11 hours ago
New MI6 chief's grandfather was Nazi ‘Butcher'
The grandfather of the new head of MI6 was a Red Army defector who went on to become a murderous Nazi spy chief known as the Butcher, it has emerged.
Blaise Metreweli was announced as the Secret Intelligence Service's first female spy chief on June 15 but little was known about the Cambridge graduate who completed MI6 postings in Europe and the Middle East before leading the agency's technology division.
However, German archives reveal that Metreweli's grandfather was Constantine Dobrowolski, a Ukrainian who defected from the Red Army to become the Nazis' chief informant in the region of Chernihiv. Documents held in an archive in Freiburg, Germany detail Dobrowolski's life and were unearthed by the Daily Mail after Metreweli's appointment.
• Who really is the new MI6 chief? Here's everything we could find
Known as Agent 30 by his Wehrmacht commanders, Dobrowolski was born to a German-Polish father and a Ukrainian mother in 1906. He loathed the Soviet Union after his high-born relatives were killed and their estates seized following the October Revolution in 1917.
Dobrowolski lived on the run for years, obtaining a fake ID and travelling to Moscow. He was caught in 1926 and served ten years in a Siberian prison camp for anti-Soviet agitation, antisemitism and forging his ancestry. He returned from Siberia in 1937 and immediately volunteered for the front when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.
Dobrowolski defected to the Nazis at the first opportunity on August 4, 1941. He was paid a monthly wage of just 81 Reichsmark, around £250 today, for spying. He initially served with an SS tank unit which took part in massacres of Jews near Kyiv.
The defector returned to his home district of Sosyntsia in September 1941, where he organised a 300-strong Ukrainian police unit. The force assisted German death squads in 'clearing' the area, rounding up and killing local Jews.
Dobrowolski signed off handwritten letters to his Nazi superiors with 'Heil Hitler'. He boasted of 'personally' taking part in 'the extermination of the Jews' and said that he had killed hundreds of Ukrainian partisans. He was reported to have looted the bodies of Holocaust victims and laughed while watching the sexual assault of female prisoners, archival documents suggest.
Dobrowolski rose to become a local intelligence chief. He first served as an inspector for the Hiwi, a collaborator force, before joining the Geheime Feldpolizei in July 1942. The Soviets put a 50,000-rouble bounty, worth £200,000 in today's money, on the head of Dobrowolski, who they called 'the worst enemy of the Ukrainian people'.
He remained in Nazi-occupied Ukraine after the rest of his family fled the Soviet advance through the country in 1943, and became known as 'The Butcher', according to reports. Metreweli's father Constantine was born to Dobrowolski and his wife Barbara in Snovsk, Ukraine on New Year's Day in 1943, according to his Home Office naturalisation certificate.
Dobrowolski eventually got safe passage for his wife and two-month-old son to flee towards Germany. The last record of Dobrowolski is from August 1943, a month before the Red Army took Chernihiv.
After the war, mother and son eventually arrived in Britain, where Barbara married a Georgian-born man named David Metreweli in Yorkshire. Constantine took his stepfather's name and never knew Dobrowolski. He is a respected radiologist and a veteran of the British armed forces, and raised Metreweli and her siblings in Hong Kong.
The Foreign Office said: 'Blaise Metreweli neither knew nor met her paternal grandfather. Blaise's ancestry is characterised by conflict and division and, as is the case for many with eastern European heritage, only partially understood.
'It is precisely this complex heritage which has contributed to her commitment to prevent conflict and protect the British public from modern threats from today's hostile states, as the next chief of MI6.'
