Hugo Boss, Hitler's tailor: Luxury fashion house once designed Nazi uniforms using forced labor
Over seven decades after the fall of the Nazis, we still talk of the atrocities it meted out against the Jews and ethnic minorities and how it wreaked havoc upon the whole world with an evil mastermind like Hitler as its leader. At the time of its imminence, however, the Third Reich wasn't viewed as it is today. While it rose to power as the country's governing body, many people changed their political faith. In fact, it wasn't just limited to the people. Even large German corporations of the time climbed the ladder of success because of their business connections with the Nazis, both before and after World War II.
While some of these businesses produced products that helped carry out the Holocaust, other companies used concentration camp inmates for slave labor, to up production with no variable cost. Some businesses were either controlled or created by the Nazis and solely manufactured products to serve Nazi troops and the population during the war. Either way, some of these businesses that had close links with the Nazis are still minting a fortune today. Among the prominent companies known to have Nazi ties in its corporate past, is the billion-dollar German fashion retailer, Hugo Boss.
In 1997, per a New York Times report, a spokeswoman for Hugo Boss AG, confirmed that the clothing manufacturer designed uniforms for the Nazis. The company only became aware of its supposed Nazi affiliations after the name of its late founder Hugo Ferdinand Boss was etched on a list of dormant Swiss Bank accounts, that the investment bank had released earlier that year. Boss started his eponymous label at the age of 33 in the Swabian town of Metzingen, Germany in 1931, prior to the Nazi party's rise as the governing body of the country. Even before setting up an office for his fashion brand, which was then a family-run business, he had already worked with a number of Nazis and produced police and postal uniforms since 1923 in a factory that he had purchased.
But it was in 1931 that Boss became a member of the party and went from being a clothing retailer for Nazi clients to a Nazi himself. The Nazis outsourced contracts to many clothing companies to produce the black uniforms of the Schutzstaffel (SS) units, the brown shirts worn by the Sturmabteilung (SA) parliamentary wing and the black and brown uniforms of Hitler Youth. Two years after he joined the Nazi party, Boss dedicated his company to producing Nazi uniforms, particularly the brown, until the end of the war. However, the brand never designed the classic black SS uniforms, which are often attributed to it.
Later on, Boss became a sponsoring member for the parliamentary wing and made monthly donations to the organization, which gained him a lot of favor from the Nazi leadership. By the 1940s, Hugo Boss was raking it in with 1,000,000 Reichsmarks, compared to 200,000 Reichmarks in 1936. This was also around the time when the company brought forced labor from Poland and France to increase factory output, according to Profil, an Austrian newsweekly. It reportedly incorporated around 140 people from concentration camps and another 40 French prisoners of war as slave labor in its factories. Many of these people were worked unto death or eventually sent back to Auschwitz of Buchenwald, where they were taken to gas chambers and killed.
In 1938, when Germany began an intensive militarization process, Hugo Boss produced new uniforms for the Nazi army. Post-war Boss was 'de-nazified' and deemed an 'activist' and a 'supporter and beneficiary of National Socialism' for which he was fined 100,000 Reichsmarks and stripped of his right to own a company. After his death in 1948 due to a tooth abscess, the company reverted to its original production operations in making police and postal uniforms under his son-in-law, Eugen Holy's ownership. While the company first made men's suits in the 1950s, it did not center exclusively on men's fashion until the 1970s.
Today, Hugo Boss is a luxury menswear brand retailing high-end clothing and accessories, but still bears the stains of its Nazi association in its legacy. In 1999, the company announced that it would contribute to a fund to compensate the former forced laborers.
In September 2011, the company issued a formal apology for mistreating forced laborers during World War II, when it manufactured Nazi clothing. The apology came with the brand's commissioned publication of a new biographical account of the company, detailing its operations during the Nazi regime.