UK says new MI6 chief did not know her Nazi grandfather

The British government said on Saturday that the incoming MI6 chief “neither knew nor met her paternal grandfather”— a man who was revealed earlier in the week to be a Nazi spy, AFP reported.

Blaise Metreweli’s “ancestry is characterized by conflict and division and, as is the case for many with Eastern European heritage, only partially understood,” a Foreign Office spokesperson was cited as saying in a statement.

“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,” the statement read.

Earlier this month, the U.K. announced that Metreweli is slated to become on Oct. 1 the head of its foreign intelligence service (“C”), the first female to lead the MI6 in its 116-year history.

Metreweli, who is fluent in Arabic, will become the only publicly named member of the service.

Uncovering archives in Freiburg, Germany, the Daily Mail reported that her paternal grandfather Constantine Dobrowolski was a Ukrainian who defected from the Red Army to become the Nazis’ chief informant in the region of Chernihiv in Ukraine.

Known by Wehrmacht commanders as “The Butcher” or “Agent No 30,” Dobrowolski vowed to exact revenge on the Russians for killing his land-owning family, plundering their estate and occupying Ukraine after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, according to the Mail.

The Soviet Union labelled him “the worst enemy of the Ukrainian people” and placed a 50,000-rouble bounty (about $274,440 in today’s currency) on his head.

The British newspaper unearthed handwritten letters from Dobrowolski to his Nazi handlers signed off with “Heil Hitler” and taking pride in “personally” getting involved “in the extermination of Jews,” as well as killing hundreds of Ukrainian resistance fighters.

The report further read that there are accounts of Metreweli’s grandfather looting the bodies of Holocaust victims and laughing at sexually assaulted female prisoners.

The rest of Dobrowolski’s family fled Ukraine in 1943.

According to the Mail, Metreweli is “one of our nation’s most formidable intelligence operatives,” having “served her country with distinction on dangerous operations for MI6 across Europe and the Middle East for two decades in the wake of 9/11.”

Metreweli, 47, will be the 18th head of MI6.

Dobrowolski was sentenced by the Soviets in 1926 to 10 years in Siberia for anti-Soviet agitation, antisemitism and concealing his ancestry, according to the Mail.

He returned from exile in 1937 and studied economic engineering. When the Germans invaded Ukraine in June 1941, he immediately requested to be deployed in the front lines—where he defected to the Nazis on Aug. 4, 1941.

Writing to his new commanders, he said that “I had long hoped that Germany would enter the war with Russia,” the report read.

Between October and December 1941, he organised a Ukrainian police force of 300 men who “cleared” his home district of Sosnytsya in north-central Ukraine. It was during this time that the unit helped German murder squads and Hungarian soldiers to massacre the Jewish population.

One account alleged that Dobrowolski was part of a police force that is said to have raped, shot, and robbed the bodies of Jewish women in Ponornytsia, Chernihiv, although it is not believed he took part in the shooting and raping, the Mail reported.

JNS