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| Who’s Boss A Series of Art Works more | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Fashion
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| In 1997, Swiss
bank account lists from the National Socialist era were made available
to the public. The company name 'Hugo Boss, Metzingen' showed up and serious
issues had to be addressed. The clothing business that had been set up
in 1923 was privileged with a contract to make SS, SA (Storm Trooper)
and HJ (Hitler Youth) uniforms, when its founder Hugo Ferdinand Boss became
a Nazi party member in Germany, 1931. Uwe & Jochen Holy, grandchildren of the founder by marriage, took over the management of the fashion concern at the end of the 1960's changing its image and turning it into an internationally famed house of fashion. It was due to external pressure that Boss was forced to engage with and take responsibility for the past; but it was only after the firm had been sold and was no longer in the hands of the Holy brothers, that the company's financial executive, Jörg-Viggo Müller, approached historian Elisabeth Timm from Tübingen in Germany, late in 1997, with a request to research into the full history of Hugo Boss AG, for eventual publication. It emerged that from 1940 onwards, until the end of the war, 150 persons from Eastern Europe, mostly Poland, were engaged in forced labour; 30 French prisoners of war were also employed in the production of uniforms. In an email to me of 18.4.2004, Dr. Timm reveals, "…that these forced labour workers were not engaged because the firm was obliged to take them on in accordance with state guidelines, they were required because they were very cheap labour. Moreover, these people were often highly qualified - in many cases representatives of the companies expressly recruited skilled technicians from appropriate industrial centres of the German occupied lands of Eastern Europe. I could also prove that these kinds of expeditions to recruit textile workers (tailors, seamstresses) were made by the Hugo Boss firm." In 1946 Hugo Boss was declared to have been a Nazi supporter and called upon to make financial atonement to the sum of 100,000 Reich's Mark, that should be paid to the state; this fine had not been paid at the time of his death on the 9th of August 1948, nor was anything paid by the family thereafter. All group claims made by former forced labour workers prior to the 1990's proved unsuccessful; the first group claims that eventually led to the founding of the Restitution Fund of the German Economy and German state, followed in 1997. "Mark Spoerer, a historian at the University of Hohenheim, Germany, estimates that in the year 2000, 2.7 million former labour workers must still have been living. In February 1999 the Federal Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, wishing to take radical steps towards the realisation of restitution together with twelve German companies, agreed to create an endowment fund. Four further companies later joined in, and together they became the sixteen founder members of the Foundation "Memory, Responsibility, Future".?www.metzingen-zwangsarbeit.de Each forced labour worker, who hadn't been in a concentration or labour education camp, could apply to the Federal Foundation for a settlement of a maximum of 5000 Deutsch Mark. The participating firms paid at least a thousandth part of their current yearly turnover into the fund (but no more than that), thereby achieving the so-called "certainty of the law" that would protect them from any further claims from former forced labour workers. For forced labour workers on the other hand, there is no certainty that they will even receive reimbursement, because the rate of the fund was set too low and numerous applications for compensation were being rejected, or because very much less than the maximum amount of 5000 DM per person was being paid out. The historian Thomas Kuczynski worked out that the undertakings of forced labour, brought companies the equivalent in currency today, advantages of 92 billion Euros. Forced labour workers received less or no payment at all; Kuczynski estimated the difference in payment of the German employees, as being 180 billion Mark; restrictions, damage and suffering that may have been incurred due to illness, mutilation, enforced transportation, the ruin of a life-plan, death of family members etc. however, are not even included in the amount of 180 billion Mark. Surviving victims, of also the company Hugo Boss, could only make claims for restitution from the year 2000 onwards; Boss did not set up its own restitution fund (like Siemens or VW did, for instance) but simply paid the well-known thousandth part of their current yearly turnover into the German Economy Foundation; the endowment initiative, on the other hand, made altogether 5 billion DM available to the "Federal Foundation 'Memory, Responsibility, Future'", who were altogether equipped with 10 billion DM, the state having provided the further 5 billion DM. Significant is that they could make a claim for compensation here, but whether they actually received it is not known, for obtaining an award is not so easy. What's more, the money wasn't enough for all claims, so that at first only small amounts were being paid out. For fear that the Boss image would suffer in the light of her findings, the company Hugo Boss AG decided not publish Dr. Timm's documentation of 1998. Elisabeth Timm publicised the study in the Internet herself in 2002: www.metzingen-zwangsarbeit.de Tanya Ury, 2004 (Translation from German,
Ury) |
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