Hugo Ferdinand Boss
July 8th, 1885
Ok, let’s get a couple of things straight. Firstly, the Nazis didn’t look cool. It’s a poor taste joke myth that they did. They wore terrible, baggy, badly cut trousers with high waists and saggy bottoms. The shirts were boxy and designed for a one-size-all fit, which as most of the people who wore them were an odd combination of pigeon-chested and work shy flabby, just looked like they were wearing prison clothes. The jackets were repurposed Luftwaffe cast-offs, re-detailed by someone who clearly had no idea how to design anything and looked like a children’s version of what ‘military menace’ looked like. There’s a reason that Nazi uniforms have been so easy to lampoon over the decades following them losing, and that’s because they looked stupid. A myth went around in the 1980s that the Nazis looked cool and because there are a number of people - men, naturally - who are attracted to ridiculous ideas primarily because they think it makes them look cool, which it doesn’t, the myth persisted.
Secondly, Hugo Boss didn’t design the SS Uniforms.
Thirdly, yes, the Nazis were Socialists. People who go “Oooh! The Nazis were Socialists!” are, however, just being facetious pricks and trying to make a point about something they don’t understand. The Nazis were National Socialists, which made them Socialists at a time when being a Socialist wasn’t the preserve of the left-wing of politics. The word ‘National’ gives it away somewhat. There were National Socialists in Britain and the USA, too. The major split between the right wing of the Socialist movement and the left wing in Britain happened in the lead up to WWI when Nationalists, warmongers and antisemites like Henry Hyndman were driven from the British Socialist Party to form their own version of a more totalitarian, authoritarian, jew hating, nationalist form of Socialism. Sound familiar? So yes, they were Socialists, no they were not Socialists in the modern form of how we understand that term and anyone who tries to say otherwise is a fucking idiot. The Nazis were Socialists, but that doesn’t make Socialists Nazis.
Fourthly, the Nazis didn’t call themselves Nazis. We called them Nazis. It’s a derogatory term coined from ‘National Socialist’ and is also the diminutive form of the German man’s name Ignatius, ‘Ignaz’, a common peasant’s name in the Bavarian heartland of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. It means ‘village idiot’. Members of the NSDAP referred to themselves as parteigenosse, ‘party members’.
So, fuck the Nazis.
Hugo Ferdinand Boss was born in Metzingen in the Kingdom of Württemberg to Luise and Heinrich Boss on 8th July, 1885. The youngest of five children, he did military service from 1903 to 1905 and then worked in a mill in Konstanz until he took over his parents’ lingerie shop in 1908. He was conscripted in 1914 and fought throughout WWI, rising to the rank of corporal.
He founded his own company inMetzingen in 1923, moving to a new factory in 1924. Boss produced work clothing, sportswear, raincoats, shirts and leisure wear.
In 1931, two years before Hitler came to power, Hugo Ferdinand Boss decided that there weren’t enough bastards in the world and became a Nazi. His membership number was 508 889, and he was a Förderndes Mitglied der SS, a sponsoring member of the Schutzstaffel (SS). In 1936 he joined the Deutsche Arbeitsfront, the German Labour Front, in 1939 the Reichsluftschutzbund, Reich Air Protection League and in 1941, the Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt, the National Socialist People's Welfare.
Hugo Ferdinand Boss went Full Nazi.
Joining all these Nazi organizations meant he got lucrative licenses to produce clothing for them. He made uniforms for the Sturmabteilung (SA), Schutzstaffel (SS), Wehrmacht, Hitler Youth, National Socialist Motor Corps, and other party organizations. Something the company boasted about in adverts.
Boss himself had no part in the design of the uniforms, his company was one of three that simply made and supplied them. The SS uniforms were designed by SS-Oberführer Prof. Karl Diebitsch, and graphic designer Walter Heck, who also designed the SS double ‘siegrune’. Which goes someway to explaining how they managed to look like a cross between a Chicago policeman and a zoot-suit wearing alley cat from a Tom and Jerry cartoon. But black was quite a cool color, to be fair. They were so badly designed that Heinrich Himmler looked like he could spin around inside his without moving the shoulder pads.
Instead, Boss was more focused on producing field uniforms for the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS, the military branch of the Schutzstaffel. He made those ones you see getting muddy in those old war films.
However, it gets worse. On top of the 300 workers at his factory, Hugo Boss used 140 slave laborers. most of them women, from the Soviet Union and Poland. In 1940 and 1941, they also forced 40 French prisoners of war into working at the factory. All of the senior staff at the Boss factory were keen Nazi supporters and when the factory was raided in 1945 by the Allies, Hugo Ferdinand Boss had a picture in his office of himself and Adolf Hitler, taken at Hitler’s mountain retreat at Berghof.
Hugo Ferdinand Boss not only knew about slave labor, he encouraged it.
After the war, he was arrested and charged with being a financial supporter, an ‘activist’ and a "supporter and beneficiary of National Socialism". In 1946, he was stripped of his voting rights, his license to run a business and fined 100,000 Reichsmarks, about $75,000.
In 1931, Boss made about 32,000 Reichsmarks in sales. In 1941, because of his Nazi links, that had increased to 3,300,000 Reichsmarks.
His fine was later reduced to 25,000 Reichsmarks and his status reduced to ‘follower’ of National Socialism, which reduced some of the effects on him, but still saw him pass control of the company to his son-in-law, Eugen Holy.
In June 2000, the Hugo Boss company joined the Foundation Initiative of German Business for the Compensation of Forced Laborers and contributed financially to the fund to compensate those or the families of those it had enslaved.
In 2011, they finally decided that it might be a good idea to formally apologize and issued a statement of "profound regret to those who suffered harm or hardship at the factory run by Hugo Boss under National Socialist rule.”
So, thanks for that.
Hugo Ferdinand Boss died on 9th August, 1948, in the now French controlled region of Württemberg-Hohenzollern, in Allied-occupied Germany, in excruciating pain, from an infection caused by a tooth abscess.