Perhaps it was his poor health alone that saved Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach from being accused and sentenced to death together with Hermann Göring, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Rudolf Hess, Julius Streicher, and other leading Nazis at the first and most famous of the Nuremberg trials in 1945 and 1946. On the Allied side, hardly anyone questioned the complicity of big business with Hitler. Some even looked upon the industrialists as the driving force within that alliance. From this point of view, it was quite natural to punish Krupp severely as the supposed symbol of the powerful armorers of the Ruhr.

By 1947-48, however, when Gustav Krupp's son Alfried and several leading managers of the firm stood trial (there were prosecutions against I.G. Farben and the Flick concern at the same time), the political atmosphere had changed dramatically. The increasing gravity of the Cold War had turned former enemies into new allies. Alfried Krupp and his colleagues were treated with leniency compared to the defendants of the first trials. One of the main reasons for this mildness was that in the meantime West German industrialists were once again urgently needed to build a common Western dam against the red tide from the East. An essential prerequisite to achieve this goal was the success of the European Recovery Program (ERP). Effective economic restoration of Western Europe, however, required a substantial degree of economic rehabilitation in the Western zones of Germany. But without private industry cooperation in this effort, U.S. Military Government and State Department officials had little confidence that they could win the battle.