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

Although independent of the new Federal Republic of Germany to the west, the new East German state retained the fraternal support of the Soviet Union.

By the time Rauchfuß celebrated his nineteenth birthday there was little sign of former SPD members in the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED / Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands), the controlling positions in which were all occupied by men who before April 1946 would have defined themselves politically as Communists.

[1] In 1952 he moved on to study at the Academy for Foreign Trade, after which he took a job as a domestic and export sales manager for precision mechanics and optics.

[4] 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.