Not that long ago, at the GQ magazine awards and sponsored by Hugo Boss, British comedian Russell Brand goose-stepped onto the stage and told the audience, made up of politicians and celebrities (Which proves me to talk about another imperial subject: The relationship between the government, media, and industry that is evident even at the most fictitious and ostensible— But that’s another topic), that Hugo Boss had ties to the Nazis and made uniforms for uniforms them.
However, Brand’s claims are not at all new. For years there have been speculations and rumors around the connection between the firm’s founder Hugo Boss and the Nazi Party, and like anything, the truth is not nearly as exciting as the fiction — as much as I wanted to get a juicy take on this.
Hugo Boss was established in 1924 in Metzinger, a small town in Germany. Initially, the workshops were to make uniforms for police officers and posters. The business did not go well, and the economic climate in Germany at that time, immediately after the First World War and the Paris Peace (1919) that is the beginning of the German economic downturn that propelled Hitler to power brought the company to the brink of bankruptcy. As a result, the employer had to find anything to survive in times of crisis.
The fledgling business produced several clothing lines that included workwear, shirts, raincoats, and sportswear. One of the clients that the company was captivated with was Rudolf Born, who asked HB to produce brown shirts for the new political organization known as the National Socialist Party, which later morphed into the Nazi Party.
Boss also made uniforms for other organizations such as the postal service and the police, and so it seemed that he was willing to make anything and everything for anyone who could pay the bills. In the early 1930s, the world and german economy were struggling to stay alive.
On the 1st April 1931, Boss took the step of becoming a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party. It seems that his reasons for joining the Party were to help attract government contracts, which were welcome in these times of weak economic activity, and he was sure that Hitler would be able to lift Germany out of economic stagnation. He was not a rabid party supporter, he was merely a realistic businessman who needed all the work he could get in difficult times.
After the war, Boss was classified as an active supporter of the Nazi Party and was stripped of the right to run a business or vote and was fined 100,000 Marks. He successfully appealed the conviction and was classified as a ‘follower’ of the Nazi Party.
Boss continued in the clothing line, and after the war, his company turned to make suits which led to it becoming the pillar of menswear that it is today. Boss died in 1948, but the stain of his association with the Nazi Party remains. In 1999, the company agreed to pay into a fund designed to compensate for the forced labor of WWII. Which really tells us is that the truth is much less glamorous than the history behind it. And Hugo was never Hitler’s tailor.