Vilhelms Munters

Latvia state institutions 1898–1967 ○ Natural death

Latvian foreign minister who signed the Soviet–Latvian Mutual Assistance Treaty in 1939 and was deported to the Soviet Union in 1940

Born in Riga to an Estonian trader and a Baltic German mother, he served in the Estonian Army during the Latvian War of Independence. He joined the Latvian foreign ministry in 1920, became its general secretary in 1933, ran the ministry de facto after Kārlis Ulmanis’s coup of 1934 and was foreign minister from 1936 to 1940; he was also active on the Council of the League of Nations. In June 1939 he signed the German–Latvian Non-Aggression Pact and on 5 October 1939 the Soviet–Latvian Mutual Assistance Treaty. After the Soviet occupation he and his family were deported to Voronezh in July 1940 in the presence of the interior minister Vilis Lācis; he was arrested in June 1941 and in 1952 sentenced to 25 years. Released in 1954, he returned to Latvia in 1958, wrote against the Latvian diaspora organisations and died in Riga in 1967.