Siegfried Wagner

Siegfried Wagner (3 March 1925 – 2 August 2001) was an East German party official who served as chairman of the Arts and Culture Committee of the Party Central Committee. In view of the highly centralised nature of the Leninist political power structure under which the country was administered, that position may have been of greater importance than his office as a government minister. In any event, reflecting the importance attached to culture and the arts by the government, he was a relatively high-profile political member of the East German arts establishment through the 1970s and 1980s. Starting during the 1970s he was also listed in the files of the Ministry for State Security as an "Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter" (IM), providing secret reports on colleagues and others of interest to the country's vast "Stasi" homeland security department under his code name, "IM Meister". Life Provenance and early years Siegfried Wagner was born at Hildesheim, a traditionally prosperous midsized town in the countryside south of Hannover. His father was an orchestral musician. He was still not quite 8 when the Hitler government took power: the later years of his childhood were spent under National Socialism. Between 1936 and 1942 he belonged to the "Hitler Youth" organisation. He passed his "Abitur" (exam) in 1943, which under normal circumstances would have opened the way for university level education. Under the war-time conditions of the time, however, on leaving school he was conscripted into the army. In September 1944 he was captured in France: he was held as a prisoner of war by the U.S. military till 1946. On his release he returned home to Hildesheim, which since May 1945 had been administered as part of the British occupation zone (after May 1949 part of West Germany). During the middle part of 1946 he relocated to Greiz, south of Gera in the south-east of Thuringia, administered since 1945 as part of the Soviet occupation zone (after October 1949 part of East Germany). Across Germany the rubble had been cleared, but there was still an urgent need for workers to help with the rebuilding of the towns and cities, and Wagner's initial employment was as a building worker. Still in 1946 – and still aged only 21 – he was offered and accepted a post as first secretary of the local leadership team with the "Freie Deutsche Jugend" / FDJ (loosely, "Young Communists") in Greiz.