The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order: 1905-1922

by Edmond Taylor

Before 1870 Germany had been primarily an agricultural region; by 1914 it had become an industrial power on a level with Great Britain or the United States. Here is a contemporary description of the great Krupp works at Essen, the spearhead of German economic might: “... a great city within a city, with its own streets, its own police force, fire department and traffic laws. There are 150 kilometres of rail, 60 different factory buildings, 8500 machine tools, seven electrical stations, 140 km. of underground cables and 46 overhead. More than 41,000 workers are employed there.” The sole owner of this vast concern — the most important supplier of artillery and other weapons to the German Army — was Friedrich Alfred Krupp, the head of a dynasty whose role in shaping the nation’s destiny sometimes seemed second only to that of the Hohenzollerns. At the Essen works and in his other enterprises Krupp employed a total of 78,334 men and women. The great German industrial barons displayed in some respects more social sense than those contemporary “malefactors of great wealth” in the United States whom Teddy Roosevelt had castigated; at least they had accepted without too much grumbling Bismarck’s paternalistic version of the welfare state, which had made the Prussian worker the most privileged — from a material viewpoint — in Europe.