Earlier this month, the United Kingdom government announced that the new head of MI6 will be Blaise Metreweli, the first woman to head the British External Intelligence agency. Metreweli joined the Secret Intelligence Service in 1999, and will become its head in September this year, when the incumbent chief Sir Richard Moore retires. However, before she takes charge, a disturbing fact has been reported, that her grandfather was a Nazi spy chief.
Citing German archives, The Daily Mail reported that Blaise Metreweli is the granddaughter of Constantine Dobrowolski, a notorious Nazi collaborator who spied and killed for Adolf Hitler’s Germany.
As per the report, the new MI6 chief’s paternal grandfather Dobrowolski was a Ukrainian national who had defected from the Red Army and had become the chief informant in the region of Chernihiv in Ukraine. He was known as ‘The Butcher’, the report stated.
He remained in Nazi-occupied Ukraine while the rest of his family fled after the Soviet army liberated the region from the Germans.
As per a family tree posed by Daily Mail, Blaise Metreweli is the daughter of Constantine Dobrowolski Jr. alias Constantine Metreweli, son of Constantine Dobrowolski and Varvara (Barbara) Andreevna.
As per the archives accessed by the media house, Dobrowolski was known as ‘Agent No 30’ by Wehrmacht commanders, and he had vowed revenge against the Russians after “they slaughtered his noble land-owning family, plundered their estate and seized Ukraine after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.”
The archives show that Soviet Union had put a bounty on Dobrowolski of 50,000 roubles – worth about £200,000 now – and called him “the worst enemy of the Ukrainian people”. The report states that he signed off a letter with ‘Heil Hitler’.
It further mentions that he boasted to German commanders of ‘personally’ taking part ‘in the extermination of the Jews’ and killing hundreds of Ukrainian resistance fighters. There are even accounts of him looting the bodies of Holocaust victims and laughing at the sexual assault of female prisoners, the report says.
Notably, Blaise Metreweli never met her grandfather, as the family fled Ukraine but he remained there after the Red Army’s liberation of the region in 1943. Moreover, she can’t be judged for the acts of her grandfather. But this fact again shows how Ukrainians collaborated with Nazis.
