Hugo Boss became wealthy off SS uniform production, study finds

Despite that deep entanglement with the Nazi war machine, the company survived Germany’s defeat. The study notes that Hugo Boss appeared before a denazification tribunal after the war, was fined and banned from running a business, yet the firm itself continued to operate, sewing uniforms for Allied occupation forces in the first postwar years. Boss died in 1948, and control passed to his son-in-law, Eugen Holy, and later to his grandsons Jochen and Uwe Holy, who gradually turned the company into a fashion brand for young professionals and, eventually, a global lifestyle label.

In the 1990s, as international attention focused on companies that had profited from Nazi forced labor, Hugo Boss paid one million dollars into a fund for wartime victims, according to the study.

The article is sharply critical of what it describes as the brand’s handling of that history. Ickiewicz-Sawicka argues that the company built a powerful postwar image while largely erasing its origins from public view, relying on silence and omission even as it cultivated an aura of timeless elegance and success.

She points to a company-commissioned history by German economic historian Roman Köster, Hugo Boss 1924–1945: The History of a Clothing Factory Between the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, published in 2011, as a key moment in this strategy. Köster’s book, which drew on archival research, confirmed that the Metzingen factory produced Nazi uniforms and used forced laborers. At the time, Hugo Boss also issued a public statement expressing its “deepest regret to all those who suffered harm or hardship at the factory run by Hugo Ferdinand Boss during World War Two.”

According to Ickiewicz-Sawicka, however, commissioning and publishing that history allowed the company to “defuse” damaging information by controlling how it was presented and by releasing it on its own terms. The apology and the official history, she writes, did not lead to a sustained rethinking of how the brand narrates its past to customers or investors.

“The ‘brown’ Nazi fascist past of the brand’s founder did not translate into its negative perception,” she concludes, noting that Hugo Boss has continued to thrive as an aspirational label.

The new paper builds on earlier work by historians and fashion scholars who have examined the clothing industry’s role in Nazi Germany.

In the late 1990s, Hugo Boss commissioned an internal study from historian Elisabeth Timm on the company’s wartime history and use of forced labor. That report, which was not officially published by the firm but later made available independently by the historian, detailed how workers from occupied countries were deployed in the Metzingen plant. Köster’s later, book-length study, backed by the company but written as an academic work, broadly confirmed these findings and placed the factory within the wider Nazi war economy.

Beyond Hugo Boss, German researchers have documented how uniform makers and textile firms profited from persecution and militarization. A research brochure produced for the German Justice Ministry, on “fashion and persecution” in the Third Reich, surveyed a range of garment companies that supplied Nazi institutions and relied on forced labor. Hugo Boss appears there as one example among many in what was a much larger system.

The new study draws on that literature to argue that Hugo Boss did not simply produce clothing but also helped create an iconic visual language for the regime, one that continues to shape the brand’s aesthetic of sharp suits and disciplined silhouettes.

Ickiewicz-Sawicka frames her analysis in terms of corporate social responsibility and business ethics. She tests four hypotheses, including whether Hugo Boss’s history involves controversial cooperation with the Third Reich, whether customers understand the brand’s internal culture and sales strategies, and whether its current CSR policies meet modern ethical standards.

The study finds that the company’s Nazi-era collaboration and use of forced labor are well established in the historical record, and that the details of that history are not widely known among consumers. It also concludes that while Hugo Boss has embraced sustainability rhetoric and modern CSR principles in areas such as climate impact and supply chains, it has not fully integrated its own past into that ethical framework.

In doing so, the paper echoes broader debates in the field of business ethics. Scholars writing in journals such as the Journal of Business Ethics have questioned whether corporate apologies and one-time compensation payments are enough to transform companies that profited from mass atrocities, or whether more sustained forms of education, memorialization, and structural change are required.

The study also situates Hugo Boss within a tightening web of international standards. It cites the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, OECD guidelines for multinational enterprises, International Labour Organization conventions on forced labor, and the European Union’s new corporate due diligence rules, as well as Germany’s own supply chain law. These instruments, the author argues, increasingly require companies to look both forward and backward when it comes to human rights.

Against that backdrop, Ickiewicz-Sawicka presents Hugo Boss as a test case. A company that began by sewing uniforms for the Nazi state is today a global fashion brand that talks about sustainability and responsibility. The question, she suggests, is whether that responsibility also extends to keeping the most uncomfortable parts of its origin story in clear view.