Daily Kennebec journal. [microfilm reel] (Augusta, Me.) 1870-1975, 1912-09-18
PROFIT FROM WAR.

A little German girl, scarcely out of
her teens, earns more than $S,000,000
year!
Her monthly income for three years
past has exceeded $666,000!
If paid by the week, as most girls
are, her pay envelope every Saturday
would contain $153,s46!
Sundays and holidays included, she
receives $21.97S every day in the year,
which is equivalent to $911.5S an hour,
or $1519 for every minute of her time,
whether she is awake or sleepingi
Every second licked off by the clock
means that Bertha Krupp Won Bohlen
richest woman in Germany, having
increased her fortune in three years
from 100000 to $70,000,0 900.
Although her recently acquired husr
band poses as the nominal head of the
great Krupp gun works at Essen. Ger
many, to Bertha Krupp belongs all the
credit for the enormous Increase in
capital and earnings of the plant dur
ing the last few years. None of her
army of 10000 employees knows more
about the delicate mechanism of mod
ern death dealing weapons than she
does, and no military expert of
Europe, or of any other great Power.
is better posted on gunmaking.
That is why "Fraulein Bertha" as
her townspeople still affeetionately
call her, is capable of earning $4,000
geo year. Before her marriage
every day saw her down at the fac
tory. good and early" and since that
time she has spent almost as many
hours in work as formerly.
II a visitor to the Krupp plant
should happen to see a slender young
woman, dressed in the thick yellow
overall of a farm girl, in one of the
workshops he probably would not
recognize her as the owner of the
greatest gun factory in the world. The
fierce heat that belches from the fur
naces. the binding glare of the glow
ing metal, and the deafening roar of
the great guns on the testing grounds
have no terrors for "Our Lady of the
Cannon" who thinks nothing of
spending a hot morning in the, work
shops following every stage of the
work there.
At the time of her marriage to
Baron Gustave Won Bohlen and Hal
bach she made her entire trousseau
with her own fingers, much to the dis
gust of the fashionable dressmakers
of all Germany.
Ever since her fathers death, when
he bequeathed his forty million dollar
plant to his seventeen year old daugh-
ter, Bertha Krupp has been queen,
socially and economically, of a city of
more than a quarter million people,
nearly every inhabitant of which is
dependent for livelihood on the
mammoth industry she controls.
BY the provision of her fathers will
the city of Essen virtually became
Bertha Krupp's private property. In
addition to thes 40 900 men employed in
her gun works others are toiling for
her in the numerous outside Krupp
holdings, and it is estimated that
the entire population of the
city is more or less dependent upon
her for living. taking into account
the families of the workers
For many years after Bertha's birth
it was a source of grief to her father
that he had no son to inherit his vast
fortune and take charge of the inn
nIense industry he had developed.
But by the time his eldest daughter
was Is years old he had completely
changed his mind
Bertha has the brain of man."
said he, and my son, il | had one,
might not be SO steady as ! know she
will be-"