Embarrassment in UK: Family connection between incoming MI6 chief and Nazi atrocities in Ukraine

This coming fall, Blaise Metreweli will become the first woman to head the British intelligence agency MI6 in its 116-year history. However, the British media is now revealing dark shadows in Metreweli’s family history. According to a report published Sunday in the Daily Mail, the grandfather of the incoming intelligence chief was a Nazi collaborator.

The revelations caused such concern that a spokesperson for the British Foreign Office issued a clarification, stating: “Blaise Metreweli never knew or met her paternal grandfather. Blaise’s background is marked by conflict and division, and like many people of Eastern European descent, it is only partially known,” the spokesperson added.

The Mail reported over the weekend that Blaise Metreweli’s grandfather, 47-year-old Konstantin Dobrovolsky, defected from the Soviet army and worked for the Nazis in the area of modern-day Chernihiv, Ukraine. The paper claims it uncovered hundreds of pages of documents in a Freiburg archive showing that Dobrovolsky was known to Wehrmacht commanders as “The Butcher” or “Agent No. 30.”

According to the reports, he signed letters to his superiors with “Heil Hitler” and claimed to have “personally participated” in the “extermination of the Jews.” Archival documents reveal that Dobrovolsky looted corpses of Holocaust victims, took part in the murder of local Jews, and laughed while watching the sexual assault of female prisoners.

According to the BBC, Dobrovolsky was also listed as wanted by the KGB in the 1960s as a foreign intelligence agent and traitor to the motherland. This list reportedly contains details of his past activities and suggests he may still have been alive in the 1960s.

After the war, Dobrovolsky’s wife, Barbara, and their two-month-old son, Konstantin Jr., fled to Britain, where she married David Metreweli in 1947.

Konstantin Jr. later adopted his stepfather’s surname, Metreweli. However, the BBC accessed a naturalization certificate from July 1966, still held in the National Archives, where his surname was still listed as Dobrovolsky, with Metreweli noted as an “alias.”

Konstantin Jr. went on to become a radiologist in the British army. His daughter, Blaise Metreweli, was born in 1977. The future head of MI6, the 18th since the organization's founding, is the only member of the secret organization known to the public and reports directly to the Foreign Secretary.