First off, Hugo Boss was not really a "Nazi company," in that they were intertwined with the rise and fall of the NSDAP. Boss opened shop in 1923, before the NSDAP made a name for itself in German politics. Boss did join the party in 1931 and the company did win contracts to make uniforms for the party. The company did advertise its connections to the NSDAP in the 1930s and it also was a beneficiary of state largess and later used forced labor. But Hugo Boss was not an especially ideological company but rather typified the type of firm that materially benefited from its association with the dictatorship. This mixture of opportunism and pragmatism by Hugo Boss, both the company and its founder, was all too common among the German business community. Boss himself went through the denazification process postwar and while he initially received a more serious charge, he was able to have it downgraded to Mitläufer (fellow traveler). This lesser charge allowed Boss and his company room to return to business as normal in the FRG.

This clarification on Hugo Boss is important for Franz Six's career path because a lot of German companies were able to reestablish themselves in the postwar years in the FRG with a many of the same personnel they had prior to 1945. Boss's networking among NSDAP elites was not atypical for the German business community during the Third Reich. So it was not surprising that someone like Six could manage to find a prominent role within these companies.

Six was somewhat emblematic of what Michael Wildt has termed the "uncompromising generation," of young professional Germans who gravitated to the SS. These men tended to have a high degree of education, were old enough to experience the WWI but too young to fight, and generally somewhat stymied in their career trajectories. The SS offered an alternative career path that allowed these men to bypass the patterns of seniority that was common in German professional life. The man had his doctorate and habilitation by the mid-1930s. Six was head of a think tank within the SD and in charge of RSHA Office VII, which was in charge of ideological research on ideological opponents for the SS. His portfolio within the SS included various cultural missions such as propaganda and liaisons with the Foreign Ministry during the war. Simultaneous to this, Six also kept up his academic career, becoming a professor of journalism and having chairs within several university departments and institutes. He staffed Office VII with fellow academics. Himmler was not terribly pleased with the output by Office VII, and Six made his way through various RSHA offices and responsibilities such as staff work for Einsatzgruppe B.

Despite his membership in the SS and involvement with the Einsatzgruppen, he received a mild sentence at the Einsatzgruppen NMT of twenty years imprisonment because there was no direct linkage between his actives and actual war crimes. This might seem like a damaging sentence at first, but this jail sentence allowed for Six's postwar rehabilitation. The needs of the emerging Cold War encouraged what a number of historians term "amnesty fever" in which the American High Commission pardoned or shortened the sentences of those convicted of war crimes. Six benefited from this short memory and was released from Landsberg Prison in 1952.

It was not a straight line between Landsberg and Porsche for Six though. Six worked as a freelancer for the Gehlen intelligence organization, which employed a number of SD veterans in the fight against communism. He was able to capitalize upon connections with other RSHA veterans who had already reestablished themselves within the German professional world. His connections allowed him to assume the position of managing editor for the C. W. Leske Verlag and German publishing was filled with a number of his former Office VII subordinates. Many of them found that the stark anticommunism of the early FRG was a good fit for their ideological predispositions and their SS background was largely irrelevant in the Adenauer era.

The reestablishment of Six's intellectual networks eventually led him to Porsche. Albert Prinzing, Porsche's commercial director, was acquainted with Six already. Prinzing worked in the Foreign Office during the war and he filtered his way through the various professorial offices that Six also occupied. The two men had an already-established relationship prior to Porsche Diesel in 1957 and Six's work post-1952 work in German publishing certified his credentials for this position.

Six's background was not much of a liability for Porsche. It was very difficult in the 1950s and 60s to find major institutions and industries that had no ex-Nazis in positions of power or authority. The Adenauer government's support for clemency meant that most Germans could move on from their past and not worry about the consequences of their actions. Their activities under the dictatorship only became an issue if these men shot off their mouths at inopportune times (ie when the press covered them) or openly backed antidemocratic movements like the SRP. Six's involvement with the SS only became a liability for Porsche when muckrakers revealed that he was slated to head the SD of a conquered UK and his testimony during the Eichmann trial in the early 1960s. Six had initially thought of going to Israel, but the fact that the Israelis did not guarantee he would be immune from prosecution meant Six just sent in his affidavit fro a German court.

But Six was a manageable embarrassment for Porsche. The brand had reestablished itself in the postwar years and wartime memories of German occupation and atrocities did not stymie the growth of FRG exports. After Porsche Diesel folded up shop in 1963, Six made his way through may of the same networks as he did after his release from Landsberg.

Six was all too typical of the career trajectory of former RSHA men. The self-inflicted amnesia of the Adenauer era meant that these men were able to capitalize both on their educational background and professional networks to become part of the establishment. While they were now longer a "uncompromising generation" of young professionals as they were in the 1930s, their age and experience allowed them to assume positions of authority within traditional German professions. Although it is an affront to justice, many of the desk-bound murderers like Six were able to prosper during the Wirtschaftswunder because of the professional skills and connections they developed while working for a genocidal dictatorship.

Sources

Frei, Norbert. Adenauer's Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

Paehler, Katrin, and David A. Messenger. A Nazi Past: Recasting German Identity in Postwar Europe. Lexington: University of Kentucky, 2015.

Wildt, Michael. An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office. Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009.