Verena Wagner Lafferentz

Verena Wagner Lafferentz (2 December 1920 – 19 April 2019) was the fourth child and younger daughter of Winifred and Siegfried Wagner, and the youngest granddaughter of German composer Richard Wagner. She was also a great-granddaughter of the composer Franz Liszt.

Her father died, aged 61, when she was 10. Verena Wagner grew up in the Villa Wahnfried in Bayreuth and attended the Obernkirchener rural school. Adolf Hitler greatly favoured Wagner's music and became very close to Verena's mother, Winifred Wagner, who was a fanatical admirer of Hitler; there were even rumours that they would marry. She met him at the Bayreuth Festival in 1923. although Hitler was said to have been uncomfortable with how the public would accept their three-decade age gap.

In 1943 Verena Wagner married Bodo Lafferentz, a member of the Nazi Party from 1933 and a high-ranking officer (SS-Obersturmbannführer) of the SS from 1939, assigned to the Race and Settlement Office. After World War II, her husband was interned during the Allies' denazification program, and released in 1949.

She was distinguished from other Wagner family members by her lack of artistic ambition, except for occasional appearances at the Bayreuth Festival and other musical commemorations honoring her grandfather. In February 2007 she opened, as guest of honour, a grand concert of her grandfather's works at Sofia in Bulgaria.

Verena Wagner Lafferentz lived in modest retirement in the family's summer home in the village of in Überlingen, Germany, on Lake Constance, near the Swiss border. She died at her home in Nußdorf in 2019, at the age of 98.