The man known to history as Hugo Boss was
born on the 8th of July 1885 in the town of Metzingen in the Swabia region of Germany
which lies in Baden-Wurttemberg in the south-west of the country. Hugo’s father was Henrich Boss, who ran
a lingerie and linen shop in the town. His mother was Luise Boss. Hugo was the fifth and last child which his
parents had. However, growing up he only had one sibling,
as three of Heinrich and Luise’s children died in infancy, a larger than average rate
of child mortality by the standards of the late nineteenth century. As Hugo was the only one of Heinrich and Luise’s
sons to survive he was chosen to be their heir over his older sister. Consequently, from a young age he was brought
into the family business in Metzingen and was learning the trade of running the family
store and also textile weaving and manufacturing. This was interrupted in 1903 when he was called
up to the German imperial army at a time when peacetime conscription was practiced in Germany
and all young men were expected to serve two years in the military. His training was completed by 1905, at which
time he briefly took up a position working in a weaving mill in the town of Konstanz
south of Metzingen. This appears to have simply been another element
of Boss’s preparation for taking over the family business by getting hands-on training
on the production side and as his parents entered retirement he stepped in to take over
the shop in Metzingen in 1908. It was a small, though relatively profitable
business and Hugo appears to have run it with a reasonable degree of success during these
first years of his ownership. It was also right around the time that he
took over the store in Metzingen that Hugo married Anna Katharine Freysinger. They would have a daughter together, Gertrud,
whose children would later run the company Boss became infamous for establishing. Hugo and Anna also had a son named Siegfried. Boss’s rather routine life in Metzingen
was broken by the clouds of war gathering across Europe. For years tensions had been brewing between
Germany and many of the other European powers, notably Britain, which viewed the German Empire
thatwhich had was formed in 1871 as a direct threat to its pre-eminent position amongst
the European powers, and France, which had lost extensive territory to Germany following
the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to 1871 and which ideally wished to recover this territory
someday. Yet, when war came, it was owing to a regional
crisis in the Balkans which that primarily involved Germany’s ally, the Empire of Austria-Hungary,
and Britain and France’s ally, the Russian Empire. What started as a conflict there soon mushroomed
into a pan-European war and then the First World War. Boss, whose military career had been less
than inspiring in the mid-1900s, having failed to earn promotion of any kind at that time,
was recalled to the army like millions of other German men. He fought for four years of the conflict,
eventually being promoted to the rank of corporal. Meanwhile the shop back in Metzingen suffered,
as did all German businesses. In the end it was the collapsing state of
Germany internally, rather than defeat on the battlefield which that brought the conflict
to an end in November 1918. Boss headed for home in Swabia with its end. He returned to a Germany which was in turmoil. The Kaiser Wilhelm II had abdicated his throne
in the closing stages of the war and a new republic named after the town of Weimar, the
city where its first members met, had been established. But it had a very tenuous hold on the country,
with socialists and other radical groups trying to seize power in cities like Berlin and Munich. Millions of men had suddenly been demobilised
from the army and paramilitary groups were forming everywhere. To compound matters, hyperinflation had hit
the new German currency, the Papiermark, and this was detrimentally impacting on businesses
such as the Boss family store in Metzingen. In this environment Boss simply tried to keep
his business afloat. In the end it was several years before stability
returned, but not before hyperinflation reached its peak in 1923 and the French and Belgians
invaded the Ruhr region of Germany that same year in order to force the German government
into meeting its war reparations payments. In tandem extreme right-wing and left-wing
political parties and groups began to emerge across the country. But 1923 was the worst of the crisis and thereafter
renewed global economic growth began to pull Germany out of its post-war malaise. As Germany exited the crisis Hugo Boss demonstrated
signs of growing ambition. Up to that point in his life he had never
demonstrated much aspiration to better his position, no doubt safe in the knowledge that
he was to inherit his family’s business and would live a comfortable life as a result. But the war and the crisis thatwhich followed
seems to have changed his outlook. Thus, in 1924 we find him actively seeking
out financial support from other manufacturers in Metzingen in order to open a textiles factory. Boss’s thinking here was that he could become
the actual producer of clothing in Metzingen, where previously his family had purchased
their stock and simply sold it on in the store in the town. Now he would become the producer as well as
the middleman. As such, in 1924 he established a factory
with several dozen sewing stations at which he employed between 20 and 30 seamstresses,
working in shifts to produce all manner of garments, from shirts to the traditional German
loden jackets. Soon the Boss factory was taking on big orders
for companies to produce uniforms and other mass-produced items and in later years Boss
would describe the company as, quote, “a supplier of party equipment since 1924.” Boss was soon employed by one of southern
Germany’s most controversial political parties. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party,
or Nazi Party, were a far-right political organisation which had been established in
Munich in the chaotic political environment of 1920. They were rabidly Anti-Semitic and viewed
the Weimar Republic with disgust for the peace terms it had agreed to in 1919. The party had been banned in Bavaria after
attempting an armed insurrection in Munich in November 1923, but their leader, Adolf
Hitler was released in December 1924 and the party was gradually allowed to resume its
activities. Yet they still attempted to disguise much
of their actions in the mid-to-late-1920s. As such, it was not 100% clear if Hugo Boss
knew who he was producing uniforms clothes for when he received an order for a large
number of brown uniforms from a Munich-based textiles distributor named Rudolf Born in
1927 or 1928. In reality this order was to produce the brown
shirt uniforms worn by the Sturmabteiling or SA, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party
whose name translated as ‘Storm Detachment’. In any event, had he known who he was working
for, there seems little doubt that Boss would have completed the order anyway, given his
subsequent actions and political affiliations. Hugo Boss’s business flourished in the 1920s,
as the world economy boomed in a period of pronounced economic growth across Europe and
the Americas during the post-war period. During the Roaring Twenties, as the period
became known, countries like Germany experienced average annual growth rates of 4%. The US economy alone expanded by over 40%
during the 1920s, one of the sharpest periods of growth in modern history. Credit was easy to obtain and Boss was able
to expand his business in Metzingen accordingly. However, much of this economic expansion was
based on speculative investment which created a huge economic bubble, one which burst spectacularly
in the autumn of 1929 with the Wall Street Crash. The Great Depression followed and Germany
was one of the worst hit nations, in large part because it had borrowed enormous sums
of money in the 1920s to pay off its war reparations. Boss’s business was badly impacted on by
the economic crash and by 1931 he was forced into bankruptcy as spending on clothes and
virtually everything else, other than food and the bare necessities, dried up across
Germany. However, Boss was handed a lifeline by his
creditors, who agreed at this time to let him keep six of his sewing machines. Consequently, while he was now bankrupt, he
had a minimal amount of means to start over again and build his business back up. It was in an effort to do so that he became
deeply involved with the Nazis. While the fortunes of Boss and many other
German businessmen were plummeting in the early 1930s those of the Nazis were flourishing. They had always been a very minor political
party in Germany, one which garnered little more than 2% of the vote in Reichstag elections
and most of that being confined to Bavaria in the south. But the economic crisis saw a surge in popularity
for the Nazis in the 1930 Reichstag elections, gaining one in five votes and becoming the
second largest party in Germany. In the years that followed millions of Germans
flocked to join the Nazi Party and its paramilitary groups, the SA and the much smaller SS. The latter, in particular, wore distinct quasi-military
uniforms and the surge in popularity created a major need for new uniforms being produced
quickly during the early 1930s. Perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly, given his
financial straits in 1931, Boss joined the Nazi Party that year as member number 508,889. If this was a strategic move to acquire contract
work from the Nazis, it proved effective. Within weeks Boss had secured a major order
to produce brown shirt uniforms for the SA, as well as the black and brown uniforms of
the Hitler Youth organisation. This provided a lifeline to the Hugo Boss
textile company in Metzingen, one which allowed him to survive the Great Depression and rebuild
his business after the bankruptcy of 1931. Boss is most closely associated today with
the manufacture of the uniforms of the Schutzstaffel or SS, an organisation whose name means ‘Protection
Squad’ and which was established in 1925 as a kind of bodyguard for Hitler and the
upper ranks of the Nazi Party. It had been expanded in the intervening period
and under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler from 1929 it began to rival the SA, eventually
superseding it as the pre-eminent Nazi paramilitary organisation. Members of the SS wore a variety of uniforms
over the years. Between 1929 and 1932 their uniform was brown
and closely resembled that of the more numerous SA members, but in the early 1930s Himmler
decided that a change was needed, one which would set the SS apart from Ernst Rohm’s
Brownshirts in the SA. The new uniform is that which is most closely
associated with the SS, being largely comprised of a black uniform, with the SS runic symbol,
Nazi armband in red which contrasted with the black uniform and a black wool greatcoat
for inclement weather. Boss soon received orders to mass produce
some of these new SS uniforms for the regime. These added to the business windfall he experienced
having joined the Nazi Party in 1931 and by late 1932 his business had not just survived
but was beginning to grow again. It should be noted here that Boss was not
responsible for designing the uniforms of the SS. Thisese wasere primarily the work of two other
individuals, Walter Heck and Karl Diebitsch. Heck was a German graphic designer who was
working for a company called Ferdinand Hoffstatter in the city of Bonn in 1929. Hoffstatter manufactured badges and logos
and were approached that year by representatives of the SS to design a logo for their uniforms. Heck was given the job and designed the SS
Rune symbol, which looks like a cross between two Ss and two lightning bolts. He was paid two and a half Reichsmarks for
his work, a sum equivalent to $2, but he was not an innocent bystander who unknowingly
designed the symbol of the organisation who that would later run Europe’s concentration
and death camps. Heck was already a member of the SA in 1929
and later joined the SS himself. His SS symbol was soon adorning uniforms which
were designed by Karl Diebitsch, an artist and a member of the Nazis since their very
earliest days in 1920. It was he who approached Heck to design the
SS symbol and it was Diebitsch who designed the SS uniform and much of the other paraphernalia
which went with it such as the SS swords and daggers. Thus, while Boss would be responsible for
actually manufacturing many of the uniforms which members of the SS would wear, the design
of these same uniforms was not his. Boss later claimed that his main reasons for
joining the Nazi Party in 1931 were practical, in so far as he wanted to acquire work contracts
from them to produce their uniforms, and also because he liked their ideas on how to end
unemployment in Germany in the early 1930s and pull the country out of the Great Depression. However, he didn’t stop with just membership
of the Party itself. He became an associate member of the SS in
due course, as well as joining the German Labour Front, the Reich Air Protection Association,
the National Socialists People’s Welfare organisation and a range of other Nazi bodies
such as the Reichsbund for physical exercise. It is hard to disentangle if he joined these
bodies for ideological reasons or simply because that is what millions of other Germans did
after 1933, as early that year the Nazis seized power in Germany and turned the country into
a one-party dictatorship. Having risen to become the most popular party
in the country in the Reichstag elections of 1932, garnering nearly 40% of the vote
in one election, the Nazis effectively reached an agreement in January 1933 with the German
business community and the centre-right political establishment whereby Hitler would become
Chancellor of Germany. This Faustian bargain gave way within weeks
to a complete seizure of power. Despite the beneficial contracts which that
Boss had received from the Nazi Party to manufacture uniforms for the SA, SS and Hitler Youth from
1931 onwards, his business did not balloon in size overnight. Rather the early-to-mid-1930s were years of
consolidation. Work was steady but market restrictions which
that were imposed from the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 onwards limited the capacity
for growth. For instance, a ban was imposed on exporting
German textiles abroad, a protectionist measure designed to boost the German textiles sector. However, for Boss, whose company was located
in an ideal position in south-western Germany to benefit from the export trade to France,
Switzerland and Austria, this was an impediment to his business’s growth in the mid-1930s. In addition the clothes Boss was manufacturing
were far from high-end fashion. They were functional clothes, often made with
synthetic fibres which the Nazi regime was keen to promote the use of in order to end
Germany’s reliance on imports of foreign cotton and wool. Moreover, while Boss benefited from his Nazi
contracts, they did not make him a rich man overnight and the fact that the factory at
Metzingen had stalls at trade fairs to sell goods to the wider public is indicative of
Boss’s varied business dealings in the first years of the Nazis being in power. This all began to change from 1937 onwards
as the German army and Nazi paramilitary organisations began growing exponentially in size and the
regime handed out numerous large contracts to produce uniforms to textile factory owners
such as Boss. As a former seamstress who worked at Boss’s
factory throughout the 1930s, Edith Poller, noted some years later, “When the large
orders began coming in, we were dizzy with relief. We had the feeling: ‘We’ve finally made
it.’” This was reflected in the scale of the income
of Boss’s business. In 1932 the company had an income of approximately
38,000 Reichsmarks, a sum equivalent to $27,000, not a negligible sum in the 1930s, but nevertheless
a limited figure for a company which that employed nearly 50 people and which had acquired
a number of substantial contracts in the past year. That figure had increased gradually to reach
200,000 Reichsmarks by 1936, but ballooned in the two years that followed, topping half
a million Reichsmarks during 1938. It would eventually exceed one million Reichsmarks
in sales in 1940. Thus, in the course of the late 1930s Boss
went from being a limited textile manufacturer with a few contracts from the Nazi Party to
a major regional contractor working for the state on sizeable contracts. Boss’s workforce grew in tandem with his
business. In 1932. when his business first began to recover from
the Great Depression as he acquired contracts from the Nazis, he was only employing about
twenty people. Moreover, not all of these were working in
his factory. Most were ‘Arbeiters’ or ‘Workers’,
but a small number were ‘Heimarbeiters’ or ‘Homeworkers’. The number of both types of worker increased
gradually in the years that followed, such that by 1936 Boss was employing about 100
people, of which two-thirds worked from his factory and one-third from their own homes. With the increase in business from 1937 onwards
these numbers grew considerably. In the course of 1938 the number of Boss employees
reached 200, with approximately 130 of these operating in the factories and 70 from their
homes. Thereafter the growth in employees slowed,
but by the early 1940s there were over 250 employees in total. During the peacetime years of the 1930s and
indeed even during the early stages of the Second World War it was possible for Boss
to find staff, but eventually he would run into difficulties in doing so and it was this
which situation that has created most of the controversy surrounding the Hugo Boss company’s
wartime record. That Boss’s business operations had been
expanding year on year from 1936 onwards was entirely owing to the accelerated pace at
which the Nazis were preparing for war. While Hitler and his closest associates had
always planned on a new European war to avenge German defeat in 1918, it had initially been
believed that it would take until 1941 or 1942 before the German economy was sufficiently
prepared and the army remilitarised to a sufficient extent to allow the country to go to war. However, as the 1930s proceeded Germany’s
economy performed better than expected and its remilitarisation plans were not matched
by a commensurate military build-up by Britain and France. Consequently plans for war were accelerated
and an aggressive foreign policy adopted, one which led to the annexation of Austria
in March 1938, the Sudetenland in September 1938 and then Czechoslovakia in March 1939. By then Britain and France were rearming,
but Germany was buoyed enough to invade Poland in September 1939. With that Britain and France declared war
on Germany in what would become the Second World War. Poland was conquered by the Nazis within weeks,
followed by Denmark and Norway in the spring of 1940 and then France early that summer. By July 1940 the all-conquering Wehrmacht
had created a territorial empire stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to Poland and western
Ukraine. This rapid militarisation and conquest had
of course led to a dramatic increase in the size of the German armed forces and with it
the number of uniforms needed to clothe soldiers, members of the SS and other military regiments. By 1938, for instance, there were approximately
700,000 men in the German land forces, but this number increased very rapidly to over
two million military personnel by the end of 1939 and further again with the new campaigns
initiated in 1940. The German army reached an unprecedented size
in 1941. As we will see, the Germans launched an invasion
of the Soviet Union that summer which involved three million men, most of them coming from
within Germany and the territories it had annexed. All of this created increased demand for the
uniforms being produced at textile factories such as those run by Boss at Metzingen. As new campaigns were initiated and new soldiers
were conscripted each of these needed uniforms, while the SS was also growing in size as the
number of concentration camps which that were being operated by the Nazis in Central and
Eastern Europe expanded. These were run by the SS and the paramilitary
group would eventually balloon to nearly a million members, each of whom needed uniforms
such as those Boss produced. In addition to increasing the demand for uniforms
produced at textiles factories such as that run by Boss in Metzingen, the changing war
situation had a major impact as well on the German economy. With millions of young and middle aged German
men being called up for military duty, there was an increasing lack of manpower available
at home. More women were drafted into working in German
offices and factories, but even this could not plug the gap. In this environment, the Nazi government began
having growing resort toturned to forced labour in the early 1940s to keep the domestic economy
running. Men and women were identified in occupied
countries and effectively detained by the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, and shipped
off to Germany to work in factories there. The Poles and Czechs were the two ethnic groups
which suffered most from this development in the long run, but forced labour was also
extracted from other nations. In the case of Boss’s factory at Metzingen
approximately 140 forced labourers, most of them being women, were brought to the south
German town to produce uniforms there. Of these the majority were Polish, though
for a time there was a group of 40 French women providing labour there too. The latter were the first to arrive in April
1940, but they were gradually replaced by Polish workers in 1941. This was the third-largest group of forced
labourers in Metzingen during the war. Overall 1,240 forced labourers were involved
here. Metzingen was a relatively average sized German
town so the presence of over twelve-hundred forced labourers here gives an idea of the
extent of the use of forced labour across Germany as the war went on. We might ask what the conditions were like
for these forced labourers in Metzingen? Firstly, many of these individuals had been
brought to Germany against their wills, often coerced by the Gestapo and other Nazi authorities
in Poland. When they reached Metzingen, the conditions
differed for men and women. Male forced labourers at the Boss factory
lived in a shed on the factory grounds, one which was rudimentary but sanitary. Conversely, places were found for the female
labourers living in the households of local German families. That is until 1943 when a dedicated camp to
house the forced labourers in Metzingen was constructed on the back of the passage of
a local law that summer which directed that forced labourers should live separately from
local German residents. Funding for this camp was limited and hygiene
here was poor, while food supplies were inadequate, particularly during the winter months. It should be noted that the Boss company made
an effort to provide a better standard of meal to the forced labourers in the factory’s
canteen. Labourers were paid, but after a certain time
it is debateable whether any extra provisions could be acquired by the Poles of Metzingen
on the black market using their small salaries. They were also expected to work 12 hours a
day, however, it is certainly worth notingwhich, that as the war went on and labour shortages
prevailed, eventually also became expected of Germans were also expected to work 12 hour
shifts. Generally speaking, forced labourers at the
Boss factory later recorded a relatively positive impression of Hugo Boss himself, claiming
he was generally kind to the workers, but some of the foremen and other managers running
his large factory were committed Nazis and treated the workers harshly. It would seem that Boss did not actively intervene
to prevent such mistreatment when it occurred, although the extent to which he might have
been aware of it is debateable. While Boss’s attitude towards forced labour
might have been ambiguous, events in the early 1940s were to ensure that forced labour became
an ever more prevalent part of the German wartime economy. Having conquered France in the early summer
of 1940 the Nazis had briefly attempted to force Britain into surrendering through a
naval blockade of the island and a sustained bombing campaign. However, this was soon abandoned as Hitler
determined to conquer Nazism’s great ideological enemy, the Communists of the Soviet Union. Thus in the summer of 1941 the greatest land
invasion in military history was initiated as three million Germans invaded the Soviet
Union. Needless to say the military build-up attendant
on Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi codename for the Eastern Campaign, produced an ever
greater demand for Boss’s uniforms. However, while the campaign was initially
successful, in the winter of 1941 the German advance stalled and the Nazis began to suffer
significant casualties for the first time. Then the United States entered the war on
the side of Britain and the Soviet Union. By 1942 the Germans were on the back foot
in both Russia and North Africa. They would lose the campaigns in both regions
in the first half of 1943. By that time conscription was being widely
extended across Germany to increase the number of soldiers being sent to the Eastern Front
and to Italy where the Western Allies opened a new Southern Front in the summer of 1943. And as all of this occurred the reliance on
forced labour to keep factories like Boss’s in Metzingen operating to supply the army
increased. This new period of the war ushered in the
concept of ‘Total War’ in Germany, whereby the entire nation was mobilised to aid the
war effort. Previously many Germans had been relatively
uninvolved in the war. A 60-year-old German shopkeeper would have
heard and read about the Wehrmacht’s immense military successes in Poland and France in
1939 and 1940, but, unless he had a son of fighting age, he would not have been personally
involved in the conflict. This changed with the advent of ‘Total War’
in 1943. With this, men in their forties were suddenly
being conscripted and sent to the front lines. The shopkeeper might have been able to continue
his work, but if he had a daughter she might have been directed towards working in some
part of the war economy. And everyone would doubtlessly have noticed
the arrival of train loads of Czechs, Poles and other subject peoples to Germany’s cities
and towns, where they were sent off to factories like Boss’s at Metzingen to effectively
provide slave labour. Every part of Germany’s economy and resources
was now to be utilised to the maximum extent possible to try to change the course of the
war. Boss’s factory was no different and the
number of forced labourers being made to work there increased to 140. In the end it is estimated that 15 million
people were employed as forced labourers in the Third Reich, the majority being Slavs
and other ethnic groups which Nazi ideology identified as racially inferior to the German
people. The ambiguities which are involved in assessing
Hugo Boss’s use of forced labour and his treatment of these workers are demonstrated
by the case of one forced labourer from Poland named Josefa Gisterek. She was one of four labourers who died whilst
working for the Boss company during the war. The other three are believed to have died
from natural causes, but Gisterek’s death was seemingly avoidable. She was sent from Poland to begin working
in the factory at Metzingen in October 1941. Her sister Anna had already been sent to the
factory in 1940. While she was in Metzingen Josefa received
a letter from her father back in Poland concerning family matters. She subsequently applied for leave to return
for a time to Poland, but when this was rejected she eloped anyway to the east. Back home she was identified and arrested
by the Gestapo. Josefa was not sent back to Metzingen, but
was detained in several concentration camps, including the notorious death camp Auschwitz
in Poland and Buchenwald in Germany. Eventually Boss discovered her location and
organised for her to be sent back to work for him at Metzingen. He did not punish her, but the foreman of
the factory did and refused to let her see a doctor despite being in poor physical health
after her stint in the concentration camp system. Eventually Josefa had a physical breakdown,
following which she was granted a three month vacation permit. At the end of this twelve month period Josefa
ended her own life at the home of the family who were hosting her in Metzingen rather than
return to working at the textiles factory. In a sign of the ambiguities which surrounded
the use of forced labour in Metzingen, Boss personally paid for Josefa’s family members
to travel to Germany from Poland to attend her funeral and covered the costs of the funeral
himself. While Gisterek’s story is tragic, the whole
case highlights the contradictions involved in Boss’s use of forced labour during the
war. While forced labour was deeply immoral in
and of itself, there is also little doubting that there was some humanity in Boss’s behaviour. He paid for Josefa’s funeral expenses and
to bring her family to Germany to attend it, while he must have also been quite unusual
amongst German business owners at the time in granting one of his forced labourers three
months of leave to rest and recuperate. He might also be viewed as having effectively
rescued here from the concentration camp when he had her brought back to Metzingen, yet
at the same time Boss can be said to have singly failed to prevent the abuses committed
by the foremen of his factory and it may have been these which contributed substantially
to her decision to take her own life. Overall, the case highlights the contradictions
in Boss’s wartime conduct. It should be borne in mind when evaluating
Hugo Boss and his company’s actions during the Second World War that this was far from
the only major German company which had strong ties to the Nazi regime. In terms of German automobile manufacturers,
Audi, Porsche and Volkswagen were all strongly associated with the regime. Ferdinand Porsche, the founder of the Porsche
car company, was himself a member of the Nazi Party and the SS, Audi utilised slave labour
from the Leitmeritz concentration camp to produce its cars during the war, a camp where
approximately 4,500 people were effectively worked to death, while Volkswagen was first
established in 1937 as a branch of the German Labour Front, a Nazi organisation. Beyond car manufacturing, Deutsche Bank provided
funding for the construction of Auschwitz. IG Farben, a chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate
which was the parent company of modern pharmaceutical giant Bayer, produced Zyklon B, the gas which
was used to mass murder millions of people in the death camps in Poland and elsewhere,
and IG Farben was effectively in charge of the third camp at Auschwitz, known as Auschwitz-Monowitz. Finally, some of Germany’s most powerful
industrial families such as the Krupps and Flicks were involved in the Nazi rise to power
and later used tens of thousands of people as slave labourers in their factories during
the war. Boss’s operation in Metzingen ultimately
pales in comparison with some of these other companies in terms of their complicity with
the regime and involvement in its crimes. By late 1944 Germans like Boss and the other
inhabitants of Metzingen must have been aware, regardless of the relentless Nazi propaganda
to the contrary, that Germany was losing the war badly and that defeat by the Allies was
imminent. Metzingen was not in the crosshairs of the
Soviet armies which began pouring into eastern Germany and heading for Berlin in the first
months of 1945, but they were close to the frontlines of the Western Allies’ invasion
of the Rhineland that same spring. While many of their forces also pushed forward
to try to join the Russians in besieging the German capital, divisions of American and
French troops fanned out to the south into Bavaria and other regions like Baden-Wurttemburg. Because of its position in the extreme south
of Germany it was April before Metzingen was occupied by the Allies, just days before Hitler
killed himself in Berlin on the 30th of April 1945, followed just over a week later on the
8th of May by the surrender of Nazi Germany. Metzingen was subsequently incorporated into
the French zone of occupation. Boss was soon identified as a person of interest
in the town owing to his factory’s associations with the Nazis and the use of forced labour
there. In the months that followed the end of the
war the Allies divided the population up into different groups depending on their level
of involvement with the regime. On the one extreme end were the surviving
senior Nazi ministers such as Hermann Goering and Albert Speer who were to be tried before
the International Military Tribunal at Nuremburg. Members of the Waffen-SS who had run the concentration
camps were also deemed to be war criminals. On the other end were the average German civilians
who were deemed to be uninvolved in the regime’s crimes and unable to resist the totalitarian
state. However, there were numerous groups in the
middle, such as German business owners who did not specifically orchestrate the regime’s
crimes, but were complicit in them by, for instance, using forced labour in their factories
or aiding the ascent of the Nazis in some way in the early 1930s. These individuals were to be placed on trial
and classified variously as ‘followers’ of the regime or ‘activists and supporters’,
and, depending on which their designation, they would be fined or serve brief prison
sentences. This was all part of the policy of Denazification
through which the Allies also sought to remove former supporters of the regime from positions
of social, political and economic authority in post-war Germany. Because of his position in Metzingen Boss
was quickly identified as someone who would be involved in the Denazification process
in the French occupied zone. Boss was initially identified in late 1945
as an ‘activist, supporter and beneficiary’ of the National Socialists movement in Germany
on account of his work for the regime and use of forced labour in his factories. He was accordingly fined 100,000 Reichsmarks
and in line with the general programme of dDenazification he was prohibited from running
the factory in Metzingen henceforth. This was one of the stricter sentences which
the Reutlingen Chamber of Commerce which dealt with Boss’s case could hand down and was
decided on owing to Boss’s early membership of the Nazi Party, having joined in 1931 before
their ascent to power, the fact that he had benefited financially from his ties to the
Nazi and also his links to George Rath, a local senior Nazi official who had become
notorious for his heavy-handed actions in Metzingen during the war. This was a heavy fine, one which Boss appealed
successfully, having his status reduced to that of a ‘follower’ of the regime, a
designation which carried a much lighter penalty. In part this was because the dDenazification
process was followed less strictly in the French occupied zone than in the British and
American zones to the north, in large part because so many French people had been implicated
in collaborating with the Nazis through the Vichy regime during the occupation of France. Boss might have escaped with a lighter sentence
in the end for his complicity with the regime, but he did not live for long thereafter. He died on the 9th of August 1948 in the town
of Metzingen. In part he was a casualty of the post-war
deprivation which prevailed across the country. Rationing continued for years after 1945 and
in the immediate aftermath of the war there was also a severe shortage of basic medicines. Consequently, Boss was seemingly unable to
gain access to anti-biotics to treat the abscess which had developed in one of his teeth. A tooth abscess, if left untreated, can lead
to infection spreading throughout the body and eventually death, which is exactly what
happened to Boss in the course of 1947 and 1948. Even before Boss’s death the company he
had founded had been taken over by his son-in-law, Eugen Holy, who had married Hugo’s daughter
Gertrud, as Boss himself had been prohibited from running the business as part of the Denazification
programme. Holy struggled to make ends meet at first,
but eventually acquired a number of contracts to manufacture uniforms in the late 1940s. Then in the early 1950s the Hugo Boss company
branched out into men’s suits and the business expanded considerably. By the time Holy retired in the late 1960s
and his two sons, Jochen and Uwe, took over Hugo Boss was a very substantial suit manufacturer
within Germany itself. But it was Jochen and Uwe who turned it into
an international brand, in large part by focusing on branded men’s suits and beginning a very
successful partnership with the McLaren Formula 1 racing team. By the 1980s Boss had expanded into fragrances
and men’s apparel and had become one of the biggest fashion houses in the world, to
the extent that the Marzotto textile group were willing to pay $165 million to acquire
three-quarters of the company in 1991. Today there are over a thousand Hugo Boss
stores worldwide and the company’s annual sales average three billion euros. But success would also bring increased attention
to the company’s past. In the 1980s and 1990s, as its brand continued
to grow, the Hugo Boss company came under increasing scrutiny regarding its war time
record. Where the complicity of companies like Porsche,
Deutsche Bank and Bayer in the Nazi regime’s crimes was well-established by then, little
had been said or written about Hugo Boss and the use of slave labour at his textile factory
at Metzingen to produce uniforms for the SS and the Wehrmacht. A number of articles appeared in prominent
newspapers and publications in the mid-to-late-1990s, including The New York Times following the
release of a set of accounts in 1997 held by a Swiss bank. A lawsuit against the company on behalf of
Holocaust survivors followed soon after. The company did not shy away from this uncomfortable
spotlight and instead took the decision to finance additional research into the wartime
record of Hugo Boss and the company he ran during the war. The result was a book, first published in
2011. The text, written by Roman Koester was entitled
in translation Hugo Boss, 1924–45: A Clothing Factory During the Weimar Republic and Third
Reich, this book used company records and other sources to examine exactly what had
occurred at the Metzingen factory during the war and to shed light on Hugo Boss’s role
in the crimes of the Nazis. As a result, there is now detailed information
in the public domain about the company’s wartime record and the company has since apologised
for its past actions. Hugo Boss is a difficult character to assess,
in large part because he was a private, enigmatic individual who has left little record of his
personal views behind. For the first forty-five years of his life
he was an unremarkable figure who operated a small clothing store in a mid-sized German
town. The most striking aspect of his life up to
that time was that he had acquired enough ambition in his late thirties to try to expand
his business operations into opening a textile factory as well. It is only from the early 1930s that his actions
are notable. Although he had undertaken work for the Nazi
Party in the late 1920s, it is unclear if he was even aware who he was producing brown
shirts for at that time and it was not until 1931 that he began actively working for the
Nazis. He also joined the party at that time, but
so were millions of other Germans in the 1930s and there seems little reason to disbelieve
hisalthough he would later assertion that he did so for practical purposes to save his
ailing business. Following the Nazis’ seizure of power he
gained an increasing number of contracts to manufacture their uniforms, most notably the
striking black uniform of the SS. His business prospered as a result and by
the time the Second World War erupted in 1939 he was employing well over 200 people and
was one of Metzingen’s most successful industrialists. There is no doubting that his factory utilised
forced labour during the war, with upwards of 140 Polish women effectively used as slave
labour here between 1941 and 1945. However, Boss was no sadist or Nazi ideologue
and while he failed to protect his workers in all instances there is clear evidence of
him looking out for their welfare during these years in many different ways. This is ultimately Boss’s wartime record. He was punished accordingly after the war
for it and while it is not a good record, he was certainly very far from being the worst
figure within the German business community during the Second World War. Other German companies, many of which are
massive multi-national corporations today, were directly involved in the Holocaust and
the use of tens of thousands of forced labourers. As such, while Boss’s wartime conduct and
involvement with the Nazis was not ethical, it does need to be looked at in perspective. What do you think of Hugo Boss? Should he have received greater punishment
after the war and should the company he founded have been wound down? Please let us know in the comment section,
and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
