By eight o’clock, he is piloting his tiny car through the gray, grubby, broken streets of the Ruhr metropolis, past a wildly jagged landscape etched by 275 Allied bomber raids, to the rubble and ruin surrounding a towering office building at 103 Altendorferstrasse, the headquarters of the world-famous Krupp works. Parking his Porsche before the building, he quickly strides inside, catches the open-faced cubicle of a nonstop rotating elevator, and is carried up to the third floor. As he moves toward his office, his eyes are introspective and worried. His face is furrowed beyond his forty-six years. His brown suit is undistinguished. To the busy employees who brush past him in the corridor, he looks like just another anonymous min or executive, rushing to reach his overcrowded desk on time. Passing him, few recognize him—yet all know and fear his name, depend upon him as serfs once depended upon feudal lords, and speak of him as one of the few hopes for a reborn and virile Fatherland.
