New MI6 chief’s grandfather was Nazi spy who boasted of ‘exterminating Jews’

The grandfather of the incoming chief of MI6 was a leading Nazi collaborator who boasted of killing Jews, it has been reported.

Blaise Metreweli, 47, is set to become the first ever female head of the agency after 26 years serving it in Europe and the Middle East.

She is the granddaughter of Constantine Dobrowolski, a Ukrainian who infiltrated the Red Army to become an informant for the Germans, according to the Daily Mail.

German archive documents unearthed by the newspaper show he was known to Wermacht commanders as ‘Agent No. 30’ or ‘The Butcher’.

He was said to have sent letters to superiors saying he ‘personally’ took part ‘in the extermination of the Jews’, signing off with ‘Heil Hitler!’.

Soviet leaders placed a bounty equivalent to £200,000 in today’s money for the mole, whom they called the ‘worst enemy of the Ukrainian people’.

Dobrowolski, born to a German-Polish father and Ukrainian mother in 1906, was said to have vowed revenge on the Soviets after they destroyed his home and killed most of his family during the Ukrainian-Soviet war when he was 11.

As an adult he spent 10 years in a Siberian prison camp for dissidence, antisemitism and concealing his ancestry.

When the Germans invaded Ukraine in 1941, he joined the Red Army, later writing to his spy handlers that he used the ‘panic’ to get himself sent to the front despite his ‘political unreliability’.

That gave him an easy opportunity to defect to the Germans, serving in an SS tank unit and apparently taking part in the ethnic cleansing of Jews in occupied Kyiv.

Ms Metreweli never met her grandfather, who stayed in Ukraine when his family fled the Soviet reclaimed Ukraine from German occupation in 1943.

Reports indicate her father was also named Constantine Dobrowolski but also used the surname Metreweli after moving to the UK.

Beka Kobakhidze, a Georgian historian who uncovered the family tree, told the Telegraph the revelation will likely become ‘a favourite talking point for Kremlin propagandists for years to come’.

A Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office spokesman 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.’

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