Butonia's darkest chapter began not on a runway but in the Nazi regime's systematic "Aryanization" of Jewish-owned businesses. Founded in Frankfurt in 1865 by Zadok Alexander Frankel, the company had remained under the control of the Frankel-Stiebel family through successive generations, with Regina Frankel continuing to operate it for more than four decades after her husband's early death. By the 1930s, however, the German branch was expropriated from its German-Jewish owners under Nazi rule. The business was renamed KHG—Knopf Handelsgesellschaft GmbH—and stripped of the family ownership that had built its European garment-trimmings network. The Frankel-Stiebel family relocated to London, where Butonia (London) Ltd. became the principal group company and the family's commercial base outside Nazi Germany. The seizure illustrates how the Nazi dictatorship targeted not only major banks and factories but also specialized suppliers whose buttons, fastenings, and other components quietly underpinned the clothing industry. The German company retained the KHG formal name even after the war, leaving a corporate trace of the confiscation embedded in the firm's later identity, while the surviving family-run group rebuilt and expanded across Western Europe and Asia from Britain.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1930s
The Nazi Seizure of Butonia: How a Jewish Button Empire Was Expropriated in 1930s Germany
Z.A. Frankel & Co. / Butonia / 1930s
Butonia's darkest chapter began not on a runway but in the Nazi regime's systematic "Aryanization" of Jewish-owned businesses. Founded in Frankfurt in 1865 by Zadok Alexander Frankel, the company had remained under the control of the Frankel-Stiebel family through successive generations, with Regina Frankel continuing to operate it for more than four decades after her husband's early death. By the 1930s, however, the German branch was expropriated from its German-Jewish owners under Nazi rule. The business was renamed KHG—Knopf Handelsgesellschaft GmbH—and stripped of the family ownership that had built its European garment-trimmings network. The Frankel-Stiebel family relocated to London, where Butonia (London) Ltd. became the principal group company and the family's commercial base outside Nazi Germany. The seizure illustrates how the Nazi dictatorship targeted not only major banks and factories but also specialized suppliers whose buttons, fastenings, and other components quietly underpinned the clothing industry. The German company retained the KHG formal name even after the war, leaving a corporate trace of the confiscation embedded in the firm's later identity, while the surviving family-run group rebuilt and expanded across Western Europe and Asia from Britain.
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