Deilov, Jakob

Born into the family of a shoemaker in Kamenka, Saratov province, in 1886. He had a high school education and worked as a school teacher in southern Russia; in 1908 he became an associate of a private firm and an official of the Russian-East Asian Mission in Saratov. From 1914 he served at the Front; after demobilization in 1918 he returned to Saratov and was a member of the Collegium of the People’s Commissariat for Food from the Volga German Republic.

In 1921 he moved to Moscow and was the head of the economic department of the German Mission in Moscow and a member of the management of the cooperative Narkomnatsa. In September 1923 he was sent on assignment to Argentina as a representative of the Volga German Republic to establish contacts with Germans who had resettled there from Russia. From August 1923 through 1925 he was a representative of the Volga German Bank in Moscow and regularly traveled to Germany. From 1928, having returned to Moscow, he was an official at Vsekopromsoyuz, and he also helped prepare documents for young women from the Volga region who wanted to leave the USSR to enter convents in Germany and Austria.

In 1929 he made his apartment available to Frs. Augustine Baumtrog and Alois Kappes, who had come to Moscow. January 15, 1930 – arrested and drawn into the investigation in the case against German Catholic clergy from the Lower Volga. Charged with “active involvement in recruiting and sending young women parishioners from the Volga German Republic to convents in Austria.” April 20, 1931 – sentenced to death under Articles 58-4 and 58-10 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR; sentence commuted to ten years in corrective labor camp with confiscation of property [OGPU Collegium]. His family was exiled to Kazakhstan. Fate thereafter unknown.

The investigation case file contain letters of introduction from the German embassy to western charitable organizations: “Mr. Deilov, from Kamenka, a German colony on the Volga, is most favorably recommended to the German Union of Aid (of Catholic Germany) by His Reverence, Bishop Kessler, from the Diocese of Tiraspol, now residing in Berlin; His Reverence, the Vicar General [Fr. Jakob] Feser (Volmer, on the Volga); and Director Uhlmann, head of the Catholic Union of Aid for the Diocese of Tiraspol. All the aforementioned persons know Mr. Deilov personally and had the occasion to evaluate his work for the Volga Germans. Mr. Deilov has done exemplary work in Russia, primarily among his compatriots of German heritage, for the re-establishment of their ruined economy […]. In his political attitude, Mr. Deilov is a completely impeccable person.”