Leading German designer Hugo Boss tailored the much-feared brown and black uniforms of Hitler's Nazi elite during World War II, Austrian current affairs magazine Profil said in its latest edition.
The German men's fashion house, majority-owned by Italy's Marzotto group, said the report was probably accurate, although the company has no records or patterns from the wartime period."Our archives don't go back to that time but we suspect that Hugo Boss really did produce these uniforms," spokeswoman Monika Steilen told Reuters from the company's office in Metzingen, southern Germany.
Profil alleged that Boss, who died in 1948, manufactured uniforms for the German SS, the Storm Troopers, the Hitler Youth and the Wehrmacht, and used French prisoners of war and Polish inmates from German death camps to make the clothes.
Boss's 82-year-old son Siegfried told the magazine his father had been a member of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party, but would not comment on his precise role.
"Of course my father was a member of the Nazi Party, but who wasn't at that time?" he said. "The whole industry worked for the German army," he added.
According to Profil, Boss's first tailoring enterprise went bankrupt but after he joined the Nazi party in 1931 and set up Hugo Boss AG his fortunes changed dramatically.
The company's success in kitting out Hitler's elite troops laid the foundations for the multimillion dollar business that today comprises fashion giant Hugo Boss.
At the end of the war, Boss was ostracized as a "opportunist of the Third Reich" and deprived of the right to vote. He was fined 80,000 marks.
After Boss's death, the company passed to his son Siegfried and son-in-law Eugen Holy, and in the 1950s began producing its first men's suits for which it has won world renown.
Hugo Boss AG was floated in 1985 and the majority stake was sold to Marzotto in 1991.
The firm expects sales to amount to 1.05 billion marks ($562.9 million) this year from 995 million marks last year.
The company says it had no clue about its founder's past before the publication by Swiss banks last month of a list of nearly 1,800 dormant account holders, including Boss.
"What we know is that Hugo Boss founded the company and produced work overalls and rainwear, and that probably in the years of the Second World War the firm was involved in the war economy," Steilen said.
The company is likely to employ a historian to research the facts thoroughly, she added.