Verena Lafferentz obit

Verena Lafferentz, Wagner’s grand-daughter, who was close to Hitler and married a Nazi – obituary

She was not on the list.


Verena Wagner Lafferentz, the last surviving grandchild of Richard Wagner and one of the last people alive who knew Adolf Hitler intimately, died on Friday at her home in Nussdorf, Germany. She was 98.

Her death was confirmed by Horst Eggers, president of The International Association of Richard Wagner Societies in Bayreuth, Germany.

Called by Mr. Eggers “the ‘grande dame’ of all Wagnerians” and an “ambassador and representative of the Wagner family,” Ms. Lafferentz was the youngest of the composer’s grandchildren, who included Wieland, Wolfgang and Friedelind, and was distinguished by her lack of artistic ambition.

Except for occasional appearances at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany and other musical commemorations honoring her grandfather, she lived in modest retirement in the family’s summer home in the village of Nussdorf on Lake Constance near the Swiss border.


The festival, more formally known as the Richard Wagner Festival, was founded by the composer and opened in 1876. It is dedicated to performing his works and has largely been run by his descendants.

Ms. Lafferentz was the daughter of Wagner’s son Siegfried and his wife, the English-born Winifred, who was a fanatical admirer and a rumored paramour of Hitler’s. She met him at the Bayreuth Festival in 1923.

She and her children frequently mingled with “Uncle Wolf,” as they called Hitler, at Bayreuth, where the Wagner family lived, and at his Bavarian mountain aerie at Berchtesgaden, among other places.

Ms. Lafferentz tiptoed into the limelight herself only twice, both times during World War II.

In 1940, she, too, was romantically linked to Hitler, although he was said to have been uncomfortable with how the public would perceive their two-decade age gap. She was known to be both flirtatious and unusually frank in her conversations with him about everything from culture to current events.
Ms. Lafferentz in 2013. She was called the “grande dame of all Wagnerians” and an “ambassador and representative of the Wagner family.”

In 1943, when she was 23, she was back in the public eye when she married Bodo Lafferentz, who had joined the Nazi Party a decade earlier, had worked for Volkswagen and had since 1939 been a high-ranking officer in the SS, assigned to the Race and Settlement office.


He oversaw a rocket research center at an outpost of the Flossenbürg concentration camp, where, according to the book “Bayreuth, the Outer Camp of Flossenbürg Concentration Camp” (2003), Wieland Wagner recruited inmates as laborers to build sets for the Bayreuth Festival.

Bodo Lafferentz was interned after the war during the Allies’ de-Nazification program and released in 1949. He died in the mid-1970s.

The couple had five children, Manfred and Wieland Lafferentz, Amelie Lafferentz-Hohmann, Verena Lafferentz-Schnekenburger and Winifred Lafferentz-Arminjon, all of whom survive her. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.

Verena Wagner was born on Dec. 2, 1920, in Bayreuth. Her father died at 61 when she was 10. Her mother, Winifred Marjorie (Williams Klindworth) Wagner, who was almost 30 years younger than her husband, died in 1980 at 82. Verena was also the great-granddaughter of the composer Franz Liszt.

Her sister Friedelind, who directed master classes for young singers, conductors and directors at Bayreuth, fled Germany in 1940 and became an outspoken opponent of Nazism. Their brothers Wieland and Wolfgang were opera directors and directors of the festival. Wieland died in 1966, Friedelind in 1991 and Wolfgang in 2010.

Ms. Lafferentz was vice-chairwoman of the Richard Wagner Foundation, which owns the festival hall; a board member of the festival foundation; and an honorary member of a number of Wagner societies around the world.


Mayor Brigitte Merk-Erbe of Bayreuth said in a statement that Ms. Lafferentz had been a woman of “clarity, seriousness and strong will,” and singled out her role in the redesign of the Richard Wagner Museum.

Her niece Katharina Wagner is the current director of the Bayreuth Festiva