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.
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