The "Krupp Industrial Trial," more properly known as The United States v. Alfried Krupp, et al had four indictments for Alfried and other heads of industrial firms: crimes against peace, contributing to a general conspiracy to wage warfare, crimes against humanity which involved the use of slave labor, and participating in the Third Reich's looting of European resources. The first two indictments, like when they were brought up at other tribunals, proved to be highly problematic, especially for private businessmen, as it had to prove a conspiracy actually existed. The other two indictments were much easier to prove and Krupp's was convicted because the Krupp firm did employ slave labor and was a participant in the Third Reich's administration of occupied Europe's economy which was highly predatory and rapacious.

Alfried was of course the functional head of a German industrial firm that was very intimately associated with the Third Reich and is leadership. Hitler and other officials would frequently invoke the hardness of "Krupp steel" in their speeches and the Krupp firm was one of the beneficiaries of rearmament. Alfried sponsored the SS in 1931 and joined the NSDAP in 1938. In between 1931-38, Alfried associated himself closely with the regime and its elites, so it was hard for him to claim he joined the party as an expedient. The Krupp firm also operated under the double burden of a close public association with German armaments of the First World War and Imperial Germany, therefore a there was enormous pressure among the occupation authorities to root out an industrial element that had distorted German development into warlike behavior and militarism. An important component of the Krupp trial was the disestablishment of the Krupp family fortune and thus breaking the power of industrial militarism.

Alfried's pardon represented several different impulses in what would soon become the Federal Republic. Firstly, there was a widespread antipathy to the wider Nuremberg process among the German public who considered the tribunals and denazification as a form victor's justice. While many Germans did not mind seeing the "Golden Pheasants" of the NSDAP like Goering see their day in court, public opinion was not so receptive when it extended to Germans who were not actual members of the regime. The Adenauer government often articulated these apprehensions and became an advocate for a kind of selective amnesia in which the crimes of the Third Reich were the sole responsibility of a criminal clique wither killed in the war or convicted in the first round of tribunals. There was also a marked shift in HICOG's leadership when US General John McCloy replaced Lucius Clay and was more receptive to placating West German opinion and restoring the economy. As the Korean War heated up and the reconstruction of the Western European economies was starting to bear fruit, American leaders were much less concerned with breaking up West German heavy industry and instead wanted to reestablish it. The Ruhr steel industry played an important role in these plans, as reflected in the Schuman Plan which sought to reintegrate Western European coal and steel industries into a pan-European trading network. This strengthened network would render the Marshall Plan more effective and inoculate Western Europe's working classes against communism.

Finally, German industrialists, including Krupp, actively lobbied for Krupp's release and pardon. Industry hired a number of public relations experts to draft pamphlets in English and German such as A Short Survey of the Krupp Trial that argued that Krupp and other industrialists were apolitical patriots who had no choice but to accept the slave labor the Third Reich foisted upon them. Krupp would also maintain that his firm was a model for labor relations as the Krupp management operated with a sense of noblesse oblige towards its workers. The issue of wider economic integration had created a degree of apprehension among the Ruhr's workers and the clemency lobbyists used these tensions as leverage against McCloy and HICOG as Alfried's case went up for review. The Advisory Board on Clemency for War Criminals advised in 1950 that Alfried's sentence was unduly harsh and the disestablishment of Krupp's fortune was not in keeping with Allied policy towards other industrialists.

McCloy, a staunch anticommunist, portrayed clemency as in keeping with core American values. He characterized the confiscation of the Krupp fortune as "generally repugnant to American concepts of justice," and strongly denied that Cold War considerations played a part in his support of the Clemency Board's recommendations. However, clemency really fit within both the Adenauer's policy of normalizing and reintegration of the FRG into a wider Western European community and America's Cold War concerns that a strong European economy would act as a firewall against Communist political parties. The consciously selective histories perpetrated by Krupp played into these contexts as they minimized its involvement in the Third Reich and created an image of the German industrialist as an responsible bedrock for anticommunism.

Sources

Merritt, Richard L. Democracy Imposed: U.S. Occupation Policy and the German Public, 1945-1949. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

Wiesen, S. Jonathan. West German Industry and the Challenge of the Nazi Past, 1945-1955. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.