| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant history,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Arms of Krupp (Mass Market Paperback)
How DARE they let this book go out of print! This is one of the most brilliant histories of recent years, a classic to go along with Bill Shirer's "Rise and fall of the Third Reich" and Barbara Tuchman's "August 1914"/"The guns of August", to which it is an excellent companion. It captures both eras and characters wonderfully well. ABove all, Manchester is a passionate historian. No academic distance for hîm. The words burn with anger at the treatment of the slave workers of the Third Reich - and their murdered offspring, to whom the book is dedicated. Long it may be but it bears rereading, because nobody ought to forget this stuff.
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent, but lengthy, portrait of an industrial dynasty,
By
This review is from: The Arms of Krupp 1587-1968 (Hardcover)
This is an excellent and erudite study of the Krupp family from the first Krupp in the 16th century to the last in the 1960s. A brilliantly researched and marvelously told story of a family whose fortunes mirrored the rise and fall of Germany from 1850 onwards. Krupp armaments played an important role in the defeat of France under Napoleon III and in the arming of the Second Reich leading to World War One. Their role in the Third Reich is examined minutely and it is quite clear that the company was vitally important in rearming Germany after Versailles and by supporting Hitler from an early stage played an odious part in the Wermacht's wars of conquest. There is great deal of detail of the company's disgusting role in the maintenance of its own concentration camps and the firm's use of slave labor and its consequent appalling brutality. Despite being convicted at Nuremberg, Alfried Krupp spent only a few years in prison (when others who were arguably guilty of less heinous crimes were hanged) but was released soon after imprisonment to help provide steel to and to bolster the economy of Western Europe in response to the Communist threat. From there he regained his empire only to loose it when the company went bust. Manchester is very good at showing how many Germans and others in the West chose to whiten Alfried's guilt by ignoring the Nuremberg record and by feeding misinformation.My only complaints about the book are, firstly, that it is inordinately long. I think the book could have been at least 100-200 pp shorter. I really did wonder whether I was ever going to get through it. There are many occasions when he spends a great deal of time comparing, say Alfried's actions to those of his great grandfather Alfred - I found this a little wearing, especially since we can do that ourselves by looking back in the book. On the other hand the scholarly accumulation of fact by Manchester is very impressive and part of the power of the book. Secondly, having just said this about the excessive length, I really did feel that I missed having more technical information about the products that Krupp made. For example, Manchester talks about the howitzers that bombarded Paris in 1870, but the information about them is very hazy and the picture in the book of the 1918 Paris gun is not of the Paris gun at all (more a large railcar mounted naval weapon). Big Bertha's are covered, but I for one wanted to know more about them. The picture again is very uninformative (in fact it may not be one of them at all). There is talk of 88's, Panzers and Panthers, but we never see them or really get to grips with what was so feared about them. I think it is immediately obvious from reading the book that Manchester, although an exceptional historian, journalist and writer, is not an engineer and this is a shame bearing in mind the legendary nature of many of Krupp's products. An appendix of Krupp's most famous products would have been useful. Basically though I would recommend this book to all who have a more than a casual interest in European history, but just be warned this is not something undertaken too lightly.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful History Of Germany's Foremost Arms Maker,
By Barron Laycock "Labradorman" (Temple, New Hampshire United States) - See all my reviews (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: The Arms of Krupp 1587-1968 (Hardcover)
"The Arms Of Krupp" is the incredible biography of a powerful and incredibly rich and powerful family that was central in the advent and progress of European history for the more than four hundred years they presided as an almost imperial force within the boundaries of what is present-ay Germany. Certainly no other non-royal dynasty engenders such controversy and hotly expressed differences in opinion than does the multiple generations of this critically based family so critical to the development and technological capabilities of the German war machine. Of course, no one could do a better job at providing a definitive historical biography of the Krupp family than William Manchester. This is truly a magnificent book, a spellbinding story splendidly told by a master of English prose, rendered in a flawless, comprehensive, and objective treatment of this fascinating, often outrageous, and sometime imperious string of Krupp family member who ignited the wars raging in Europe in terms of their ability to provide the motherland with such complex, ingenious, and technically superior weapons of war. This is, in fact, considered a masterwork of history, an eminently readable and elegantly stylish work by Manchester, a master of the trade. Manchester, a retired history professor at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, is widely regarded as one of this country's preeminent biographers and historian. The Krupp dynasty was extinguished in 1967, when the last surviving family member passed away. With his death the legacy of a four hundred year span of contribution to the European armaments industry came to an end, and so brought to a conclusion a tradition spanning wars and quite profoundly influencing outcomes of European history for centuries. The Krupp Arms conglomerate was technologically innovative, devising new weapons such as a superior cannon to an anti-air vehicle weapon designed to counter the reconnaissance capabilities of aerial observation balloons to exotic and much more capable submarines, which they then built for over four decades. In so doing, they became fabulously rich, and rose to become extremely influential and exceedingly conservative voices within the realm of German political circles. No German leader could hope to marshal the resources or the weapons of war necessary to mount a military campaign without first gaining the trust, confidence and support of the Krupp family, which then cleverly and cynically manipulated this influence to vastly enrich themselves. During World War One, their cannons helped to flatten the French city of Verdun, and at one point succeeded in lobbing projectiles into Paris from as distant a location as some eighty miles away, an unheard-of innovation at the time. Aiding the Third Reich in its secret rearmament effort after the end of the First Word War, they provided a much advanced tank design that eventuated in the Panzer tank, used subsequently so successfully in Hitler's blitzkrieg through France in the summer of 1940. They were quite influential within the German society as well, having armed the forces of Kaiser Wilhelm for battle before World War One, and then surreptitiously backed Hitler financially in the so-called terror-campaign" of 1933. Incredibly, the Krupps participated in the war crimes of the Third Reich, even controlling and operating more than 130 concentration camps during the war. Afterwards, they help to rebuild Europe in the eventual development of the European Common Market. This is a truly fascinating book written with all of the usual style and substance one come s to expect of William Manchester, and it is certainly a book I can highly recommend to anyone with an interest in European history. Enjoy!
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
