The Controversial Legacy of Hugo Boss: From Tailor to Nazi Collaborator

Headline: Hugo Boss got rich from Nazi uniforms

The history of Hugo Boss has been in the public eye several times over the years. The fact that Volkswagen, Siemens and BMW collaborated with the Nazi regime before and during the Second World War is well known and not surprising. Less well known are the names Nestlé, Kodak and Hugo Boss.

In fact, before Hugo Boss AG became known for its classic men’s suits and flashy ties, it made uniforms for the Nazis. The business was so big that during the Second World War, Boss also employed 140 forced labourers from Poland and Ukraine, most of them women, and 40 French prisoners of war.

The luxury fashion house, which has been disconnected from the Boss family for many years, only found out about its founder’s Nazi past in 1997, when Hugo Boss’s name appeared on a list of inactive accounts published by Swiss bankers.

“Of course my father belonged to the Nazi party,” Siegfried Boss, Hugo Boss’s then 83-year-old son, said in 1997 in response to the criticism. “Who wasn’t a member then? The whole industry worked for the firer and the Nazis.”

In 1999, James Brown, the British editor of GQ, was fired for including a Nazi in a list of the best-dressed people of the 20th century. He particularly praised the dashing style of Nazi Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, describing him as an icon of “Nazi chic”. The ensuing controversy forced him to leave the magazine.

There is a general rule in fashion that you don’t touch the Holocaust or Hitler if you don’t want to offend. However, there have always been links between fashion and Nazism, even if this seems bizarre and almost unbelievable at first sight.

But the Nazis not only understood the power of clothes, from iconic uniforms to haute couture, they also appreciated the business side of them.

The removal of Jews from the fashion industry and from the clothing industry as a whole was not an accidental by-product of anti-Semitism. It was the goal. A goal to be achieved through blackmail, threats, sanctions, boycotts and forced bankruptcies. Jews had their department stores and weaving mills confiscated, as well as rolls of cloth and sewing machines. The textile trade was an important part of the German economy, and the Nazis wanted all the profits for themselves, using the proceeds of their looting to finance military conflicts.

Hitler’s Fashion Office

One of the more surprising aspects of Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 was the creation of the German Fashion Institute. Known as the Deutsches Modeamt, it was a reflection of Nazi attempts to control all aspects of women’s lives, including what they wore. The Fashion Institute was tasked with transforming the nature and character of the German woman.

Hitler was not exactly a fashion enthusiast. Although he supervised the uniform for the Bund Deutsche Mädel – the Federation of German Girls, his attitude to female adornment was generally negative. He hated make-up – often remarking that lipstick was made up of animal waste – and disapproved of hair dye. Perfume disgusted him, although he bowed to Eva Braun‘s enthusiasm for it, and smoking was repulsive to him.

The ideal woman also did not pluck her eyebrows or paint her nails. Wearing fur was also discouraged, as it involved killing animals, which Firer, who was a vegetarian, found deplorable. The politically incorrect wearing of furs was particularly painful for women of high society, who rarely went out in the cold Berlin winters without a piece of fox, mink or marten around their necks. Trousers were also forbidden because they were unfeminine. Nevertheless, Hitler showed characteristic ambivalence about fashion when he declared that ‘Berlin women must become the best dressed in Europe’.

The German Fashion Institute existed essentially to bring fascism into fashion. Women were to wear only clothes made by German designers and made of German materials. German, of course, meant Aryan, which excluded the vast majority of existing textile merchants and designers from high society. An organisation called the Association of Aryan Clothing Manufacturers quickly emerged and sewed its own label on the clothes, which ensured that they were only touched by Aryan hands.

The image promoted by the Institute celebrated tradition, so that dirndls and Tyrolean jackets were very popular. Wearing a tracht, a traditional folk costume with a rural inspiration, became völkisch, an expression of national awareness.

Even more important than this, however, was Hitler’s desire to wipe out French influence in the German fashion industry. He hated Parisian fashion, mainly because it was French, but also because the styles introduced by designers such as Coco Chanel promoted an unnaturally slender silhouette. He felt that French fashion, which aimed for slim hips and boyish bodies, created a type of liberated femininity that did not fit the German woman and her role in society – to be ‘strong, sporty, a young wife and mother’.

Wide-hipped skirts were much more suited to the full-hipped figure that could produce more children for the Reich.

The controversial Magda Goebbels

One of the greatest ironies of the German Fashion Institute, and one of the examples of perverse and bizarre fashion policy, was the choice of Magda Goebbels, wife of the Minister of Propaganda, as honorary president of the office. Like many other aspects of the Third Reich, her participation was fraught with contradictions.

It would be hard to imagine anyone less suited to lead such a reactionary organisation. Magda Goebbels, the unofficial First Lady of the Reich, loved French fashion. She was renowned for her love of fashion, dressing up several times a day, putting on Elizabeth Arden make-up, chain-smoking and wearing handmade Ferragamo shoes.

Her favourite designers, Paul Kuhnen, Richard Goetz and Fritz Grünfeld, were Jewish. She wore their creations without restraint, even though the Nazis were obsessively trying to erase Jews from the fashion world. Other high-ranking Nazi women had similar tastes. Emmy Göring, married to Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, wore ostentatious luxury, even though she claimed to have no idea of the origins of her possessions. Hitler’s mistress Eva Braun loved fashion and in the last days before her suicide and Germany’s surrender, even had her wedding dress delivered across burning Berlin, which she then wore with Ferragamo shoes.

By collaborating with the Third Reich regime, fashion brands made a lot of money and actually built their empires. These histories of some prestigious brands have been pushed into the background, but they remain undeniably part of the story of their links with the Nazi regime. Balenciaga, renowned as a fashion designer of uncompromising standards, was famous for making dresses for the wives of Nazi generals. Coco Chanel is said to have made a considerable fortune during the war at the expense of the Nazis, and to have received their patronage because of her lover, a German officer.

Some relationships were even more mysterious. In Nazi Germany, the violent paramilitary group, the SA (Sturmabteilung, meaning “assault squad”), which Adolf Hitler set up in the 1920s, was crucial to his rise to power. Known as the ‘Brownshirts’, SA members became prominent icons of terror and intimidation.

And who provided the SA with the shirts? One of Hugo Boss’s first big orders was to supply brown shirts to the Nazi Party. In the 1930s and 1940s, they made and sold Nazi uniforms made with the forced labour of captured Jews (mostly women) from Poland and Ukraine. Many of the forced labourers died or were later sent to concentration camps.

Hugo Boss’s humble beginnings

Hugo Ferdinand Boss was born on 8 July 1885, the fifth and youngest child of Heinrich Boss and his wife Luise, who ran a lingerie and linen shop in the small town of Metzingen in south-western Germany. At the time of Hugo’s birth, Metzingen was widely known for its thriving textile industry, which was the result of the Industrial Revolution in the area.

The family business had given Hugo an interest in fashion and clothing even as a child, and he completed a three-year apprenticeship as a tailor when he was still a teenager, albeit without much ambition. He began his career in 1902 in a weaving mill in Metzingen, where he gained his first experience in the garment industry.

At the age of 18, he was conscripted into the army to serve a compulsory two-year military service. After his discharge in 1905, Hugo took a job as a salesman in a textile shop in the town of Konstanz, near the Swiss border, about 150 kilometres south of where he grew up, but in 1908, at the tender age of 23, he returned to Metzingen and took over his parents’ shop.

He was appointed heir to the family business, as only two of Heinrich and Luise’s five children, Hugo and his sister, survived. In the same year he married Anna Katharina Freysinger and they had a daughter, Gertrud, and in 1914 a son, Siegfried.

When the First World War broke out, Hugo, who had been a German nationalist from a young age, joined the German Imperial Army and fought at the front as a corporal between 1914 and 1918. The defeat in the war was a devastating blow for Germany and a great personal disappointment for Hugo, who returned to Metzingen after the war, where he continued to run his parents’ shop.

In 1922, Hugo Boss registered his manufactory shop in Metzingen as a trade. In 1923, he set up his own clothing company, Hugo Boss AG, and switched from sales to production. The following year, with the financial support of two other Metzingen businessmen, he opened a tailoring workshop. This small business initially specialised in the production of shirts and underwear. Later, the production of workwear and professional clothing was to become the young entrepreneur’s first successful venture. Boss’s manufactory employed around 33 seamstresses, who made all the clothes by hand.

The first crisis came in 1926. Germany was increasingly confronted with an unfavourable socio-economic climate, which was more or less a consequence of Germany’s defeat in the First World War and the failed economic policies of the Weimar Republic. Germany, whose economy was heavily dependent on investment from the United States, suffered more than any other country in Europe.

Like almost all entrepreneurs in Metzingen at the time, Hugo Boss registered short-time working for its employees, who also took pay cuts in order to keep their jobs. The world economic crisis following the crash of the New York Stock Exchange in 1929 caused Boss’s business to decline more and more. His manufactory concentrated on regional costumes, hunting outfits and leather jackets. At this time, Eugen Holy, Boss’s very capable son-in-law, joined the company in a managerial position, but the crisis took its toll.

By the end of the 1920s, the Hugo Boss AG clothing factory was close to bankruptcy. The workforce was reduced to 22 employees and freelancers, and finally, after long and difficult negotiations, Boss reached a settlement with his creditors, who left him with six sewing machines to start afresh. Nevertheless, he was determined to make a success of his business and continued to work hard and with dedication.

Something had to change and it seemed that the most likely agent of positive change would be the Nazi Party, led since 1921 by Adolf Hitler. His speeches succeeded in convincing many Germans, including Hugo Boss, who joined the party in April 1931.

Boss’s links with Nazism

The National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) had an extreme fascist and anti-democratic orientation. It was set up to turn workers away from communism and towards “völkisch” nationalism. Initially, Nazi political strategy focused on rhetoric against big business, the bourgeoisie and capitalism. However, in order to win the support of industrialists, the NSDAP later toned down its ideology and in the 1930s the party focused on anti-Semitic and anti-Marxist themes.

Years later, Hugo Boss stated at a hearing in the post-war denazification proceedings that he had been attracted to the NSDAP because of its promise to put an end to the unemployment that plagued the country. He later added to his argument by admitting that he had joined the party for tactical reasons and economic pressures, as he would never have received the contracts that saved his business if he had not been a member.

While this may have been true, Hugo shared the ideals of the Nazi Party and, according to the denazification questionnaire, was also a Fördernde Mitglieder (FM), a supporting member of the SS. The SS was the only branch of the NSDAP that could employ so-called “FMs”. They supported the SS financially, but did not swear an oath to Hitler and were not subject to the SS’s internal orders.

There is no information on the period and extent of the financial support that Boss, as a supporting member of the SS, gave to this paramilitary organisation. The NSDAP explicitly encouraged its members to leave the Church from 1937 onwards, and the state no longer supported church festivals during the Nazi era.

Although there is no more precise information, Boss’s resignation from the Church is an indication that his membership of the party was based on political convictions. Despite his high economic and social position in the NSDAP, Hugo Boss was not politically active and held no prominent office or position in the party.

The NSDAP defined itself as a “workers’ party” and was primarily concerned with protecting the needs of the middle class.

From the mid-1930s at the latest, Boss had become so well established socially, thanks to his membership of numerous local clubs, his passion for hunting and the expansion of his business, that he had risen from a small artisan to the petty bourgeois upper class. Even if there is no evidence that he took part in the anti-Semitic agitation against Jewish shops and department stores (which would have been likely given his social profile), he did take part in everyday exclusion, since after 1933 he apparently distanced himself from Adolf Herold, a Jewish friend and hunting companion from Metzingen, who had supported Boss financially at the start of his career.

Hugo Boss was also a member of the National Socialist Association for People’s Welfare (NSV), a social organisation which provided social services not on the basis of need, but in accordance with the racial-hygiene criteria of Nazi ideology.

Aware of the advantages of networking, he joined many other organisations that were linked to the Nazis, because through these contacts he gained even more clients among important people.

Hugo Boss and clothing production in the Third Reich

The textile industry suffered most from the National Socialist policy of autarky, the complete self-sufficiency of the state. During the Second World War, clothing production in Germany generally declined, while the production of uniforms and workwear increased accordingly. These were, in fact, the only products for which it was possible to avoid general restrictions.

Import (e.g. cotton) and export bans, quotas on raw materials, job cuts and plant closures in favour of arms factories in the metallurgical sector affected mainly companies in the textile sector. However, Hugo Boss AG, like other textile companies producing ‘war-relevant’ products, was in a special position which not only protected it from the difficulties faced by the textile sector as a whole from 1933 onwards, but even allowed it to expand.

Only acceptable companies were granted the coveted licence by the Reichszeugmeisterei, the state material control office of Nazi Germany. Hugo Boss AG was one of them. The friendship with the Nazis led to the first major orders for Boss, and with the orders came benefits. These included the production of a large batch of shirts for the Munich textile distributor Rudolf Born, who supplied clothing for the National Socialist Party.

Although Hugo Boss was probably unaware of the purpose of the shirts, in the mid-1930s he advertised his company as a “supplier of party equipment since 1924” (in reality since 1928). His future was thus sealed and he no longer had to worry about the future of the company.

Former seamstress Edith Poller recalls that in 1938 the company received large orders for military uniforms. The Metzingen tailor finally succeeded. By 1942, the company’s annual turnover had risen steadily, reaching a peak of just over one million reichsmarks.

As with other tailors and the approximately 15,000 companies in Germany, Hugo Boss AG’s policy was largely determined by the Nazi regime. According to witnesses from the time, during the Second World War the company mainly produced uniforms for the German army, the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS, as well as for the Hitler Youth and for postal and railway workers.

Overall, Hugo Boss expanded considerably during the Third Reich, both in terms of the number of employees and the scale of production, although it never became a large corporation. In 1925 it employed 33 people, but by 1944 this had increased to a total of 324. In 1938, Boss expanded the company’s premises and bought a factory building from the A. Gänsslen Jr. leather and glove factory in Metzingen, where it moved its production. In addition, the company opened a production branch in Hülben in 1941, and Hugo Boss also had a branch (probably a warehouse for raw materials or goods) in Tischardt.

Despite the company’s expansion, there is no indication that Boss played any leading role in the sector, but he did, however, gain an important position in the textile industry. Rumours that Hugo Boss designed uniforms for the Nazis and was even Hitler’s tailor have circulated in the press for years, both inside and outside Germany. But available sources prove that Boss’s company was not involved in the design of the uniforms – the Nazi leaders had their own tailors in Berlin.

Hugo’s commitment to National Socialism was evident, as he still had a picture of him and Firer at the Obersalzberg in 1945 hanging in his apartment, even during the denazification. But to describe him as Hitler’s tailor is an exaggeration and one of the biggest myths, as Hitler’s servants claimed that all of Firer’s clothes were bought in prestigious shops in Munich and Berlin.

Hugo Boss was only one of many suppliers of uniforms to the Nazi regime, not a leading manufacturer. Like other textile entrepreneurs, Boss made the infamous black uniforms of the SS from patterns designed and sent to him in Berlin by fashion designers who were members of the organisation, and some of the suggestions were made by Hitler himself.

Forced labour in National Socialism

After the mobilisation of men into the large German army, the country was faced with a shortage of labour for the war industry. From March 1942, Fritz Sauckel, the leading Nazi official and General Commissioner for the Distribution of Manpower, met the growing demand for labour with people from the occupied territories. The number of volunteers was insufficient and within a few months forced civilian labour was introduced.

By the end of the war, it is estimated that some eight million civilians in Germany and Austria were working against their will for the Reich’s industries, meaning that one in five workers was a foreigner. Almost six million were deported as civilian forced labourers, just under two million worked as prisoners of war, and some 700,000 were prisoners in concentration camps, subject to the SS, who were brutalised to death in accordance with the Nazi commandment of “Extermination by labour”. Only about 200,000 workers came to work in German factories voluntarily.

Forced labourers were classified by decree according to racial ideology. According to the Nazis, the French and the Dutch were only opponents of the Reich in the war, while the workers from the East, the so-called Ostarbeiter, were far more despicable “sub-humans”. While the forced labourers from the West received the same wages as their German counterparts, the “Eastern workers” had to pay various taxes and levies in addition to deductions from their wages for housing and food. They worked an average of 12 hours a day, six days a week, and received wages 50 to 85 per cent lower than German workers. The legally guaranteed leave for forced labourers from the East was interrupted several times until it was completely abolished in 1942.

The “eastern workers” received inferior food, medical care and housing. Forced labourers from France, Belgium and the Netherlands were free to move around and visit restaurants and cinemas, while forced labourers from Poland, Ukraine and other eastern countries were subject to further restrictions.

Under the so-called Göring Decree, all Polish forced labourers were required to wear a “P” pinned to their clothes from March 1940, while those from the other occupied eastern countries wore the “OST” label. They were not allowed to go to churches, restaurants or cinemas. “Eastern workers” were also banned from public transport or cycling. They were not allowed to leave their assigned place of residence, were taken to work in convoys and were subject to a curfew in the evening.

Many Ostarbeiter died when Allied bombing raids targeted the factories where they worked, and the German authorities did not allow them to enter the bomb shelters.

All private contact between Germans and Poles was strictly forbidden. Intimate relations often ended with the “Eastern women workers” being imprisoned in concentration camps and the “Eastern” men often facing the death penalty.

Rape of Ostarbajter women was extremely common, and pregnant forced labourers were sent back to their homeland, but forced sterilisations and abortions were also carried out. A staggering 80% of rapes took place on farms where very young Polish girls worked. In the last year of the war, the number of births among forced labourers in the German Reich rose sharply. Most of the newborn babies were secretly euthanised in special Nazi birthing centres for foreign women workers because of so-called racial contamination.

According to surviving records, more than 20 babies were born to forced labourers in Reutlingen, a town near Metzingen, in 1944. No written information on the medical care of pregnant forced labourers survives for Metzingen; it is documented only that in January 1945 the district administrator planned to set up “maternity homes” to accommodate forced labourers.

By 1944, most of the new forced labourers were under 16 years of age. In November 1943, the age limit was lowered to 10 years.

An indelible stain on the company’s reputation

Between 1939 and 1945, Metzingen employed more than 1 200 forced labourers. They were deported or conscripted from the Baltic States, Belgium, France, Italy, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. During the Nazi era, Hugo Boss employed between 30 and 40 prisoners of war and around 150 forced labourers. The average age of the slave workers employed by Hugo Boss – the proportion of women was over 75% – was between 20 and 25 years.

As the demand for military uniforms continued to increase, the company began to suffer from a severe shortage of workers. Hugo Boss did not hesitate to use forced labourers from abroad, especially from Poland, where the Nazis carried out regular raids to deport forced labourers to the German Reich. It is not known when the first forced labourers arrived in the company of the industrialist Boss and under what circumstances they came to Metzingen.

According to sources, in the spring of 1940 Hugo Boss sent his employee Eberhard to Poland, who personally selected 20 people – four men and 16 women – and then deported them by train to Boss’s factory, accompanied by the police, for forced labour. It is also known that Boss, together with eighteen other industrial companies, had a secure labour camp built in Metzingen for 300 forced labourers, with five living quarters, one kitchen and one bathroom.

Despite the “washing barracks” and the possibility of using the toilets at the Hindenburg school one day a week, the hygiene conditions were poor, as evidenced by reports of ear infections and a life-threatening form of tuberculosis. Some of Boss’s male and female workers lived on the factory premises and helped in his household.

There is no reliable information on the diet of the forced labourers in Metzingen and at Hugo Boss. There is only evidence that the forced labourers themselves planted vegetables in the camp area. When the food situation deteriorated at the end of the war, Hugo Boss intervened with the camp director in early 1944 to feed the Polish women who worked for him in its factory canteen instead of in the labour camp for eastern workers.

The minutes of the meeting at that time state that the Boss stressed that this measure was not intended to achieve any special care for the Polish women, but only to ensure their work performance, since the food they were receiving in the camp was not sufficient for them to perform adequately. Hugo later pointed out in the denazification proceedings that he had stood up for the women workers because, in his opinion, the camp food was “inhuman filth” which no human being could work with.

There are conflicting accounts of how the workers were treated by the management. While several witnesses expressed a relatively positive opinion of Hugo Boss as an individual, there were Nazi Party loyalists in senior positions in the company who treated the forced labourers extremely harshly and threatened them with concentration camps, which points to abuses and casts a huge stain on the company’s reputation.

Hugo Boss may not have been personally involved in these incidents, but he took no action to stop them.

“Polish pigs, that’s what they called us”, recalls former forced labourer Maria Klima of Boss’s bosses. Maria was 14 years old when she was deported in 1943. The working days were long in the sewing shop, where today customers rush around the creaking floorboards in the factory outlet looking for bargains. From six in the morning to six in the evening, twelve hours. She was housed in a forced labour camp where the food supply was very poor. One day she was punched in the face because she picked up an apple from the ground and wanted to eat it.

In 1941, when Josefa Gisterek was deported from her hometown of Oświęcim in Poland to Metzingen, where she was forced to work as a seamstress in Hugo Boss’s company, she was 20 years old. She and her younger sister Anna, who had been taken against her will to the Boss factory the year before before she turned 15, were staying with Maria Speidel, whose husband had gone to war as a soldier and who, as a Catholic, was committed to Christian charity.

Anna and Josefa sewed uniforms for the Wehrmacht day after day, and after a day’s work in the factory they helped Maria Speidel on the farm. Anna also occasionally filled in for one of the maids in the Boss household when they fell ill.

In December 1941, the father wrote to his daughters to tell them that their mother was in hospital and to ask for their help in caring for the other eight children. Josefa asked her employer for leave, but he refused her request because she had worked too short a time at the company. She decided to flee and headed back to Poland, crossing the whole of Germany.

A year and a half later, in March 1943, Josefa Gisterek was back in Metzingen, according to a registration form from the city archives. What happened in the meantime is still not entirely clear.

“The Gestapo arrested my sister at our parents’ house. She was then imprisoned in several concentration camps. She never spoke about the names of the camps”, says Anna Gisterek, now Wocka. “She was subjected to severe violence there and was often beaten on the head.”

What Josefa had to endure is hard to understand today. Her trace was lost in the Gestapo prison in Myslowice. In the neighbouring Auschwitz concentration camp, a large part of the files on the women prisoners were destroyed. The vast majority of Gestapo files were also destroyed before the end of the war, so the camps in which Josefa Gisterek was imprisoned cannot be definitively reconstructed.

When Hugo Boss, through his connections in the Nationalist Party, discovered a year and a half later which concentration camp Josefa was in, he arranged for her to be returned, because he wanted her to be an example of what happens to escaped women workers.

“When they brought her back to Metzingen, she looked very bad,” says her sister Anna. The formerly vivacious young woman was an exhausted, sad and despairing person on her return, with severe head injuries, who confided her thoughts only to her diary.

The manager at the Boss factory ignored the injuries she had suffered in the concentration camps. “Kapo forced her to work even though she was very ill and had severe headaches,” Anna continues.

The boss’s son-in-law, Eugen Holy, of whom Anna speaks, was considered an extremely violent man. Willi Tscharotschkin, who came to Metzingen as a Russian German in the early 1940s, adds: “He was always beating us. The order of the day with Boss was punches in the neck. Holy treated workers from the East particularly badly.”

Only after many requests was Josefa allowed to see the Metz doctor Bornhäuser. Remembering phrases such as “Polish pigs don’t need a doctor,” it brings tears to Anna’s eyes. “She was so weak that she fell unconscious after the injection.”

On 5 July 1943, Josefa closed herself in the house of Marie Speidel, who was away, and turned on the gas cooker. When her sister found her in the evening, she was dead.

There was no farewell letter in Josefa’s diary, only a poem. Her relatives came from Poland for the funeral, but the Catholic priest refused to bury the suicide. Hugo Boss paid for the funeral and the travel expenses of Josefa’s family members who attended the funeral. Could it be that he has awakened a twinge of bad conscience?

The post-war period

Metzigen was occupied by the Allied forces relatively late in the war – in April 1945 – and then became part of the French occupation zone. After the Second World War, the Allies set up denazification commissions in Germany and Austria, with the aim of politically cleansing German society and excluding people who had previously supported the Nazi regime from important positions in society and the future state.

The main denazification process involved some 16 million “suspicious” Germans, who had to give a detailed insight into their political CV by filling in compulsory questionnaires and, amongst other things, to truthfully declare their membership of the NADSP and other organisations of the Nazi regime. Penalties ranged from fines to dismissal from their jobs to forced labour in labour camps.

In their zone of occupation, the French concentrated the process of political cleansing on people who held positions in the civil service and in big industry.

They wanted to hold the business elite in particular to account, as they were considered to be the most important pioneers and supporters of the National Socialists. Hugo Boss was an almost perfect candidate for trial and was forced to undergo a denazification process which lasted several years and during which he was initially classified as “incriminated”. He was deprived of his right to vote, banned from public speaking, from holding public or honorary office and fined 100,000 Reichsmarks.

This was the second highest penalty imposed in the Reutlingen Chamber of Commerce district. The reasons for this penalty were his early membership of the National Socialist Party, the fact that he had benefited financially from the Nazi regime and his friendship with Georg Rath, the notorious local leader of the National Socialist Party, who was notorious in Metzingen for his brutal and coarse behaviour.

Hugo Boss appealed the denazification measures and obtained a reduction of the fine to 75,000 Reichsmarks, but was also reclassified as a “follower”, i.e. a person who was a “follower” but did not actively participate in Nazi politics. His company was labelled as an important link in the economic skeleton of Hitler’s regime, but despite being labelled as “tainted by Nazism”, Hugo Boss AG was allowed to continue to operate.

Hugo Boss died on 9 August 1948 in Metzingen after a persistent infection caused by a dental abscess.

When Boss lost ownership, his son-in-law Eugen Holy took over the company. Initially, the company continued to produce uniforms, but for the French occupation forces and the Red Cross, and also returned to making uniforms for policemen and postmen. Under Holy’s aegis, the design company left its past behind and began to forge a future with HUGO BOSS as an internationally recognised brand of haute couture. In the mid-1950s, the company produced elegant men’s suits for the first time and by the end of the 1960s, total sales had climbed to 3.5 million Deutschmarks.

In 1969, Boss’s grandsons, the brothers Jochen and Uwe Holy, took over the company and gradually began to build it into a successful international fashion house by producing luxury goods for men.

For many years, the fashion concern has been no longer owned by the Boss family. In 1991, after the Holy brothers retired, the Italian Marzotto group bought the majority of the company’s shares.

The hidden story of Hugo Boss for more than 50 years

In 1997, the company emerged as an account holder in Switzerland and reports began to emerge about Boss’ links to the top of the Nazi Party. Swiss accounts linked the designer’s collaboration with the Third Reich and the use of forced labour in the factory.

In 1999, American lawyers from New Jersey, acting on behalf of Holocaust survivors, brought legal proceedings against Hugo Boss for the use of forced labour during the war.

The company, which could not find any documents on the subject in its archives (the company has no sources older than the 1960s, so apparently nothing from the Nazi period exists), commissioned a study of its past from the renowned historian Roman Köster. Following the revelations published in the book Hugo Boss, 1924-1945, the management expressed regret over the Nazi past and pledged to contribute to a fund that compensated former forced labourers.

In 2011, Hugo Boss issued a statement expressing its “deep regret to all those who suffered harm or hardship in the factory run by Hugo F. Boss under National Socialist rule”.

“It is clear that Hugo Boss joined the party not only because it gave him orders to produce uniforms, but also because he was a supporter of National Socialism,” Köster wrote.

In June 2002, Anna Wocka, who at the age of seventy-eight wanted to see her sister Josefa’s grave once more, accepted an invitation from the city of Metzingen to visit them, because she wanted to come to terms with the tormenting memories. During a production tour at the Hugo Boss AG factory, the former forced labourer was interested to see the machine that sews the buttons onto the jackets. “At that time, I had to sew the buttons on the uniforms by hand,” said the white-haired lady.

The new Managing Director, Bruno Sälzer, visibly nervous, apologised to all the forced labourers in the factory. For Anna, an official apology is a sign of recognition and respect. Pride is an important value for a woman with the story of Anna Wocka. “Pride is the only thing that can be preserved,” she said, her hands folded and covered with brown age spots.

Perhaps it was pride that made the suffering of having to work for Hugo Boss after her sister’s suicide bearable. Perhaps Josefa also thought of the word pride when she decided to commit suicide as her last act of independence.

In September 2021, another unpleasant stain appeared on a name synonymous with elegance and one of the most recognisable luxury fashion brands in the world. The European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights filed a criminal complaint with the German Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office alleging that Hugo Boss was profiting from forced labour in Xinjiang. However, the Federal Public Prosecutor refused to open a criminal investigation against the persons in charge of the accused company due to a lack of factual evidence.

In 2022, however, researchers at the Nordhausen University of Applied Sciences confirmed the allegation by identifying cotton from Xinjiang in Hugo Boss shirts.