Wolfgang Rauchfuß

Wolfgang Rauchfuß (27 November 1931 – 15 August 2005) was a member of the Politburo of East Germany's ruling SED (party).

Life Rauchfuß was born into a working-class family in a western quarter of Chemnitz, part of the industrial belt in the southern part of what then counted as central Germany. He completed his secondary schooling in 1946 and embarked on a three-year traineeship as a mechanic. Also in 1946 he joined the newly formed Free German Youth (FDJ / Freie Deutsche Jugend) in which he progressed so that by 1949/50 he had become a full-time FDJ instructor with the organisation's regional leadership in Berlin. Later that year, in December 1965, he became Deputy Chairman of the Ministerial Council.

The constitutional arrangement sunder which the German Democratic Republic was governed were modeled on those originally created for the Soviet Union. They implicitly - and after 1968 expressly - asserted the "leading role" of The Party. The party determined policy and government ministers (who were very often also people with senior party positions) carried it out. It therefore represented a major promotion when, in 1961, Wolfgang Rauchfuß became one of the 131 members of the Party Central Committee (which controlled the party). He also became a member of the National Legislature (Volkskammer) at this time. He then, in 1974, became in addition the Minister for Materials Economics and director of the Central Energy Commission in the Ministerial Council. In March 1990 he took a position with the Treuhand, the body mandated to privatize the East German industrial and commercial sectors as part of the reunification process. He also worked, for a period, for the "East German Investment Trust".

Awards and honours 1971 Banner of Labor 1979 Patriotic Order of Merit in Gold 1981 Patriotic Order of Merit Gold clasp