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

Episode Date: February 18, 2021

Robert is joined again by Alison Stevenson to continue to discuss Alfred Krupp. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look 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. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. About a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. You know, excited to hear more about horseshit.

Yeah, there's definitely more horseshit in this. Also, a lot of people get killed. And spoiler alert, 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 without Germany? How different history would have been?

That's facts. I'd have more relatives, probably. You would definitely have 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. Yeah, we don't want that. So all the historic events we've discussed so far were 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 that became Germany started to gradually coalesce together with the birth of the German Commonwealth, 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 1864 involved Prussia and Austria allying to fight Denmark, which at the time controlled a chunk of land in what we now would consider northern Germany. Denmark used to have possessions outside that weird little fucking isthmus, or whatever the fuck you want to call it, sticking out of the top of Europe.

They owned a bunch of the continents and the Germans were like, but that should be ours. And so they had a war. Now, when this war kicked off in 1864, the Danish army was small but extremely experienced. It included one of the highest proportions of combat veterans in continental Europe. And in the past, that had made all of the difference in European wars. More than minor differences in musketry or cannon was whether or not your troops were veteran, because guns sucked and cannons also kind of sucked. So what really mattered was if you had a bunch of guys who were able to stand together when they got shot at

and then charge the other guys with sharpened sticks. That was kind of what determined the battles. And the Danes had that. The German army was like completely inexperienced. They were well drilled and 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 the Prussians and the Austrians had been armed by Krupp with breech loading steel cannons.

They also had Dreyse needle guns, which were essentially the first 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 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, 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 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. 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, we always have an edge. But when we fight each other, we're all on the same. And now suddenly, even playing field. Yeah, suddenly that isn't true anymore. Even killing field. Even killing field.

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. And this actually kind of pissed 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 the Danes and win and take a big chunk of Germany. And then they go to war with each other. And by 1866, both nations were mobilizing to fight.

And Krupp had pending orders from both sides. And since Essen was in Prussia, 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 king's- Is this kind of the first time that this sort of thing is happening? Yes, yes. This is the first time that this is happening. Okay. Which is again, yet another like thing that we can thank Alfred Krupp for.

Yeah. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, 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 obvious conflict of interest between 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 Krupp's shipments if he wished. So like, what was the big deal? Like, it probably won't get there in time to kill your soldiers. Why are you complaining? This pissed 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, sensing an opportunity for a sale, he warned the king that Prussia's defenses were inadequate.

So, yeah, he tells the king 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. But Alfred is happy about that. He writes home to his employees that evidently startled him, which was what I wanted. 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 bad at reading people, this guy. Talk about Hutzpah.

Yeah. Obviously, the king says no, and Alfred is flummoxed as to why. So over in France, the emperor, Napoleon III, had been pretty psyched that Prussia and Austria were going to war. German unification terrified the French, and he'd been relieved 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 the Prussians had a hell of a lot better guns than the Austrians, and a lot more of them. Krupp 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 this 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 Prussia switch away 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 that she's, like, friends with and fucking. And he's, like, bummed because his guns killed their gunners, and it's just, it's a very awkward situation. Thankfully, he proves himself incapable of relaxation and is soon back at home in his filth 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 1868, he showed up at yet another Paris exhibition with a brand new 14-inch gun, which he described as, a monster such as the world has never seen. The barrel alone weighed 50 tons. The powder charge for each shell was 100 pounds. Emperor Napoleon III awarded Krupp the highest honor of the exhibition and a bunch of France fancy French military awards. He started talking about buying from Krupp in bulk, and Alfred sent France a catalog of his wares. The emperor kept Krupp's hopes up for months, but his generals were convinced that brass cannons were all that 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 cannon he'd brought to the exhibition to the king of Prussia, and he sent an identical gun to the Tsar 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, and Russia all showered him with awards. None of this meant much to Alfred. The only international acclaim he valued was, of course, money.

He's in this interesting situation because the Prussian government 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 other company. At the same time, Krupp 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 their enemies. He's still doing that. He's still doing it. It's kind of weird that it works, but it does.

And it doesn't seem to matter to the Prussian government because Krupp 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 with the arms company. It's very like proto-capitalism. Yeah. Yeah. This is early capitalism.

This 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's able to do this. And it's because the cannons are that much better than anyone else's guns. Hmm. Now, at around the same time, Alfred started designing a new 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 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 horseshit. So the entire house had to be built so that it wreaked a feces at all times.

Beautiful. It's an amazing house. And it's crazy. In the 60s, 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 100. Like nobody was quite sure. 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 house. Oh, God. People would just like wake up in the morning and he would have notes in their bedroom about their behavior the day before. Such a fucking creep. Ew. Yeah, he rules. You got to love Alfred.

But I want to talk a little bit more. I smell a sitcom. This is like a sitcom in the making. Yeah. So from the arms of quote, he gave a lot of thought to this, this being how to get as much horseshit smell into the house as possible. Then it came to him in a flash. What an idea.

He could build his study directly over the stable with shafts to waft the scent upward. And that is precisely what he decided to do. Crowing, so to speak, on his private dung hill. Jeez. Fucking dude loves horseshit. And it's funny because like all these kings and queens come to visit him and stay at his house. And like they all comment that like fucking smells like shit in here. What is wrong with this guy?

And he's like, thank you. 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. So you have. Right. It's a very strange situation. But it is an evidence that if you're rich and successful enough,

you can make everybody indulge your like very bizarre whims. 1870 came and in June of that year, Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern 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 French Foreign Minister threatened Berlin and the King of Prussia back 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 Otto's like the Prime Minister. He's like basically the guy 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 preeminent military force in Europe. A generation or so earlier, they'd taken on the entire rest of the continent and won 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 was the guy who had orchestrated Prussia kind of gobbling up all of these German kingdoms. And he saw war with France as basically the same. So for Bismarck in this period, he spent his whole life cobbling together what becomes Germany.

And he sees war with France as 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 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. OK, OK.

Worth it? Yeah, totally worth it. So at the time, everyone expects France to win. Newspapers all write that the Prussian cause is doomed. 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 croop cannons. And that turned out to be all that really mattered. The whole war came down to a siege in a city called Metz. And I'm going to write about read about that from an article in World Crunch. It kind of contextualizes this battle. Modern warfare began in 1870 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. Though each army had the same number of cannons, the bronze artillery of Napoleon III's army was no match for the range, accuracy and durability of Prussia's steel cannon. Some 193,000 French soldiers were killed to the Prussians 5,740 casualties. After Metz came to siege of Paris, the collapse of the Napoleonic dynasty, the unification of Germany and the birth of the Second Reich. So this battle is very...

We don't like nobody fucking talks about the 1870 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 I ends with the Treaty of Versailles is because the Germans humiliate the French here in 1870, sign a treaty in Versailles that leads to the creation of Germany, and fucking two generations later, the French want to do the same thing in Versailles when they beat Germany.

That's why that all happens. It all starts here. And this is the first modern battle and the first modern death toll. Before then, 193,000 was like an insane number of people to die in a war, let alone like a long battle. And in here, it's like one part of the war. It's just like this tremendous death toll that had not been seen earlier in the same kind of timeframe.

It's a fucking nightmare. This is where the modern world is kind of born out of this battle. And it's born because of Krupp cannons, because they were so much 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 tidbit. So Krupp guns would get another chance to impress the world and kill a fuckload 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.

And the city is like, we're going to take back France on our own, like fuck our emperor and stuff. Like we'll fight the Germans, which is, of course, like as swells, 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 miles away. And that had never been done before. So what you see with the siege of Paris is a sneak peek to how war would look 70 years later, where you have, you know, bombers raining down bombs on cities from miles up. This is the same thing, but with artillery on the ground, just blowing the shit up out of Paris without troops ever entering the city. Oh, God.

Yeah, it's the first time that happens. Thanks to Alfred Krupp. OK, OK. Wow. Damn, what a legacy. Yeah, it's good stuff. And we're going to talk a little bit more about how he murdered a whole bunch of people. But first, you know, who doesn't shell Paris from five miles away?

Who? The products and services that support this podcast. Oh. 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've 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 not in the good and 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. We're back and we're talking about the siege of Paris. So again, I was 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. But eventually they decided to do it. And yeah, I'm going to read a quote from hate wins. Yeah, yeah, it always does. So I'm going to find I'm going to read a quote from a collection of eyewitness accounts from the siege of Paris that were gathered by Salem College. A colonel Heitzler and his wife were giving breakfast at Evron to several friends,

a servant being in the room. One of the guests was laughing with the hostess and said, no butter, 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 Val de Grasse Hospital, but it was such a human ruin that no individuality could be recognized. Oh, my God.

Prussians are firing with 80 guns, some of them being 112 pounders, ranging from three miles to three miles and a half to four miles. So they're just killing anybody and everybody. Yeah, they're just shelling. They're dropping 112 pound explosive shells on a city, blindly shooting into it. Jesus. Until people don't want to fight anymore.

Yeah. That's 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 Raqqa. It was U.S. artillery pounding Raqqa from miles away in order to clear out the Islamic state

and also all of the civilians who happened to be there. I watched some of this shit happen in Mosul. Like this has been war ever since and it starts here in 1870. Thanks to these steel cannons of Krupp. It's good stuff. Damn. That's sad. It's cool shit.

It is cool shit. Archibald Forbes, a 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'd been like the little bit of European wars. We have like a bunch of lines of guys shooting 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 gasliness of those dead transcended anything I had ever seen or even dreamt of in the shuttering nightmare after my first battlefield. Remember how they had been slain? Not with the nimble bullet of the needlegun that drills a minute hole through a man and leaves him undisfigured unless it has chance 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. Yeah, it's the first modern, modern deaths. Wow. That's how everybody dies now. It's good stuff. Yeah, it's fucking rules. So cities had been ravaged by war before,

but 1870 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 crop 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 got to get some of those fucking cannons. I need some of that shit.

Give me those motherfuckers. This guy's really good at making guns. Look at how many dead people there are in Paris. Yeah, it's fucking great. We suck. This is not one of our more optimistic about people episodes. It sure isn't. We suck.

Yeah. A lot of the time, journalists. Yeah. So from the arms of Krupp, Krupp cannon became the new status symbol of nations. Turkey used them to guard the Bosphorus. Romania to protect the 40 bastions of Bucharest. According to legend,

tiny Andorra bought a long-range gun and then discovered that it couldn't be fired without hitting French soil. In 1873, the Krupp work payroll was half again as large as in 1870. The firm had surpassed the peak of its wartime production. Then came the Sino-Japanese War scare of 1874 to 1875. 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 Sudan, Metz and Paris, those are all battles from 1870, were being read over the globe. When Krupp wrote flattering letters to Li Hongcheng, the Bismarck of Asia, and sent him a model railroad, Li responded by ordering 275 field guns, another 150 cannon to arm the Taku Fort,

guarding the approach to Tien Sin, and a complete armament for eight warships. In gratitude, Alfred hung over the head of his bed a portrait of Li, despite his fear of combustible objects in the castle. Word of his Chinese coup reached Potsdam. 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 Hongcheng didn't receive Essen's latest model, which was being delivered to St. Petersburg that winter. The Taku Fort's got outdated cannon, and a handsome order from Bangkok 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 shit. Yup. Yeah, he's a terrible person. He's a piece of horseshit.

Sorry. Yeah. No, don't say that. That's a compliment to Alfred. Yeah, he would love to hear that. You tell him he's a piece of horseshit. He would say, thank you. Yes, but to everyone else.

Yeah, except for they'd have to pretend it to like it because they want his guns. Fair enough. Wow. Krupp, one of the things I guess that is kind of heartening here is that as successful as he was, Krupp was fundamentally incapable of taking any pleasure in his success. He always found new things to worry about.

Oh, that's good. Yeah. When the 1870s rolled on, this thing was communism. So in 1871, like, I love that there's no, like, guilty conscience going on. It's like, I was just worried about how his guns are going to sell. He is incapable. The only thing he ever feels guilt about is when his guns blow up

and kill German crews. Yeah. He's a good dude. So he starts flipping out about, he thought communism was pretty funny in 1870 when the French went on strike and they didn't get their steel cannons in time. But in 1871, the Social Democratic Party goes on strike in Germany

and threatens to shut down the mines that 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 cunning 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

that he called his general regulations. These guaranteed his permanent employees a pension, health care, 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 the first company to do a pension is Krupp. Wow. See, if this was to be made into a movie,

that's the only thing that they would say about him and ignore all the weapons shit. Well, and 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 lists aren't mostly benefits. They're mostly a list of obligations that the workers have to the company.

OK. Yeah. 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 authority must be used 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 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 benign or evil arises. And again, the act that is evil he's talking about is like unionizing. Which is yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, the more Krupp played with the idea of his general regulations, the more they turned into a corporate dictatorship. He said 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 Krupp should be the entire focus of a Krupp employee's life. To that end, he developed housing colonies for his employees. Each building named after a Krupp ancestor.

He built a bread factory, a wine store, a butcher plant and even a hotel. The city of Essent turned into an extension of Alfred Krupp's personal property. Wow. At that 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 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. So you won't go on strike. That feels kind of true today. Thanks Alfred. Yeah. Not much different.

He's a trailblazer. Not like in Alfred right now. To help further prevent those errors, Krupp instituted a program of snooping. The first centralized workplace espionage program. It's like OG Big Brother. Yeah. You talk about late 1800s, early like the 1890s through the 1920s. This is huge in the United States.

The Pinkertons are a big deal. Krupp is doing this in the early 1870s. He's like he's the first company to have an organized program of spying on its workers. Yeah. Yeah. Very ahead of his time. Today, companies like the Pinkertons provide corporations like Amazon with surveillance of workers who might want to 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 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. 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 not in the good and 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 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. I love not thinking too deeply about history. 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 and the social 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 like writes down the initial laws that become the backbone of everything that is 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. It's it's it's fun.

Now, obviously, even that is more problematic than it might sound. And I'm going to quote from the arms of Krupp here. In 1911, the Reich's workman insurance code was extended to all labor hoods, extended to was to extend to all laborers, the rights that Krupp had given his men nearly four decades before. And the following year, Kaiser Wilhelm II declared an SN that the Iron Chancellor Bismarck had been prodded by Krupp. Echoes of the general regulations were to be heard in the Third Reich. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that his own program had begun with a study of Bismarck's social reforms and the slogan of the Führer's labor front leader, Robert lay 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 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 a little more complacent.

Yeah, a little more complacent. And the Nazis recognize this and almost copy him word for word in some places. Like, yeah, it's good stuff. It's good stuff. I feel like Krupp 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. Oh, yeah. OK. Yeah. His grandson was a huge Nazi, big, big, solid Nazi. Great a solid Nazi. Did he inherit the horseshit thing or was that just? No, I think that was just Alfred. Yeah.

Yeah, it's a little peculiar. Still stuck on genetic. Still stuck in the horseshit guys. It's weird. So Krupp himself never lived to see the rise of the Third Reich, but his descendants loved it. And there's no reason I think he wouldn't also have loved it. Yeah. 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 counterrevolution for the best of the people with flying columns, labor battalions of young men. He's saying he 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 counterrevolution with like flying columns of young men ready to beat the shit out of socialists.

Yeah, that's definitely what humanity needs as a solution to things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When he's crying out for somebody with great gifts, 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 who made. Yeah. He was one of the people who made, you know, Hitler possible. Obviously, you know, you don't get a Hitler without a lot of people wanting a Hitler and a lot of groundwork 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 suffrage and the franchise to vote withdrawn from people without property. 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, disillute 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 of big questions of national policy. Issues of high policy require more time and knowledge than the work man has at his command. You're too dumb to think about politics.

Yeah. When the Social Democrats. Yeah, he himself is a pretty smart guy. When the Social Democrats won seats in the Reichstag anyway, he fired 30 men for suspicion of socialism. Now in his late 60s, Krupp became a tyrant, cracking down irrationally on anything that seemed like dissent. 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 people over and then refuse 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 paper with his handwriting on it in their bedroom, telling them that a carriage was ready to take them away.

Damn. Kissing and shit. 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 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. Oh my God. Yeah, he's out of his damn mind by the time he's like in his fifties and sixties.

I'm going to quote from the arms of Krupp again here. Since he was providing his employees with homes, schools, hospitals and food, he reasoned that their hours away from work belong to him, too. It is an astonishing fact that most of them agreed or at any rate 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, had come to the conclusion that a faithful workman's place of work included the marriage bed. Just as the sole proprietor was acquiring enough raw materials to last the house of Krupp for the next 99 years, some of every conscientious Krupp employees 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 in the future and my children have employees. Damn. This is messed up.

Yeah, it's really bad. He's terrible. And a lot like Jeff Bezos. He's just open homeless shelters for Amazon employees. So the continued success of the Social Democrats threw Alfred into a constant rage in his waning years. He ran for election and lost amidst a massive leftward swing that saw the SPD, the Social Democratic Party, ally with the centrist party to try and block a landmark military appropriations bill that would have meant 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 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 were still going to pass the appropriations bill. So it was kind of stupid to blow up his entire factory just because they were 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.

He's a cool dude. Yeah, he is kind of Trumpy. And the fact that the SPD still existed and seemed to be gaining ground kind of broke 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 might be putting that a little bit projecting a little bit there, buddy. Like, yeah. So next he hired inspectors to go through all the trash in 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 33 years was fired. So as 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 use toilet 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. 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 crop history to date. At least 15 little wars broke out and involved involving countries he sold arms to. Sometimes his clients even fought.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the Russia Turkish war happens from 1877 to 1878 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 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. Yeah. Like this how it hurt this guy. Yeah. Boom.

Go boom on him. Yeah. He's a little bit. Yeah. He's kind of obsessed with England too. So he's very frustrated that they never do buy his weapons. By the late 1880s, Alfred was constantly ill and 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 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 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 his father because he had just gone mad. 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 13th, 1887 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 nothing but industrial poisons and horseshit his whole life? Yeah. Maybe there's something to that horseshit thing. Yeah.

Maybe he wasn't wrong. I'm going to not try that, but let me know how that goes. Yeah. Yeah. Somebody else would have to try it for sure. Yep. Yep. Yep.

So that's the story of the man who made everything else that happened in the 20th century possible. Damn. Good to know. Yeah. And the guy who helped invent Germany. So him and Bertha did have a kid. Yeah. No, he had a couple of kids with her and the kids mostly.

Actually, the reason they finally split is in like 1882, she asks him to like, she comes to him is like, hey, our son wants to get married. And 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 shit and left for good. And it like broke his heart and she never talked to him again, even though he like, let his kid get married after that. Because again, just like a cussed piece of shit who was incapable, like hated being with himself. And as a result, 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.

Geez. 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. What an existence. Could have been the train track guy, Alfred, but instead you're the guy who got a lot of people killed. What a waste of being a smart person. Yeah.

If he just made better ways for people to travel. Oh, yeah, Alfred, crap, the train guy. What a cool dude. Yeah. Yeah. But no, that is not the way the story ends. So how you feeling? Taking it all in, absorbing all of these facts.

Yeah. I had no idea. Yeah. This is definitely a little bit more German history nerd for our podcast. I should also state for the record that Alfred was pretty anti-Semitic, but also so was everyone at the time. I don't get the sense that he was different from literally every other person in German in that journey. Right, right, right, right. Yeah.

Everybody's racist against Jewish people in Germany in the 1870s. Yeah, history has shown. It's pretty easy to be an isometric. They were that racist in France and England and America too. Yeah. Something about us. And Russia, Turkey. Yeah.

Everywhere but China, pretty much. Who wasn't anti-Semitic? China. China was good about. In fact, 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 II 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. Yeah. And the China after that massacre, after like the city was retaken, China built a giant monument to the murder Jews of that city because they felt bad about it. Aw. Yeah. So there's that. Yeah. There's that.

But everybody else unbelievably racist against Jewish people. Wow. But yeah. Krupp is not like a trailblazer in his anti-Semitism. Yeah, he's just kind 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 Allison, you got any pluggables to pluck? I mean, I will speak in of Jews. I'll pluck my audible original like mother. It's very Jewish. I mean, I will say that's the that's the most positive statement that's ever come for after the words speaking of Jews. Normally, that does not lead to something good. So I'm glad that we're there.

Well, here we go. I'll give it to you. If you want to listen to a mother-daughter comedy called Like Mother, that starts me and comedy legend Susie Essman. Then there you go. There you go. Check out that. Check out everything. And check out, I don't know, cannons.

Check out cannons. I feel like that's a bad thing to. Check out cannons. Don't check out horseshit. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to be honest, I much prefer people have a lot of horseshit than a lot of cannons. I mean, fair enough.

Good point. Yeah. Yeah. What about cannons, but instead of like cannonballs, it's big horseshit balls. Yeah, I'm surprised you didn't come up with that. Just fling horseshit at the enemy to try to give them better ideas. Yeah. What a weirdo.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. 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. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in

a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him. He orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your