Operational secretary of the GUGB whose 'certified' signature closes the Great Terror's operational orders
An NKVD brigade commander from the border troops, he served as operational secretary of the Main Directorate of State Security from April 1937 to September 1938 and certified the copies of Yezhov's Great Terror operational orders, including No. 00447. A protégé of Frinovsky, he briefly headed Beria's secretariat, was arrested in 1939, sentenced to fifteen years and died in a Krasnoyarsk camp in 1945.
Related historical events
The name at the foot of the orders: operational secretary Ulmer
Voldemar Johannes Avgustovich Ulmer was born on 20 December 1896 in Reval (Tallinn) in the Russian Empire's Estland governorate (today's Estonia), to a working family of Swedish descent. He finished a four-year municipal school in Moscow, graduated from the 4th Kyiv school of ensigns in 1916 and served in the First World War; he had been a Bolshevik party member since 1914. From 1921 he held command and training posts in the border troops of the Cheka and OGPU, graduated from the Frunze Military Academy in 1928 and in July 1934 became head of the operational department of the border guard. He received the rank of brigade commander in December 1935.
On 16 April 1937 he became operational secretary of the Main Directorate of State Security in Yezhov's NKVD, the last gate through which the directorate's orders and instructions passed to the regional organs. The copies of Yezhov's orders for the mass operations of the Great Terror, beginning with Operational Order No. 00447 of 30 July 1937, end with the certification 'Certified: operational secretary of the GUGB NKVD USSR, brigade commander Ulmer'. This is why his name recurs in this site's 'NKVD operational orders' document and in the 1937 document collection. He did not write the orders; he vouched that they were authentic, and that signature made him one of the names most often met in the paper record of the terror.
Known as a protégé of Frinovsky, he became head of the secretariat of the new first deputy commissar, Beria, on 8 September 1938. As Naumov's research relates, Beria, who had brought only a handful of subordinates from Georgia, kept him for the first month out of necessity but did not trust him and soon replaced him with Merkulov. In November he was moved aside as acting deputy head of the convoy troops directorate. Arrested on 21 April 1939, he was sentenced by a military court in February 1940 to fifteen years of forced labour for membership of the 'conspiratorial terrorist organization of Yezhov, Frinovsky and Yevdokimov', and died suddenly at work in a camp in Krasnoyarsk region on 27 March 1945. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 26 November 1955.