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Hey, Robert here. It's been like two months since I had LASIK and I'm still seeing 2020. All I had to do was go in for a consultation, then go in for a maybe 10 minute procedure and then my eyes have been great ever since. You know, I healed up wonderfully. It was very simple, couldn't have been a better experience. So if you want to explore LASIK plus I can't recommend it enough. They have over 20 years experience in the industry and they performed more than two million treatments right now if you want to try getting LASIK plus you can get $1000 off of your surgery when you're treated in September, that's $500. Of per eye, just visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free consultation. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried true crime. And if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. 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Listen to stuff you should know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to the Horse's ********* podcast in all the land behind the ********. This is part two of our episode on Alfred Krupp, famed arms maven and horse Poop lover. My guess, as in part one, is Alison Stevenson, writer and comedian. Allison, how are you doing today? You know, excited to hear more about *********. Yeah, there's definitely more ********* in this. Also, a lot of people get killed. And spoiler alert, we get we get a Germany. OK. 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. That's I'd have more relatives, probably would you would definitely have more. A lot of a staggering amount of people. A lot of Germans would have more relatives if they'd never been a Germany, actually. Yeah, I will say there would be too many English people. Yeah, we don't want that. 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. 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 Common market, 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 and what we now would consider Northern Germany. Denmark used to have possessions outside that weird little ******* isthmus or whatever the **** 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 they had a war. Now. When this war kicked off in 1964, the Danish Army was small but extremely experienced. It included one of the highest proportions of combat veterans and. Continental Europe, and in the past that had made all of the difference in European wars, you know, more than minor difference differences in musketry or cannon was whether or not your your troops were veteran because, like guns sucked and cannons also kind of sucked. So what really mattered was if you had a bunch of guys who were able to like, stand together when they got shot at and then charged the other guys with sharpened sticks. Like that was kind of what determined battles. And the Danes had that, and the German army was like completely inexperienced. They were well drilled in everything. 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 crook with breech loading steel cannons. They also had Dreyse needle guns, which were essentially the first bochet 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 of you know, North America, South America, Africa, which is kind of starting in this. 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 assume 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, playing field, yeah, suddenly that isn't true anymore. And they're killing field. Even killing field. Yeah. Yeah. So for the first time, you know, people start flipping out about this, uh, 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 ****** *** 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 demo or 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 kings, this is this kind of the first time that this sort of things happening? Yes, this is the first time that this is happening, OK. Which is again, yet another like, uh, thing that we can thank Alfred Krupp for. Yeah, yeah, thank you. Yeah, thanks, buddy. So, the King's War minister, since 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 gun maker, 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 corrupt 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 ****** *** 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 pushes defenses were inadequate. So yeah, so he he tells the king. Like, 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 *** 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, kind of bad at reading people this guy talk about Huzzah. Yeah, obviously. The King says no, and Alfred is flummoxed as to why. So over in France, the Emperor Napoleon the third had been pretty psyched that Prussia and Austria were going to war. German unification terrified the French, and he'd been relieved at that because he thought they were gonna 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. The 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 Kings War Minister, a kind of unhinged advocate of brass cannons, to start demanding that pressure 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 ******* and he's like bummed because his guns killed their 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. Emperor Napoleon the third awarded crook the highest honor of the exhibition and a bunch of fancy French military awards. He started talking about buying from Trump and bulk and Alfred sent France a catalogue of his wares. The Emperor kept corrupts hopes hope hopes up for months, but his. Minerals were convinced that brass cannons were all that French France needed. The Emperor, who had written a book about the use of artillery, decided not to buy from corrupt after all, and gave him a terse rejection. Alfred sank into yet another depression. He sent the giant cannon cannon he'd bought brought to the exhibition to the King of Prussia, and he sent an identical gun to the Czar 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 the royal families to tour his factories. Turkey, Brazil, Belgium, and Russia all showered him with awards. None of this meant much to to Alfred. The only international acclaim he valued was, of course, money and industry. So, like, he's in this interesting situation because the Russian government is like constantly the actual military is constantly pushing back on buying more of his guns. But the king gets locked into an agreement with Alfred to where pressure won't buy weapons from any other company at the same time Krupp. It was like, like, and this is because Trump 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 they're 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 crap at this point is 10s 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. The Government of Prussia, and this is again the first time that happened, really armoto 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. 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. #1HE 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 #2 he was terrified of fire, so the entire building. Needed to be made from stone and #3. He was absolutely in love with the smell of ***** **** so the entire house had to be built so that it reeked of feces at all times. Beautiful. It's 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 that had. Like the counts of the number of rooms in this mansion varied by up to 100. Like nobody was quite sure because he had God, he liked to spy on people, so it had hundreds of secret passageways. And then behind the rooms that he could crawl through and watch people while they were in his house. God, people would just like wake up in the morning and he would have notes in their bedroom about their behavior the day before. Oh yeah, he's he rules. Uh, you gotta love Alfred. So, but I want to talk a little bit more about the horse in the making. Yeah, so from the arms of Krupp quote, he gave a lot of thought to this, this being how to get as much ********* smell into the house as possible. Then it came to him in a 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 dunghill. Cheese ******* dude loves *********. And it's funny because, like, damn, all these kings and Queens come to visit him and stay at his house and like, they all comment that, like, ******* smells like **** in here. What's wrong with this guy? And he's like, thank you, thank you. It does smell. And they can't do anything, but like, they can't not go because he's the guy with the gun. So you have right? It's it's 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 ****** 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 backed 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 autos like the Prime Minister. He's like basically the guy running the country for the king and auto decides that it 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 take it 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. Is basically the same like so for Bismarck. In this. He spent his whole life cobbling together this what what becomes Germany, and he sees war with France is 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 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 right, 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 crook cannons, and that turned out to be all that really mattered. The whole war came down to a siege in a city called Mets, and I'm going to write about, read about that from an article in World Crunch. That 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 holed up in the city's fortifications. Though which army had the same number of cannons. The bronze artillery of Napoleon, the 3rd's army, was no match for the range, accuracy, and durability of precious steel cannon some 193,000 French soldiers. Were killed to depressions 5740 casualties. After mess came the 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 ******* 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 One ends with the Treaty of Versailles is because the Germans humiliate the French here in 1870, sign a treaty and Versailles that leads to the creation of Germany. And ******* two generations later, the French want to do the same thing in Versailles when they beat Germany like that's that's why that all happens. It all starts here. And this is the first modern battle and the first modern death toll. Right before then, 193,000 was like an insane number of people to die in a 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, this tremendous death toll that had not been seen earlier in the same kind of time frame. It's just it's it's it's a ******* nightmare. And yeah, like it it's uh. This is like where the modern world is kind of born out of this battle, and it's born because of Krupp cannons, because there was 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. Yeah. Yeah. So. Krupp guns would get another chance to impress the world and kill a ******** 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, **** our Emperor and stuff, like, we'll, we'll fight the Germans, which is of course, like as well. It's pretty suicidal because Krupp has these, you know, we talk about these giant. Guns he's been building just to show off. Yeah, well, now they get used and they're not any use on a battlefield because they 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 5 miles away. And that had never been done before. So what you see with the Siege of Paris is a sneak peak 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 **** 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. Alright. Yeah. Damn it, not a legacy. Yeah, it's good stuff. 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 5 miles away? The products and services that support this podcast. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. 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With me, everything is just easier. And getting it done was easy too. You know, I went in, I had my consultation, they told me I was a good candidate and then I went back in couple of days later about it being about a boom. You know, my eyes were perfect. So LASIK Plus is a leader in laser vision correction in the United States. They have over 20 years in the industry and more than two million treatments performed. If you want to start your LASIK plus journey, you can get $1000 off when treated in September. That's 500 per eye. So visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free. Consultation now. We're back and we're talking about the siege of Paris. So again, as 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 it. That's a crime, Sir. But eventually they decided to do it. And yeah, I'm gonna read a quote from hate wins. Yeah, yeah, it always does. So I'm gonna find I'm gonna read a quote from a collection of eyewitness accounts from the Siege of Paris that were gathered by Salem College. Quote a Colonel Heitzler and his wife were giving breakfast at Ivran 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 Valda Grass Hospital, but it was such a human ruin that no individuality could be recognized. Oh my God, pressions are firing with 80 guns, some of them being 112 pounders ranging from 3 miles to and half three miles and 1/2 to 4 miles. So they're just killing anybody and everybody? Yeah, they're just showing they're dropping 112 pound explosive shells on a city, blindly shooting into it. Jesus, until people don't wanna 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 US 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 **** 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. That's sad. It's cool ****. It is cool ****. 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've been like the little bit of European wars we have, like a bunch of lines of guys shooting each other with ****** rifles and like, a couple of 100 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 ghastliness of those dead transcended anything I had ever seen or even dreamt of in the shuddering. Nightmare after my first battlefield, remember how they had been slain? Not with the nimble bullet of the needle gun that drills a minute hole through a man and leaves him undisguised 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. Huh? Yeah, it's the first modern, modern deaths. Wow, that's how everybody dies now. It's good stuff. Yeah? Yeah. It's ******* rules. So cities have 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 crupp guns. So people see this ******* slaughter instead of being like, you guys just murdered a bunch of civilians and broke all the laws of war. They're like, I gotta get some of those ******* cannons. I need some of that ****. Yeah, give me those. Give me those *************. Yeah. This guy's really good at making guns. Look at how many dead people there are in Paris. Wow. Yeah, it's ******* great. We suck. Humanity sucks. This is not one of our more optimistic about people episodes. It it's it sure isn't. At least government suck. And journalists. A lot of the time. Journalists. Yeah. Yeah. So from the arms of Krupp quote, 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 had discovered that it couldn't be fired without hitting French soil. In 1873, the corrupt 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 it sedan Mets in Paris. Those are all battles from 1870 were being read over the globe when Krupp wrote flattering letters to Lee, Hong, Chang, the Bismarck of Asia and sent him a model railroad. Lee responded by ordering 275 field guns, another 150 cannon to arm the Taku Fort guarding the approach to Tianjin, and a complete armament for 8 warships and gratitude. Alfred hung over the head of his bed, a portrait of Lee. Despite his fear of combustible combustible objects in the castle, worried if 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 Lee, Hong Chang didn't receive essence latest model which was being delivered to Saint Petersburg that winter. The Taku forts 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 ****** guns that explode sometimes to the Asians. They're not white. Damn. Yeah. He's a real ***** ** ****. Yep. Yeah. He's a terrible person. It's a real piece of *********. Sorry. Yeah. Can't. No, don't say that. He that's that's a compliment to help. Yeah, he would love to hear that. You tell him he's a piece of horse. He would say thank you. Yes, but to everyone else. Yeah, except for they have to pretend it to like it because they want his guns. Fair enough. Crap. 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. And indeed, yeah, as the 1870s rolled on, this thing was communism. So in 1870, when, like, I love that there's no, like, guilty conscious going on, it's like, no, no, it's just not worried about how his gun they're gonna 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 he starts flipping out about now he 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 minds that brought crup 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 crop. 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, healthcare, 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 he's the first company to do a pension is crowd. See if this was to be made into a movie. That's the only thing that they would. Yeah. That they would say about him and ignore all the weapons **** well, and we're 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 he, like really focuses on what the companies owe the firm, and he literally threatens his workers throughout the document. As in this passage, the full force of a of authority must be used to 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. Umm, which is yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, the more crap played with the idea of his general regulations, the more they turned into a corporate dictatorship. He decided 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 krupt should be the entire focus of a Crump employees life. To that end, he developed housing colonies for his employees. Each building named after a crup ancestor, he built a bread factory, a wine store, a butcher plant, and even a hotel. The city of Essen turned into an extension of Alfred Krupp's personal property. Wow. From his vantage 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 disapproved 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 the system would, quote, be useful for the prevention of socialistic. Nurse. Because you lose your whole life if you get fired now. Damn. So you won't go on strike. Kinda true today. Yeah. Thanks, Alfred. Yeah. Not not much different. He's a trailblazer. Not not like an Alfred right now. To help further prevent those errors, Crupp instituted a program of snooping. The first centralized workplace espionage program. Big Brother. Yeah. You talk about, like, the night early 19 late 1800s, early night. Like the 1890s through the 1920s. This is huge in the United States. The pinkertons. A big deal. Crepe is doing this in the early 1870s. He's like he is 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 wanna 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 ******* cool dude. Let's just go to ads and not think too much about any of this. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the build to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. 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If you want to start your LASIK plus journey, you can get $1000 off when treated in September. That's 500 per eye. So visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free. Consultation now. We're back. Ah, 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 the rules that Alfred puts in for his company and the the social like 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. O yeah. Wow, right? Yeah, it's it's it's fun. Now, obviously, even that is more problematic than it might sound, and I'm gonna quote from the arms of Krupp here. In 1911 the Reichs Workman Insurance Code was extended to all labour 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 the second declared an essence 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 the study of Bismarck, social reforms, and the slogan of the Fuhrer's Labour Front leader, Robert Leigh. 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. And because more complacent. Yeah, a little more complacent. And the Nazis recognize this and almost copy him word for word in some pet places, like, yeah. That's good stuff. It's good stuff. Feel like crap 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 inmate, like, his, like grandson, I guess, was an amazing Nazis oht. Yeah. OK, yeah. His grandson was a huge Nazi. Big, big, solid Nazi. Great. A solid Nazi. Did he inherit the ********* thing, or is that just. No, I think that was just Alfred. Yeah, yeah, it's a little. Peculiar. Still stuck on the genetic. Still stuck in the *********. Guys, it's weird. So crap himself. Never lived to see the rise of the Third Reich, but his descendants loved it, and there's no reason to think he wouldn't also have loved it. Yeah, he 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 counter revolution 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 ******* liberals. I wish somebody would start a counter revolution with, like, flying columns of young men ready to beat the **** out of socialists. Yeah, that's definitely what humanity needs as a solution to things. Yeah, yeah. When he's crying out for somebody with great gifts, he's 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 *********? Yeah, I mean, in a way he kind of did. He certainly was one of the people who made. Yeah, he he he was one of the people who made, you know, Hitler possible. Obviously, you know, you don't get a Hitler. We had 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, dissolute 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 cut questions of national policy. Issues of high policy require more time and knowledge than the Workman has at his command. You're too dumb to think about politics. Yeah, when the Social Democrats, yeah, he's not. 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 descent. 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 because they were kissing and ****. 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 100 years worth of raw materials to keep the company running. He threatened to sue employees who left corrupt for another company, and even attempted to have it made illegal for people to switch employers like. Oh my God, yeah. He's out of his damn mind by the time he's like in his 50s and 60s. I'm gonna quote from the arms of Krupp again here. Since he was providing his employees with home schools, hospitals, and food, he reasoned that their hours away from work belonged to him too. It is an astonishing fact that most of them agreed, or at any rate 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, so must every conscientious crop. 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 it's really bad. He's terrible. And a lot like Jeff Bezos, he's just opened homeless shelters for Amazon employees. So the continued success of the Social Democrats through 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, allied with the centrist party to try and block a landmark military appropriations bill that would have been 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 wanna blow up your own factory like is very true. Yeah, he is kind of Trumpy. Umm. 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 it might be. Putting that a little bit uh, 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 come 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 was 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 ******* 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. In Krupp history to date. At least 15 little wars broke out in violence involving countries he sold arms to. Sometimes his clients even fought each other. Yeah, yeah, and he loved this. Yeah. So the Russo Turkish war happens from 1877 to 1878, and Krupp had sold guns to both sides, and so he starts asking both sides. Their 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. Like, every time you hurt this guy. Yeah, boom it. Go boom on him. Yeah, he's a little bit. It's just a yeah, he he 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 gunner shot him with artillery shells, despite this display. Nobody bought a single one of his guns. He hatched 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. Krupt 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 ********* guy for a guy who breathed in nothing but industrial poisons and ***** **** his whole life. Yeah, maybe there's something to that ********* thing. Yeah, I am. He maybe he wasn't wrong. I'm gonna not try that, but let me know how that goes. Yeah, yeah, somebody else would have to try it. Yeah, for sure. Yep, Yep, Yep. So that's the story of the man who. Made-up everything else that happened in the 20th century possible. Damn. Good to know. Yeah. And the guy who helped invent, invent Germany. So him and Bertha did have a kid. Yeah. No, he had. 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 Umm, 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 **** 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 he's good. Just like a like a cussed ***** ** **** who was incapable of, 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 how much? Who killed? What a waste of being a smart person. Yeah, if he just made better ways for people to travel. Everybody. Yeah, yeah. Alfred crapped 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. Yeah, this is definitely a little bit more German history nerd. Uh. For our podcast, I should also state for the record that Alfred was pretty anti-Semitic, but also so was everyone at the time. Like, I I don't get the sense that, like, he was different from literally every other person in German and that. Right, right, right, right. Yeah. Like he, like, everybody's racist against Jewish people in Germany in the 1870s. You know, history has shown it's pretty easy to be an isometric. They were that racist. France and England and America too, like something about US and Russia, Turkey everywhere. But China's pretty good wasn't anti China. China was good about it. In fact, there was a there was a, I forget which city, but one of the coastal cities in China had like a huge Jewish population by the time World War 2 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 chain after that massacre, after like, the city was retaken trying to build a giant monument to the to the murdered Jews of that city because they felt bad about it. Because, yeah, there's that, yeah, there's that. But everybody else? Unbelievably racist against you people, but yeah. Crep is not like a trailblazer in his yeah, semitism, yeah, yeah, 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. OK, so, Allison, you got any plegables to plug? I mean, I will, Speaking of Jews, plug 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. Yeah, well, here we go. I'll give it to you if you want to listen to a mother daughter comedy called like Mother. That's 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 feel like that's a bad thing to check out. Cannons don't check out *********. Yeah, yeah. I mean, to be honest, I much prefer people have a lot of ********* than a lot of cannons. I mean, fair enough. And one point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What about cannons? But instead of, like, cannonballs, it's big ***** **** balls. Yeah, I'm surprised he didn't come up with that. Just fling ********* at the enemy to try to give them better ideas. Yeah, weirdo. What a ******* weirdo. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Want to say I don't know less? Listen to stuff you should know more. Join host Josh and Chuck on the podcast packed with fascinating discussions about science, history, pop culture, and more episodes. Dive into topics like was the lost, city of Atlantis Real? And how does pizza work? Say goodbye to I don't know, because after listening to stuff you should know. You will listen to stuff you should know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sisters of the Underground is a podcast about fearless Dominican women who stood up against the brutal dictator Kapal Trujillo. He needs to be stopped. We've been silent and complacent for far too long. I am Daniel Ramirez, and as a Dominicana myself, I am proud to be narrating this true story that is often left out of the history books through your husband, blood on his hands. Listen to sisters of the underground wherever you get your podcasts.