Company
ReorganizedKrupp
Essen · Since 1811
Merged with Thyssen in 1999. The steel and arms works continue inside ThyssenKrupp.
Friedrich Krupp set up a steel works in Essen in 1811 and nearly failed. His son Alfred made it the firm that sold cast-steel guns to Prussia and then to anyone Prussia would tolerate as a customer. By 1870 the Krupp works was a city inside Essen: housing, a hospital, a school, and a factory gate.
The company sold railway tires and cannons, which is to say it sold to the same century twice. Quality control on a gun was a commercial argument. So was the company store.
A private welfare state
Krupp housing kept skilled workers from leaving, and it kept them visible. The firm employed metallurgists when that was still a rare profession, pattern makers, and a large unskilled crew for the furnaces. It also employed the people who ran the settlements. Loyalty was part of the wage. So was surveillance. A Krupp worker lived in a world the company had designed, which later industrial towns copied and later critics recognized as a bargain with a price.
From family firm to ThyssenKrupp
The firm armed Germany in both world wars and used forced labor under the Nazis. Alfred Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach was convicted at Nuremberg and later released. The works returned to steel and engineering. In 1999 Krupp merged with Thyssen. ThyssenKrupp still makes steel, submarines, and industrial plant. The family no longer owns it. Essen still has the settlements. The catalogue marks the firm reorganized, not gone.
The work it organized
- Steelmaker
- Gun founder
- Company-town clerk
- Metallurgist