German industrialist Friedrich Krupp was BOTD in 1854. Born in Essen, the son of steel manufacturer and business magnate Alfred Krupp, he inherited the family business in 1887 on his father’s death. He married Baroness Margarethe von Ende, with whom he had two daughters. As head of the Krupp empire, he shifted production to arms manufacturing, acquiring a shipbuilding company in 1896 which gave him control of warship production in Germany, and manufactured nickel steel, U-boats and the diesel engine. A good friend of Kaiser Wilhelm II, he also sat in the Reichstag. He travelled extensively through Turkey and Italy, collecting antiques to furnish his family villa, and spent several months of the year in Capri where he organised orgies with young Italian men. His reputation became so notorious that the Italian police banned him from Capri. Undeterred, Krupp relocated his sex parties to the Bristol Hotel in Berlin. In 1902, Italian newspapers began reporting on his sexual liaisons in Capri. Margarethe asked the Kaiser for assistance in crushing the rumours; he and Krupps responded by having her detained in an insane asylum. A damning article in the Socialist magazine Vorwärts finally outed him. With the Kaiser’s help, copies were seized and destroyed, but Krupps died a week later, probably by suicide, aged 48. His family inspired Luchino Visconti’s 1969 film Götterdämmerung (The Damned), starring Helmut Berger as a dissolute cross-dressing gay man.