Harold James's adroit and concise study of the Krupp family and firm is a studiously undramatic treatment of frequently sensationalized subjects. After all, the enterprise long named after its unsuccessful founder, Friedrich Krupp (1787–1826), not only grew into the preeminent weapons-maker of the German Empire and later the Third Reich but also became the employer of some one hundred thousand forced laborers, plus approximately two thousand concentration camp inmates. Alfried Krupp, the firm's head in 1944–1945 and again from 1953 to 1967, joined the Schutzstaffel (SS) in 1931, even before Adolf Hitler had come to power. Alfried's father and predecessor, Gustav, who headed the National Association of German Industry in 1933, capitulated to the Nazi regime almost immediately, agreeing not only to contribute funds to the Nazi Party but also to dismiss any employees to whom party officials objected. The combination of the Krupps' implication in Nazi crimes with sexual scandals and unhappy marriages over several generations inspired both William Manchester's overwrought bestseller of 1964, The Arms of Krupp, and Luchino Visconti's famously eroticized cinematic family portrait, The Damned, in 1969.

James does not ignore the seamy sides of the Krupp firm and family histories, but his focus is on overarching themes that explain the company's endurance from its initial quarter century of unprofitability to its standing in 2010 (under the name ThyssenKrupp) as number 123 on the Fortune Global 500 list. He agrees that Krupp represents “Rhineland capitalism,” a particular way of doing business that is distinguished by export orientation, close ties to the state, commitment to the workforce, suspicion of banks and financiers, mistrust of competition, and concentration on specialized, high-value products. More specifically, he sees three broad and recurrent themes in the enterprise's history: “a mission that went beyond profitability” (4); a global market orientation, especially toward what nowadays are called “emerging markets”; and a constant tension between preserving family ownership and developing an adequate managerial system.

The author weaves these themes in and out of seven topical chapters. The first three—titled “Risk,” “Steel,” and “Science”—survey the successive leaderships of Friedrich, Alfried, and Friedrich Alfred Krupp. The next three chapters—“Diplomacy,” “Tradition,” and “Power and Deglobalization”—deal primarily with the leadership of the man who married into the line of succession, Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, until the transfer of power to his colorless and cold son Alfried during World War II, and that man's condemnation at Nuremberg in 1948. A final chapter, called “Reglobalization,” traces the postwar history of the firm and family under the direction of Alfried and his able general plenipotentiary, Berthold Beitz. This includes the transition from personal ownership of the firm to the creation of a foundation that cannot be sold or taken over. The foundation owns more than a quarter of the shares in ThyssenKrupp and has the permanent right to name three members of its supervisory board, thus discouraging would-be acquirers.

It is a well-told tale, studded with revelatory asides. That the shiny cap atop the Chrysler Building in New York City consists of Krupp's nonrusting steel was news to this reviewer, and probably will be to many New Yorkers as well. The characterization of the German economy after 1939 as “polycratically (dis)organized monopsony” (209) is as trenchant as it is unpronounceable. The demonstration that, by 1942, “foreign workers (at least in the case of males) became more expensive than their German counterparts” (220)—and that Krupp's managers knew this—reinforces the gathering consensus that the cruel labor policies of the wartime Third Reich arose primarily out of the shortage of German civilian labor, not the drive of corporations for profits. Companies accepted forced and slave workers because no other labor pool was available, not because they were relatively cheap, which was not always the case in the end. I noticed only one factual error: the Bosch who participated in drafting an industrialist's memorandum to dissuade Adolf Hitler from antisemitic actions in 1933 was Carl of IG Farben, not Robert of the eponymous electrical firm (191), although Hans Walz of the latter enterprise also took part.

In short, this well-written, reliable, highly informative book provides a solid, compact, and entertaining guide to a complex and rich—in both senses of the word—story. Both specialists and people new to the fields of German or business history will benefit from reading it.