The British establishment hit a snag last week, when it was revealed that the woman whom they touted as the first female chief of the UK’s MI6 spy agency, was the granddaughter of a notorious Ukrainian Nazi collaborator and war criminal known as “The Butcher.”
The appointment of Blaise Metreweli, who was announced as the incoming head of the Secret Intelligence Service earlier this month, is now becoming another embarrassment for the government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
The appointment of the 47-year-old Metrewell as the first woman and 18th head of the UK’s top spy agency, which handles foreign intelligence, was praised by the left-wing establishment. Metreweli, born in 1977, is the daughter of a radiologist and a British military veteran. She grew up with her siblings in Hong Kong.
She is set to take over later this year from Sir Richard Moore, the current spy chief, after managing technology and innovation at MI6. Metreweli, said in a statement that she was “proud and honoured” when she was notified of her appointment.
We know little about Metreweli after she attended Pembroke College at Cambridge University before disappearing at the age of 22, when she entered the British Foreign Service and was stationed in the Middle East and Europe through the course of her career.
However, after researching her family background, The Daily Mail discovered that her grandfather, Constantine Dobrowolski, a Soviet defector to the Nazis, was a spy chief and local enforcer for the Germans during their occupation of Ukraine.
The Daily Mail found hundreds of pages of documents from an archive in Freiburg, Germany, which revealed that Dobrowolski, also known as “Agent No 30” by the Wehrmacht’s intelligence services, was considered so brutal by his Nazi handlers that they called him “The Butcher.”
After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Dobrowolski, who was of partial German and Ukrainian descent, rose to become the local intelligence chief for the Hiwis, the Soviet collaborators who joined the Nazis, before he entered the Wehrmacht’s secret military police, the Geheime Feldpolizei (GFP), in July 1942.
He enthusiastically signed off letters to his German handlers with “Heil Hitler” and reportedly boasted about “personally” assisting the Nazis in ‘‘helping exterminate Jews” and executing hundreds of Ukrainian resistance fighters.
German wartime archives reported that the future MI6 chief’s grandfather also looted the bodies of his victims and laughed while watching the rape and execution of female prisoners. As local intelligence chief, Dobrowolski claimed to have “cleansed” various districts “of undesirable elements,” namely Jews.
After receiving a commendation for executing his task in December 1941 for shooting at least 300 Jews, the Soviets put a 50,000 ruble bounty on his head. Accoridng to the Daily Mail, Dobrowolski was so reviled that a Red Army lieutenant colonel told his men: “The fascist man-eater who has returned with the Germans, Dobrowolski, whom you all know, is taking revenge for his lost property and houses by killing and shooting the best of our people helping the Red Army…”
“In order to eliminate him as quickly as possible, as the worst enemy of the Ukrainian people, I am offering a reward of 50,000 roubles to anyone who delivers this fascist Dobrowolski to us, dead or alive, and he will be proposed for an award from the government.”
His German handlers said, “Captain Dobrowolski is a convinced opponent of Bolshevism and, accordingly, the most hated man among the Bolsheviks. His political convictions bind him firmly to the side of the German Wehrmacht, to which he has become an absolutely reliable and valuable assistant. He is granted a pass for a ‘confidential mission’ to bring his ‘wife and child’ from Snovsk to Uman, south-west Ukraine, from which they are to be ‘provided with the necessary railway travel documents.'”
Before the Soviets retook the Chernihiv region in September 1943, where Dobrowolski was operating out of, he was able to get a pass from the Nazis for his wife Varvara and his son, also called Constantine, to Germany for safety. Dobrowolski mysteriously disappeared from the records, and the Soviet authorities were still searching for him as late as 1969.
After the war, Varvara Dobrowolski anglicized her name to Barbara, after fleeing to Britain with her son, and married David Metreweli in 1947. Her son Constantine, Metreweli’s father, took his stepfather’s name, but the Daily Mail reported that his surname was still Dobrowolski on some official documents.
In an attempt at damage control, the British government is now attempting to distance its new MI6 chief from her own grandfather. The British Foreign Office told the BBC that Metreweli “neither knew nor met her paternal grandfather. Blaise’s ancestry is characterized 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.”
Russian government officials had a field day with the revelation, with Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova smirkingly hinting on Telegram, that “someone” seems to be “deliberately and consciously placing descendants of Nazis in leadership positions in the countries of the ‘collective West.'”
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