The issue kicked off again in the 1990s when certain discoveries were made, and the tale becomes truly horrendous at this point. As was the case with many German businesses during the Second World War, Boss struggled to find a workforce, with the men conscripted into the Germany military to carry out Hitler’s dirty work, and the women either at home looking after the kids or in some dingy warehouse making bullets and weapons for the war effort.
So what did Boss do? He turned to slave labour, that’s what he did. 140 Poles and 40 French prisoners of war were forced to work unmercifully in God-awful conditions. You only have to whack a search into Google to find accounts of what it was like.
In 1999, Germany accepted a $5.1 billion accord to compensate for the slave labour the country was accountable for. Half of this sum was paid by the German government, and the other half by guilty German businesses. Hugo Boss itself contributed just over $1 million, a piss in the ocean really when you consider that the company made an annual turnover in excess of $500m that same year.
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The tale drew to a close in 2011, when a historian commissioned by Hugo Boss itself to explore the company’s tainted history, presented his findings, which finally answered the moral question: did Hugo Boss join the Nazi party as an opportunist businessman to save his livelihood, or was he genuinely a loyal follower of the party?
It was found to be the latter, with Roman Koester, the chap behind the research, affirming “It is clear that Hugo F Boss did not only join the party because it led to contracts for uniform production, but also because he was a follower of National Socialism.”
So, there you have it, not only was Hugo Boss a greedy businessman who made a fortune out of enslaving others, he was also a liar and a in denial Nazi.
And for the record (and so I don’t get done for libel), this shouldn’t put you off buying their stuff. I’ve got a Hugo Boss shirt hanging up in my wardrobe as I write this. Today, the company’s owned by people that don’t have connections to any repulsive anti-Semitic sleazeballs who are happy to exterminate people on the basis of their religion.
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