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zeal launched him, after he had passed examinations with highest
honors, and had first proved his technical ability inside and outside of
Germany, on a quick ascent in a promising civil service career with the German
Reichsbahn. His change-over to industry, to the Krupp firm, is not to be
explained by the tasks he had carried out till then, nor was it caused by
financial or political considerations.
Only his technical talent is his
recommendation and the impulse to prove himself in a field completely new to
him.
2. After one year’s intensive initiation, Dr. Mueller took
over the management of the Artillery Construction Department (A.K.) in May 1936
and kept it until the collapse in 1945. To it, that is, the development of
arms, he devoted all his technical knowledge and his uncommon capacity for
work. Here lay the gravitational center of his activity, which made everything
else seem unimportant for him - marital ties and private life, striving for
honors and material gains, public appearance and political activity.
There were, for him, no general economic, no commercial and financial,
no military and tactical, but only technical problems. Insofar as he was
brought into contact with other questions transcending the development of
weapons, these contacts were marginal contacts and were connected with his
activities as a designer, as for instance in the case of the heavy ship turrets
where manufacture and development went alongside and where he had also to take
care of certain target dates.
In the firm he rose steadily, to become a
regular member of the board of directors in 1943. These promotions were not the
consequences of vain glorious ambition but were exclusively the result of his
personal qualities. His domain remained fundamentally the same. Only from April
to November 1943 was he charged with the management of the so-called machine
enterprises. He, however, was less concerned with the supervision of the
process of production but rather more with the organization of the resumption
of work interrupted by heavy bomb damage. Dr. Mueller soon realized that this
task kept him away too much from his real work as a developer of arms and after
only a few months he succeeded in having the management of the manufacturing
plants taken off his hands so that he could again devote himself exclusively to
his development work.
3. When Dr. Mueller joined Krupp in 1935 he was
at first disappointed. The development tasks set by the German Wehrmacht during
his one year's service under Ritter were accepted and started without him. When
he took over responsibility in 1936, only few new orders came in for the
Wehrmacht, orders which did not occupy him to the full. He, therefore, wanted
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