In 1902 Kaiser Wilhelm II travelled to Essen, the city where the company was and is still based, to lead the funeral procession for Friedrich Alfred Krupp, the late head of the firm. He had died, probably of a stroke, possibly through suicide, not long after the socialist paper Vorwärts accused him of using his wealth, in a "terrible picture of the influence of capitalism", to corrupt Italian peasants at gay orgies on the island of Capri.  

Hitler too made the pilgrimage to Essen. The family entertained him in the Villa Hügel, their grandiose, indeed rather grotesque, 269-room Italianate mansion built in the 1870s on a Wagnerian cliff overhanging the Ruhr as an advertisement for the firm's iron and steel.

Essen owed its rise to Krupp. When the firm was founded in 1811 Essen's population was about 4,000; by 1939, it was 660,000. But Krupp was also the source of Essen's wartime destruction: 1.5 million tons of explosive were dropped on the city, compared to around 45,000 tons dropped on London during the Blitz.