The present work deals with the damage behaviour of high-carbon steels during wire drawing and profile wire rolling. The main task was the integrated investigation of the cold forming processes used for profil wire production with a finite element model containing an implemented damage model in order to determine the reason of cracks occurring in the real process. Furthermore, the model was used to find possibilities to reduce damage in the center of the wire and consequently to prevent crack initiation. For a systematic and meaningful analysis of the influence of drawing paramters on the drawing process, the variation of the parameters has been planned and the results of the simulation have been evaluated by the statistical design of experiments. The drawing process has been optimized with respect to the core damage. Using the optimization equations, developed in this work, an optimized drawing plan and an optimized drawing die geometry was proposed to reduce the core damage in the drawing process to almost zero. So a higher plastic deformation can be realized in the wire processing. This makes it possible to produce more complex cross sections.