which is basically like the rolling wheels on trains. Like he could make very like the best steel to make trains possible. All of the early train tracks in the United States are made with Krupp steel. Yeah, like that's that's how he gets rich. Like they're not making any money off of guns at this point. They're making guns, but nobody's fucking buying them.

Like governments want trains and shit. And that's what they're making their profit off of. And so Alfred's commitment to weaponry was was kind of weird. And his new like he gets increasingly upset, obsessed with it. And for whatever reason, his kind of growing obsession with guns comes at the same time that his mom dies and he finds himself single. See, now it's sounding very like Oedipal. Yeah, some phallus, like, you know, some penis thing going on.

I don't know because he's a weird guy when it comes to his relationships with women. You could just stop with the horse shit guy. The horse shit guy is weird with ladies. Yeah, he's that's that's why he's the come on. Yeah, his mom was basically his wife. Not that he like had sex with her or anything, but his mom cooked his food and kept his house clean and made his bed. And he had no desire for a wife while he had his mom because he he wanted he wanted a mommy wife.

Like that was his his his his priority was having the perfect mom. Dude would hate 2020 then. Yeah, he wouldn't have been wild about it. He met the love of his life after riding into town from a long work trip and spotting her in the audience at a play. Her name was Bertha and she was less than half his age and not at all interested in him. But he was in love with her and he was rich. And that was all that mattered to the people who got to make decisions on whether or not Bertha got married.

She could barely stand Alfred and it's kind of hard to blame her. The man was frightened to stand near his own breath and he loved the smell of horse shit. It was kind of a hard sell falling in love with Alfred Krupp. His opening. Yeah, definitely quirky. His opening pickup line to her was where I supposed I had nothing but a piece of cast steel. I had a heart which I guess is kind of sweet. Huh. Yeah.

It's not a terrible opening line for the age. Wouldn't get me going, but. No, but like, you know, it was a different time. Yeah. I mean, and it didn't work on her to be fair. Yes, I'm rich. Yeah. He's probably what he followed that up with.

Yeah. Yeah. Now, William Manchester notes, quote, given Alfred's temperament, domestic happiness was impossible. No one could live with such a man. He could barely stand himself. The match was doomed and all that remained was to define the exact nature of the distress. Yeah, it's not a good relationship. But oddly enough, Bertha was the cold one in the couple.

Whatever else you can say about Alfred, he was absolutely in love with his wife and he would spend his life obsessed with Bertha. Now, it was a love that knew nothing about her and like, was it absolutely uninterested in actually understanding her needs in order to please her? Because again, he was kind of incapable of understanding other people in any way, shape or form. But he was madly in love with her and she kind of despised him. It's a bummer. Huh. That sounds like the perfect relationship to me. Yeah.

That's like the kind of guy I'm looking for. Yes. I don't. I don't think that you are. I don't think anybody wants to be with Alfred Crow. Okay. No, not him specifically. Yeah.

So in order to woo her after getting married, he constructed a massive and completely insane house for her. The Garden House, which was a gigantic, mostly glass building that incorporated a number of greenhouses into it, which were meant to grow beautiful, hot house flowers. It also held habitats for peacocks, grapevines, pineapple groves, all in this giant glass castle in the middle of Essent, which doesn't sound terrible so far. That sounds lovely. But there were some weird aspects of it. But it smelled like horseshit. Well, worse than that actually, because he built the Garden House directly in the center of his giant steel factory. And if you've never been in a steel smelter, they put out an enormous amount of soot and pollution.

And as a result within months, every window of the Garden House was permanently stained brown and caked in filth. All of the plants died. I have to assume the peacocks did too. He had basically moved his wife to a glass mansion in the middle of a smokestack. Oh, God. I'm an idiot. And to make matters worse, the house had one other feature I haven't mentioned yet. There was a glass crow's nest peeking out of the top of the roof so that Alfred could spy on his workers at all times.

So it was kind of a nightmare. In other words, I'm going to quote from the arms of Krupp here. Alfred was installing heavier and heavier machinery and the grunt of his steam hammers rocked the foundations of his home. Alfred didn't seem to mind. He was proud of the house and to his wife's annoyance, he became a homebody. When she complained about the dishes, an admiring friend jotted down her husband's reply. It's only a few porcelain plates. I'll make the customers pay for them.

And when she countered with a plea that he take her away for just one evening to a concert, he answered sharply, sorry, it's impossible. I must see that my smokestacks continue to smoke. And when I hear my forge tomorrow, that will be music more exquisite than the playing of all the world's fiddles. So terrible man to be married to. It is probably not surprising that Bertha left him as soon as she possibly could. And obviously she couldn't leave him leave him. Like there was no getting divorced as the wife of a rich woman in the 1850s in the center of Europe.

So she claimed to be sick with exhaustion and she might have been a hypochondriac. But basically she played well enough at being ill. Or she actually got ill because they did live in a poison box in the middle of a factory. That Alfred just kind of would send her off to different spas and health care and stuff in various fancy towns. Like that's what she did if you were rich and sick. You would go off to some spa to get to heal. So he sends her off to a bunch of these places. Yeah, it's not wildly different.

They get a private island just to unwind. Yeah. And that's basically what Bertha spends the rest of her life doing. She's almost never home. Only for like appearances sake. Every now and then Alfred will visit her. But it's incredibly awkward and she clearly doesn't want him there. I mean fair enough, horseshit. Yeah, it's not unfair on her part.

But it is very sad because Alfred never stopped being in love with her. He wrote her constantly laying out every detail of his life and business and agonizing like granular detail. Which is why we know so much about him. He wrote about everything he ever did in his life. Here's my question. Do we know what she did? Did she smell like horseshit? No, I don't think so.

Would he be like, oh, I got you a new candle and it would just be like a horseshit scented candle. He just liked having horses all around wherever he lived so that they would shit around where he lived and it would smell like horseshit because that was his favorite thing in the entire life. I just can't get over it. It's very strange. You're saying things but I'm still stuck on the horseshit.

It's kind of impossible not to think about because I've never heard of anyone having that particular. I mean, it seems like a kink at this point, right? Yeah, it's gotta be. His biographer even describes it as a fetishistic devotion to poop. It's very weird. Now, so Alfred, again, wrote out every detail of his life to his wife

in this constant stream of letters and Bertha clearly did not care and barely responded. She would occasionally justify her lack of response by saying she was too exhausted by her illness to write. Alfred solved this problem for her by providing her with a series of form letters that she could just fill in the blanks on in order to respond to him. And we have these form letters

and they are the cringiest documents I've ever read in my entire life. Oh, my God. Here's one of the form letters that he gave his wife. I received your note of blank and note there from with parentheses pleasure-sorrow and she could just kind of check whichever one she was feeling that things are going not well. As for myself, I am very well.

Thank goodness. And certainly not yet plump and fat, but hope this will remain so soon. Like these are all like different fill-in blanks and stuff. And then it continues for like since my last letter, I've been for a drive regularly every day through the delightful tear garden and go twice a day for one hour walking there

in the most charming company, which a king would give millions to see. And this was not what she'd actually done. This is what Alfred had written out for her to send back to him because this is what he assumed she was doing every day. He was kind of trying to direct her life by having this letter in the hopes that she would do exactly what he'd written in the letter if she was going to be sending the letter back to him. Oh, my God.

It's very straight. It's very strange. Yeah. Yeah. The letter ended with, I am longing to be back with my dear husband and hope above all else that he will be pleased with me. Oh, he wrote that? Yeah, he wrote that for her.

And then he ended it with only do not write me too often. That embarrasses me because I cannot reply. Yours is ever birth. Damn. That is one of the saddest things I've ever read. Oh, man. Yeah, that's pathetic. It's really a bummer. Robert, you know what?

Isn't one of the saddest things you've ever read. The products and services that support this podcast. Why? Yes, that is correct, sir. Yes. Yeah. They are fully devoted to their husbands, which happened also to be Alfred Krupp, but thankfully he's been dead for decades. So more than a century really.

Prada. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series,

Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver.

At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of goods. He's a shark. And not in the good-bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date,

the time, and then, for sure, he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow

to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991,

and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted

before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. Okay, so Alfred's Canon business at this point was going no better than his marriage. In 1852, he still had not received a single contract

for his new artillery. And so Alfred experimented with another revolutionary advertising tactic, the Free Sample. Better known for little plastic cups of snacks at Sam's Club and wee little coffee cups at Trader Joe's, corrupted the same thing with field cannons. He sent the whole cannon for free to the King of Prussia because he couldn't sell it.

And he also had another one made and sent off to Tsar Alexander of Russia. While the King of Prussia couldn't have cared less, he was testing the cannon, firing thousands of shots through it and then examining the barrel for imperfections. When he saw it was untouched, the Tsar declared the cannon a freak of nature

and ordered his men to preserve it in the National Artillery Museum, rather than ordering more or something, which is a bit of a bummer. So like, you can't catch a break in selling people killing machines, which really fucks up Alfred. I'm starting to feel bad for this guy.

Am I supposed to hate him? He had a bad character. So there was clearly no money in guns, but Alfred couldn't stop making guns. He and his team designed and built a new 12-pound cannon, and they brought three of these gargant- and when I say a 12-pound cannon, that's the size of the weapon at fire,

of the ball that it fires, is 12 pounds. Like, the gun is hundreds and hundreds of pounds. So they brought three of these gargantuan weapons to Paris for 1855 for the Universal Exposition, which is another one of these big technology expositions. Again, at this point, Krupp had made a grand total of $0 on cannons. The company made its money by this point

selling revolutionary railway tires for which Krupp had a patent and by making machine tools. Krupp brought another gigantic steel ingot to this exhibition, too, and this one was so large that it collapsed the floor it was standing on and nearly killed all the judges. Whoa. Because it's like tens of thousands of pounds.

And he won again, of course. His ingot won again. But as usual, yeah. He killed everybody. Like, that's got like clearly this is the best piece of metal. It nearly killed us all. Yet oddly enough, they're not at all interested in the killing machines that he makes.

But of course, as usual, the press and the actual people who attend the show are fascinated by his guns. And Alfred had devised like a beautiful way to show them off. A special display with three steel cannons and six polished steel breastplates. It was the talk of the exhibition. But after six months on display,

only one order came through. Six steel cannons for Said Pasha, the Wali of Egypt. And this is what I was talking about at the beginning. This is the start of the Germans selling arms to Egypt. And it continues. In 2020, Egypt imports more German guns than any other country. So this starts under Alfred Krupp

and it has not ended since. Oh, yeah. It's weird how and it's the same company. It's Krupp in the modern era selling them submarines. It's Krupp selling them cannons in the 1852. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.

But selling a few guns to Egypt was not enough to make a meaningful amount of money for a company the size of Krupp. As the 1850s drew to a close, Alfred was still subsidizing his cannon habit by selling train parts. He'd nearly sold an order of 312-pound guns to the Emperor Napoleon III,

but the deal fell through because a French family, the Schneiders, had just started a new gun works at the Crusoe. They lobbied the king to not buy German guns and the first salvo would become the competitive international arms market. So, yeah, the three big gun companies in World War I

and World War II are Krupp, Schneider, Crusoe, and Armstrong, which becomes Vickers. And Krupp is the first of them. Schneider forms next and we're about to get to Armstrong. But these are the companies whose arms race is why we have World War I. Because they're all selling guns to each other

and the thing that makes World War I happen more than almost anything else is there's a provocation. You know, the Archduke gets shot. But that stuff like that had happened before. The reason that they actually wound up fighting is that there was this interlocking series of re-arming schedules and everyone

was convinced that they were in the best position as opposed to their rivals and that if they waited to have a war in another couple of years, their rivals would have better guns. So, that's like why the fucking war happens. And this is the start of that process. So, Krupp's first major international success came courtesy of Russia.

After years of admiring Krupp's cannon in his museum, the Tsar finally started buying Krupp guns in bulk. They start buying thousands of these weapons. And this sets international arms dealers afire trying to copy Krupp's steel cannons. And it sets the governments of these countries equally on edge

out of fear of falling behind. Alfred designs a breach loading cannon in the late 1850s and when he tries to sell it to the English because his own company didn't want it, another firm called Armstrong edges him out and promises the crown they can make the same gun but better in English. And this was really the start, the first arms race.

Is this like Alfred starts selling guns to the Russians that freaks out the English and the French. He's trying to sell guns to those governments but they build up their own firms and they all start competing as to who can get the best guns fastest. That starts now. Yeah, from the arms of Krupp, quote

the arrival of Armstrong completed Europe's deadly triumvirate. Krupp, Schneider and Armstrong over the next 80 years were to be celebrated first as shields of national honor and later after their slaughtering machines were hopelessly out of control as merchants of death. So that's pretty cool. Yeah.

That's good stuff and it all comes from this guy who just like is obsessed with making cannons and wants people to like his cannons and it leads to the killing fields of World War One. It's pretty sweet. It's like a real admirable like I could see

in like a classic American movie. Yeah, he is. He's this bootstraps figure. You know, his dad leaves him in debt and like nobody takes him seriously. Everybody laughs at his guns and then his guns might have killed 20 million people. Yeah.

And it's funny in World War One a bunch of the shells that the British were firing at Germans and killing German boys with had Krupp markings on them because the Krupp had the patent on the type of explosive shell that was most common in World War One. So all of the foreign countries

who were using shells with Krupp patented like explosives in order to kill German kids those shells had Krupp written on them because that was part of the legal contract they'd signed. Damn. Isn't that fucking cool? I don't know if that's the word

I'd use. I think it's fucking sweet. I think it's awesome. I think that's that's just great. Because again, you know, people talk about the fucking deep state. This is an actual example of that kind of thing. You've got, you know, different governments. You've got the

French King in the war that we're about to talk about. You've got the Republic of France in World War One. You've got, you know, the Great Britain and you've got, you know, the fucking the Imperial Germany and the Nazi Germany. But behind it all are the same arms companies run by

the same families that are to this day in a lot of cases still selling guns to people. Jesus. It's awesome. It fucking rules. It's so good. Again, not the word I would use for it, but yeah. By 1862,

Krupp was at kind of almost the apex of his power. His dominance of London's 1862 grand exhibition was absolute. Past fairs had taught him that the mob doded on weapons and he played to the gallery. An artist from the Illustrated London News sketched a group of objects exhibited by

Mr. Krupp of Essen, Prussia, and the sketch bristles with objects of murder. One journalist did find a pair of railroad rails which had been run nearly 74,000 miles without having been again put into the lathe. But he was a digger, an exception. His colleagues' eyes were riveted on Alfred's artillery and their speeches and

their cheers were striking. The morning posts, the daily news, the news of the world were enthralled. The spectator rapturously told of ladies standing in mute delight and men dreaming of the battle music of the future. Even the time saluted the almost military discipline which prevails in Krupp's steel

works at Essen and concluded, we congratulate Krupp on the preeminent position which he occupies. Really, it's like, oh man, I can't wait for this to kill me. You know, it's weird that they didn't really, a lot of them didn't seem to be thinking about the fact

that their grandchildren would be murdered by the tens of thousands by the descendants of these machines. It does say a lot about human nature that Krupp also invents railroad wheels which can go for tens of thousands of miles without having to be repaired.

Like a revolutionary development that makes international trade possible. That makes it, that crisscrosses continents that like makes so many wonderful things possible. But nobody cares about that because Krupp brought guns and like all these women are just like it doesn't go boom.

Yeah, men dreaming of the battle music of the future which is actually the death sounds of their grandchildren. Like there were babies born during this that would die to the descendants of these guns. It's awesome. It says so many good things about people. Soon Krupp was selling arms all around the world. Prussia started buying his

guns finally after he gave some to, so he gave it like he couldn't sell a big cannon he brought to this exhibition. So he gives it to the king of Prussia and that convinces the king of Prussia to buy his guns. Again, it's a good tactic. Austria puts in orders his guns Russia but brings buys more steel cannons

which inspires Turkey to start buying steel cannons. It had taken over a decade but through a mix of savvy advertising and ingenious design, Alfred Krupp had succeeded in creating demand for his inventions. A local Berlin newspaper reported on one particularly large cannon deal with Russia by giving Alfred the nickname

by which he would come to be known in history the cannon king. Wow. I'm going to call him the horseshit king. He loves himself some horseshit. He does. He does. So that's in the end of part one. How you feeling Allison? I mean shit.

I mean horseshit. I'm not I can't get over it you guys. I don't know if I can be on part two. Yeah, it's very strange. There's more good horseshit stuff in part two. Oh, I'll say that. Yeah, no, no, no, no.

Lots more horseshit to come. Oh, yay. So how are we doing? How are we feeling Allison? Too fine. Good. Good. Yeah, are you feeling optimistic about human nature? You know, no, but I think that's the point.

Right? Yeah. You're supposed to feel bad. I'm going to go feel bad about the nature of humanity while I cradle my 1910 Mauser and enjoy the same thing that all of those people in 1862.

Robert, can I have a cannon for a present please? I will do my very best to find you a cannon. There you go. Not one of those shitty brass ones either. Yeah. Yeah, I'm with a good shit, guys. The non-horse shit version. That fucking crupstall, baby.

Allison, do you have any plugs to plug, by the way? I have by the Audible original. Like mother. It is nothing like what we've been talking about. It is a mother-daughter comedy

starring me and Susie Essman. And we just argue a lot and it's very Jewish and fun, so you know, if you want to check that out. No horseshit involved. Not any horseshit.

A guarantee. Wait, now I'm like, wait, is there? No, there isn't. Yeah, no horseshit, but tune in for part two of this episode in which there will be a tremendous amount of horseshit. So strap in, buckle up

and prepare for the manure filled conclusion of the life of Alfred Krupp on Thursday. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020

protest. It involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse we're like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys

on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price?

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