If the German industrial giant has a huge and strong heart, it must be Ruhr-gebiet. Huge coal veins, like an underground black pulse, start from north-central Germany and extend to Poland, which is the best coke producing area in Europe. 15 cities in this area are closely clustered in an area of 200 square miles. If you drive on the Dortmund-Dü sseldorf highway today, you can have a panoramic view of the Ruhr area in just three hours. The Franco-Prussian War, World War I and World War II, and the sharp edge of Germany were forged here three times. As the famous economist Keynes said, the German Empire was made up of coal and iron, not iron and blood. General Franz Halder, a former chief of staff of the Third Reich Defence Force, testified at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal that "Ruhr-gebiet was the most important factor in German war operations", and in the allied high command, although there were many differences after the landing in Normandy, one thing was certain: how to occupy Ruhr-gebiet as soon as possible.
By the middle and late19th century, on the eve of Prussia's reunification with Germany, Ruhr had become the largest industrial city in the European continent: under Ruhr, it was a winding mine tunnel with a length of 150 miles; The air is thick with smoke, red, white and yellow, which together create a cloud that will never disperse; Around the huge industrial factory buildings, there are some drab houses with reddish brown sharp corners, or railway box trucks and steam locomotives that are endless from time to time, devouring thousands of tons of coal and spitting out steel.
On the edge of Ruhr-gebiet, an iron smelting furnace in Thyssen has a conceited, stubborn and cold owner, Friedrich Krupp. Kitchenware, farm tools and shells urgently needed by the Prussian army are all produced here. Friedrich and his eldest son Alfred tried day and night here, hoping to master this most attractive technology in the industrial revolution of the British Isles, and this process took nearly 30 years. Krupp was on the verge of bankruptcy several times, and Alfred went to Birmingham, Liverpool and other places in England for an anonymous inspection. However, the quality of Krupp imitation steel is still difficult to compare with imported British goods.
Like his father, Alfred is a cold, arrogant and dedicated workaholic. It is said that one day his second wife Bertha asked him to accompany him to a symphony concert, and the answer was: "Sorry, that's impossible. I have to watch my chimney smoke all the time. The voice of my foundry is better than all the violins in the world. "
For a long time, Krupp had to rely on traditional tableware orders to maintain its own survival. The only meaningful patented technology is the improved hard roller: "Press unprocessed silver or other malleable metal pieces into human shapes, forks and spoons with people and common patterns, and simply cut them into clear and clean patterns." However, two products that really changed the future fate of Krupp and even Germany were almost ignored in Alfred's diary-they were two hollow cast and cold-drawn musket barrels.
William I, who just ascended the throne, visited Krupp's steelmaking plant. Alfred prepared a hall of more than 300 square meters to show the achievements of the factory, including models of the production process of pig iron and cast steel workshops, samples of steel ingots, train axles and Krupp's cannons. William I, dressed in a military uniform and wearing a silver helmet with a double eagle logo, was in high spirits. He awarded Krupp the Red Eagle Medal and the Knight Cross. In the same month, William I ordered the War Department to order 65,438+000 new breech-loaded rifled guns with 6-pound shells from Krupp, with a total order of 200,000 talers. A few months later, Alfred was invited by the king to visit Potsdam Palace, and von otto bismarck personally visited Alfred's newly-built mansion. Two ambitious people who can decide the future of Germany found that they viewed everything from "theocracy to ancient tree aesthetics". Since then, Krupp has won special support and preferential treatment from the future German state power by virtue of its national ambition and expansionism.
German industry therefore absorbed investment, raw materials and new technologies like sponges under the impulse of nationalism: at 1862 London International Industry and Art Expo, Bessemer acid converter steelmaking method, which can easily convert low-quality iron ore into high-quality steel, made its debut. Only six years later, more than 70 Bessemer acid converters were put into use in Europe-most of them in Germany, and Krupp Factory was the first enterprise to use this converter. "Krupp Steel" eventually became the highest quality hard backbone of German unification and industrialization. At the same time, Germany actively improved the Thomas freezing method, which originated in Britain and removed phosphorus from limonite. The subsequent Siemens-Martin steelmaking process further aggravated this inequality based on technology: in 2004, German steel output reached1917.6 million tons, which was the sum of Britain, France and Russia. In the coal industry, which has been dominated by Britain, new technology has gradually consolidated Germany's position: 1879, Werner Siemens invented the electric rotary drilling rig, 1875, and the total output of stone coal in Germany was 37.436 million tons.
1880 soared to 46.974 million tons.
1867, at the second Paris World Expo, Germany became a member of the European industrial power for the first time. In the Prussian exhibition area, the most striking product is an all-steel gun with a length of 17 feet and a weight of 50 tons produced by Krupp military factory in Essen.
1August 6, 870, the Franco-Prussian War ushered in the first major battle-the Battle of Voss. This battle was not only the victory of the "all-out war" under the Prussian General Staff system, but also the victory of German industrial manufacturing: the Krupp steel breech gun with a range more than twice that of the French breech gun "shattered all the revenge efforts of the French, and the shells rained down on the front line of the French infantry assembly". On September 1, Charles Louis Napolé on Bonaparte's exhausted right-wing army was surrounded by William I's fresh troops in Sedan, 7 miles from the Belgian-French border. In the early morning of the next day, when the first Bavarian army crossed the Maas River under the cover of dense fog, 500 cannons of 16 Krupp Fort began to roar. On a tree-lined hill in Frenova, on the south bank of the Maas River, the king himself, wearing a luxurious dress, Marshal Mao Qi, Marshal Ron, senior officers of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Prime Minister Bismarck, all senior officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and many German governors were watching the battle: the shells gradually wiped out the defenders like "harvesting wheat with a sickle", and at dusk, Charles Louis Napolé on Bonaparte ordered the white flag to be raised in the fortress.
At that time, European newspapers exclaimed that Europe lost a mistress and gained a master. With the rise of the German Empire, German manufactured goods began to conquer the world. Canadian Pacific Railway System Company boasts that its locomotives use high-quality steel wheels and axles produced by Krupp. Edward Henry harriman, the American railway magnate, submitted a one-time order for 25,000 tons of rails. In the five years after the Franco-Prussian War, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Turkey, China, Egypt, Austria and other countries * * bought 24,576 Krupp cannons of different calibers and models-the bloody war made Krupp become.
Compared with the army, Germany is more ambitious in the ocean: 1897, alfred tirpitz, a German naval expert deeply influenced by Mahan's sea power thought, became the naval minister of the new emperor William II. The following year, the German parliament passed the naval expansion bill and established an "ocean fleet" with 38 battleships and 20 armored cruisers as the main force. Tirpitz said openly: "The purpose of this great navy is to make the greatest sea power countries dare not challenge it, otherwise they will face the danger of fatal damage to their own advantages."
1890, Germany acquired Zanzibar from Britain, annexed New Guinea and Marshall Islands, and seized Cameroon and Tanganyika in Africa. The advantages of German navy in artillery, organization and mobilization, optical equipment and warship engineering structure forced Britain to transfer three-quarters of its naval forces back to the North Sea at the beginning of the 20th century. In order to break Germany's ambition, 1906, the British Admiralty, at the urging of Admiral and First Maritime Minister Lord John Fisher, announced the construction of a "fearless" class battleship with a displacement of 1.8 1 10000 tons and 10. However, the following year, Germany made its own response: 19000 tons, 12 Nassau-class battleship, 280 mm main gun, Krupp factory is the nest that breeds this sea monster-Krupp 165438+30 inches was designed in190 inches. The electric turret with a total weight of 394 tons is also produced in the Essen Military Factory of Krupp, and Krupp also provides high-quality surface carburizing and quenching armor for Nassau-class battleships. Compared with the fearless steam turbine, Krupp, which is famous for its steadiness, still uses the old-fashioned three-expansion reciprocating steam engine. 1908, Nassau, westfalen, Rhineland, Posen, each Nassau-class battleship with a cost of 40 million gold marks was launched one after another, in 65438.
1900, Fritz, son of Alfred and head of Krupp II, died suddenly. Six years later, Gustav von Pollan Haarbach, a rigid, thrifty and serious diplomat, married Bertha, Fritz's 20-year-old daughter, and became a new generation of "king of artillery". This political marriage took place under the direct encouragement of Emperor William II himself, in order to maintain the continuity of the ruling family of this arms empire. In August, the grand engagement ceremony was held at Villa Geer, which seemed to be a plenary meeting of the cabinet of the German Empire. All senior officers of the General Staff Department and Tirpitz, Minister of the Navy, also attended the meeting. The emperor's new toast is: "I wish my dear daughter to maintain the existing high efficiency of Krupp factory and continue to provide our German motherland with offensive and defensive weapons unmatched by other countries in quality and performance!"
In the five weeks after the Sarajevo incident on June 19 18, 2004, major European countries quickly entered a state of war, and Gustav Krupp lost no time in writing the slogan "The stronger the enemy, the greater the honor" into his black notebook. In the third year of the war, Krupp handed over 9 million shells and 300 guns of various types to the Germans every month, as well as countless other kinds of arms, including the 420mm giant engineering howitzer that conquered Verdun. The Krupp-Maxim machine gun it made caused the allied forces to lose 26,000 people in the Somme in one day, but it only advanced a few kilometers. A few months before the end of the war, Krupp's arms orders from this bloody conflict have made it a profit of 432 million Deutsche Mark.
Prosperity after World War I, like peace between two global conflicts, is both short-lived and fragile. 1929 The economic crisis that broke out on Wall Street quickly spread to Germany, which was heavily dependent on exports and still strictly restricted by the Treaty of Versailles. In four years, Germany's exports dropped from122 billion imperial marks to 5.7 billion, which made it impossible to pay a lot of short-term international loan debt interest and war reparations. On the other hand, on the day of1933,65438+/kloc-0,31,the Nazi regime was established, and a package of large-scale public investments stipulated in the "rearmament" plan and the "four-year economic plan" was immediately announced, which successfully made German corporate giants naively believe that long-term prosperity and profits in the future were guaranteed. Like other industrial giants, Alfred Jr, the son of Gustav and the fourth-generation head of Krupp, thought that he could easily "buy" the cooperation and taming of the Nazi government with his own chips and funds, but in fact he was soon tied to an expanding chariot. By the end of September 1939, Krupp had obtained orders, financial subsidies and loans of up to 9 billion imperial marks in the huge process of the secret armament recovery of the Third Reich. At the beginning of 1933, under the guise of developing "Kleintraktor" (light tractor), the Imperial Ordnance Department asked Krupp, Mann, Daimler-Benz and other companies to develop the first generation of future defense forces chariots. Results The prototype LKA 1 produced by Krupp with a weight of 6 tons and a speed of 37 kilometers per hour was selected and put into production, with the standard number Sd. Kfz. 10 1, that is, the PzKpfwI light tank that will be the main force in the future blitzkrieg against Poland. Krupp was the power core of the war machine of the Third Reich in the biggest bloody conflict in human history. Thousands of "slave workers" and German native workers from the Soviet Union and Slavic regions worked day and night. Under the increasingly frequent and fierce air strikes by the allied forces, ferrochrome, manganese, scrap iron, aluminum and copper from the occupied areas were converted into weapons in the hands of the German Defence Forces and the Waffen SS: from 88 mm anti-tank guns, IV medium tanks and
On April 2 1, 1945, Krupp, like Nazi Germany, also ushered in its own "twilight of the gods". Lieutenant Colonel Clarence Sagerman of the 3rd13rd Regiment of the 79th Infantry Division of the US Army came to the magnificent hugel Villa and arrested Alfred Jr., who was later sentenced to 12 by the Nuremberg Military Court. Later, the villa became the headquarters of the Anglo-American Coal Control Committee, the new owner of Ruhr-gebiet. With the determination of the allied forces to liquidate the Nazis, it also included the biggest man-made industrial retrogression in German history, so as to completely eliminate the possibility of it becoming the source of war again. Finally, the Allied Management Committee decided that Germany's industrial production capacity must be reduced to 50% to 55% of 1938. Deprived of all pre-war technical patents, Germany was allowed to start 50% of textile and leather products processing capacity and about 20% of automobile manufacturing capacity in consumer goods. Ocean-going ships, airplanes, aluminum alloys, electron tubes and heavy lathes, which are closely related to the military industry, were completely banned, and most German heavy industry equipment was systematically dismantled and transferred to the allies as war compensation-after a whole year, the workers in Essen were forced to watch allied engineers edit symbols on lathes, machine tools, rolling mills and hydraulic presses with colored chalk, and then transported away one by one with cranes. Boilers were sent to Ukraine, cast iron and melting furnaces were sent to Britain, brand-new cannons and cutting boring machines were sent to France, and its proud 10,000-ton hydraulic press was owned by Yugoslavia, and even the wall bricks were removed and sent to the Netherlands.
When Alfred Jr. was finally released from prison in February 195 1, his steel/arms empire had been vertically divided by the allies, although he still had assets as high as $6,543.84 billion. The Allied Management Committee forced him to issue a statement saying that Krupp "has no intention of returning to the German coal and steel industry", except that the enterprises he controlled under Rheinhausen can produce a small amount of ordinary steel.
Nevertheless, Krupp could still become a star in the global industrial field before finally getting rid of family rule and becoming a joint-stock company in the 1950s and 1960s. The modernization of post-war third world countries urgently needs these former colonial and agricultural countries to establish their own heavy industries. The business of Krupp's "engineering consulting and construction" department is booming. In Mexico, Greece, Iran, Chile, Sudan and other African countries, Krupp's three-ring symbol can be seen everywhere. Krupp Kiel Port Terminal, which was used to manufacture submarines and warships in wartime, quickly provided a fleet to transport oil refining, steel rolling, casting and excavation equipment to all parts of the world. After reopening for two years, Krupp's annual turnover reached 10 billion US dollars, of which 1/5 came from overseas.
However, autumn came so fast, the Great Depression in Europe in 1966 and the sharp decline in the profit rate of coal and steel as a "sunset industry" made Krupp find himself in a quagmire overnight. What is more difficult is that the West German government, which pursues a liberal policy, will no longer provide Krupp with emergency relief loans at critical moments like the Kaiser. Fortune magazine published a comment in September that year, claiming that Krupp did not give up its coal and steel shares and investments, which made it lose the last miracle of completely transforming into a new technology-based enterprise in the post-war industrial transformation. From June 65438 to1October 65438 in 0966, its loss was as high as1250,000 USD. By the end of 1968, the total debt had reached 5.2 billion marks, and finally it became a joint-stock enterprise-Friedrich Krupp Co., Ltd., but Alfred Jr. himself did not see the end of his career: 1968, the last generation of "cannon king" died, and Ruhr District125,000 workers. Endert, his son, is unwilling to continue to follow the strict and industrious tradition of his family and give up his inheritance right in exchange for the huge bonus provided by the Krupp Foundation every year.
Today, at the corner of the junction of Linbeck Street and Wei Inhof Street in Essen, there is a stainless steel memorial board to tell people that this is the birthplace of Alfred Krupp. Not far from Ahlten's Dover Street, it has become a subsidiary of Thyssen-Krupp United Steel Company. The stamping and forging workshop with a history of 100 years is still in operation, and the molds filled with molten steel and sparks keep passing through the workshop, and after tempering and stamping, they become steel plates.