Josef Wagner (Gauleiter)

Josef Wagner (12 January 1899 – 22 April or 2 May 1945) was from 1928 the Nazi Gauleiter of the Gau of Westphalia-South, and as of January 1935 also of the Gau of Silesia. In 1942 he was expelled from the Nazi Party (NSDAP) and imprisoned by the Gestapo, dying at some point in 1945.

Josef Wagner was born in Algrange, Alsace-Lorraine, to miner Nikolaus Wagner. Beginning in the summer of 1913 he went to the teachers' seminary in Wittlich, and as of June 1917 he was a soldier at the Western Front during the First World War. There he ended up as a prisoner of war of the French, but managed to escape in 1918. In 1919 he returned to Germany by way of Switzerland. He ended his training as a Volksschule teacher and first worked as a finance official in Fulda, and by 1921 at the Bochumer Verein.

Wagner joined the Nazi Party quite early on, in 1922, and founded the NSDAP local (Ortsgruppe) in Bochum. In 1927, he was a Volksschule teacher at the Volksschule Horst-Emscher – and by 1928 at the Gelsenkirchen branch – from which he was fired for political reasons. In 1928, he was appointed Gauleiter of the Gau of Westphalia, and after the Gau was split in two in 1931, he was given the office of Gauleiter of Westphalia-South, whose seat was in Bochum. From 1928 to 1930, Wagner was among the NSDAP's first twelve members of the Reichstag in Berlin.

Beginning in 1934, Wagner – who had been a Prussian State Councillor since 1933 – also led the Gau of Silesia in Breslau (nowadays Wrocław, Poland). He was appointed High President (Oberpräsident) of the Prussian province of Lower Silesia in Breslau, and furthermore administered the Upper Silesian High President's business. After Silesia was reunited into one province, Wagner became its High President in 1938, until the province was split again in January 1941.

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