Wagner's parents came from the Moselle region and had moved to the part of Lorraine annexed by the German Reich in 1870/71 with the first major wave of immigration in 1886. Here, his father found work as a trolley operator in the mining industry. Despite the poor conditions, the family made it possible for their three sons to attend high school. Adolf was the youngest – and the most ambitious. Even as a child, he had “wished to become so rich that I could buy a white shirt every day” (interview with Annemarie Wagner, 2010, quoted from Zuber, Regional Leader (Gauleiter), p. 14). After completing senior high school in Pforzheim, he did a year's voluntary service in Infantry Regiment 143, followed by a semester at the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Strasbourg, and in May 1911 Wagner moved to Aachen to study mining at the University of Applied Sciences there. He became a member of the Teutonia fraternity, which was a particularly nationalistic and ethnic-chauvinist organization in Aachen.
During the First World War, Wagner joined the “Argonne Division” of the 16th Army Corps as a mining student and reserve lieutenant. Contrary to the reports in the literature, which claimed he suffered multiple war wounds and gas poisoning, the military medical records only mention “gonorrhea” (LGA Berlin). During the 30 days in which Wagner recovered from gonorrhea, he escaped the bloody and failed attack of his regiment on the “Fille Morte” in September 1915 (Dopheide, p. 196) and the “most difficult, dangerous and grueling hours of combat” at the Ancre in January 1916 (ibid., p. 278). But on May 30, 1918, an artillery shell hit his lower right leg; on June 28, 1918, he was taken to Bavaria on a hospital train.
In February 1919, Wagner enrolled at Würzburg University, a center of militant anti-democratic and anti-socialist professors and student fraternities. One of his fellow students was Hans Dietrich, an early organizer in the ethnic-chauvinist, aggressively antisemitic camp. A few years later, Wagner visited Hitler with him in the Landsberg ‘Festungshaft’ (imprisonment with easier prison conditions, where prisoners retained their full civil rights). At the end of 1919, explosives manufacturer Louis Cahuc appointed Wagner director of a number of small mining operations in Erbendorf in the Upper Palatinate. From 1922 – as these mines went into economic decline – Wagner's political activities intensified and he founded the local Erbendorf Nazi Party group in September 1923. For unknown reasons, he did not take part in the Hitler-Ludendorff Putsch. His absence was later concealed as he attended the annual commemorative ceremonies as “spokesman for the party”.
In 1924, he became a member of the Bavarian Parliament for the ‘Völkischer Block’, where he honed his rhetorical and demagogic skills as an "economics expert”. One of his sayings was: “Names are always mentioned [...] such as Stinnes, Röchling, Stumm (mine owners)! Why don't you also mention the names Mendelssohn, Fürstenberg, Michael, Barmat [...]” (Landtag minutes February 13, 1925).
In October 1928, Wagner became Regional Leader (Gauleiter) of the Nazi Party in the Upper Palatinate. A year later, with the support of Gregor Straßer, he was given responsibility for the newly founded Greater Munich Region, which he vigorously extended to Munich-Upper Bavaria. He “declared an end to the previous ‘Vereinsmeierei’ (association bureaucracy)” (Rösch, p. 232), placed the local groups directly under his control, and rationalized and expanded the regional apparatus with specialist departments, such as “racial and public health care issues” (ibid., p. 238). From Bavaria, Wagner used his contacts with Rhineland industrialists which he had maintained from his time as an military officer. In 1930, as he himself wrote, he had “already successfully spoken to invited audiences of industrialists in Danzig and Remscheid” and promoted a speech by Hitler “at a large-scale meeting of industrialists from the entire Wuppertal area” (Party Chancellery files, Part 1, Regest 20057).
In the fall of 1932, Wagner founded the Sonntags-Morgen-Post newspaper, which he began publishing with number 45 and sold to the Nazi Party for a profit in 1933. Wagner celebrated his accession to power as provisional Bavarian Minister of the Interior on March 9, 1933 with a triumphal tour of the state. Within a few weeks, 76 Bavarian municipalities made him an honorary citizen. As Minister of the Interior, he ruled over the police apparatus, which he expanded with Storm Battalion (SA) and SS auxiliary police officers in alliance with Ernst Röhm and Heinrich Himmler. As early as March 10, 1933, he and Himmler ordered the 'protective custody' of all KPD (Communist Party of Germany) and Reichsbanner functionaries. On April 1, Wagner appointed Himmler “Political Police Commander” and placed the Bavarian Political Police, the Political Auxiliary Police and the Dachau Concentration Camp under his command. Wagner also used his position as Minister of the Interior to subordinate the four other Bavarian Nazi Party Regional Leaders who were not involved in the government to his disciplinary authority.
Although Wagner had praised Ernst Röhm as the “iron fist of the revolution” in March 1934 (Völkischer Beobachter, March 19, 1934), three months later he assisted in the violent elimination of the SA leadership around Röhm . He authorized the extradition of the SA men detained in Stadelheim Prison to the leader of the SS ‘Leibstandarte’ (SS Bodyguard Regiment), his close friend Sepp Dietrich, who had them shot shortly afterwards on Hitler's orders.
The mutual visits in 1933/34 between Wagner, who had been a Catholic altar boy as a child, and Cardinal Faulhaber revealed Wagner's cunning. Faulhaber, on the other hand, who in February 1934 had greeted Wagner with his arm raised in a Hitler salute, (Volk, p. 172) and liked to emphasize his “trust in the sense of justice of the Minister of State” (Faulhaber I files), made it less difficult for Wagner to take action against Catholic associations.
In August 1935, at a senior meeting of the Reich Ministry of Economics, Wagner pushed forward his demand to “gradually prepare for the legal elimination of Jews from the economy” (Party Chancellery files, Regest 21251). After Wagner had finally achieved his goal of becoming Bavarian Minister of Culture in 1936, he had preparations made for the looting of Jewish-owned works of art. Following the “Night of Broken Glass” in November 1938, trucks drove up to the addresses selected months earlier to remove the works of art belonging to the Jews (Stadtarchiv, StMus). At the start of the campaign, Wagner had proclaimed that “in our own interest, we must ensure that the Jew is eradicated as quickly and as rapidly as possible” (BayHStA, NL Wagner, November 9, 1938).
Wagner's personal lifestyle changed with his office as Minister of Culture. Whereas in 1933 he had still advocated the populist demand for a reduction in all ministerial salaries in the Reich, in 1937 he demanded the salary of a Reich Minister for himself. Daily visits to the Künstlerhaus, divorce money to his wife, child support for his secretary and new partner, gifts to short-term lovers, prestigious artists' parties in his official residence, the Kaulbachvilla, upkeep of his vacation home in Unterammergau, etc. had increased his financial needs enormously.
When Wagner became Reich Defense Commissioner for the military districts of Munich and Nuremberg at the beginning of the war in 1939, the artists' parties became less frequent, but for him the last moral and civilizational barriers had been breached. The account at the Bavarian State Bank, which he opened on October 24, 1940 with 227,000 Reichsmarks in aid of “Homes for people suffering severe war damage”, was transferred to his name a week later (Staatsarchiv, Spruchkammerakte Wagner). The occupation of the monasteries by soldiers and the wounded revealed his cynicism: “If I put anything into the monasteries, then at most it will be stupid people” (Wagner, September 9, 1939). Wagner suffered a setback in 1941 when he had to revoke his decree to remove the crosses from schools due to massive protests from the church-going population.
In Traunstein, on June 14, 1942, he suffered a stroke in the middle of the so-called “district celebration”, which Wagner had introduced in 1936, with military-style mass marches to mark annual ''confession days'' for the Nazi Party. Adolf Hitler put his personal physicians at Wagner's disposal, but soon learned that Wagner would not recover. While Hitler had previously been a frequent visitor to Wagner's home, attended operettas with him, viewed models of city buildings etc. and called him his “favorite”, he did not visit him when he was dying.
At Wagner's state funeral in April 1944 – he was buried next to the Northern ‘Temple of Honor’ – only Wagner's sister sat next to Hitler, his two brothers were absent. The older brother, Karl Wagner, was an active Social Democrat in Frankfurt am Main and married to a Jewish woman who was deported to Theresienstadt in 1945.
