Kurt Wagner

Kurt Wagner (31 July 1904 – 8 July 1989) was a German soldier and politician who between 1959 and 1967 served as the German Democratic Republic's Deputy Defence Minister.

Early life Wagner was born in what was then south central Germany in the city of Chemnitz (which in 1953 was officially renamed "Karl-Marx-Stadt"). His father worked as a Tinsmith/plumber and as a lighter of the city's street-lights. He attended junior school from 1911 till 1919 which was followed by three years at a training college. During the 1920s he started an apprenticeship as an electrician and took various skilled and semi-skilled factory jobs. There were also periods of unemployment. He first joined a trades union in 1923.

On 30 July 1946 the German Interior Administration (DVdI / ) was created in the Soviet occupation zone with responsibilities that included the national coordination of the new police service. One thing on which the Americans and Soviets had agreed in 1945 was that there was no place for a German army in occupied Germany, but the police service now established in the Soviet zone of Germany was nevertheless in some respects a quasi-military force, and the entire area was by now being developed into East Germany, a state modeled along principals approved in Moscow, and administered separately from the occupation zones to the west, administered by the American, British and French forces. The President of the East German DVdI was the former Police Chief from Thuringia, a man called . There were three vice-presidents: Kurt Wagner was one of the three, and he was the man responsible for the police.

NVA service In October 1949 he moved to the Party's Central Academy at Privolsk in the Soviet Union where he undertook twelve months of special training. On 1 March 1966 be was promoted to General Colonel. A year after that he retired.

Kurt Wagner lived in Strausberg till his death in July 1989, a few months before the German Democratic Republic which he had served over more than four decades ceased to exist as a separate state.