{"id":225331,"date":"2025-06-30T00:52:20","date_gmt":"2025-06-30T00:52:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/225331\/"},"modified":"2025-06-30T00:52:20","modified_gmt":"2025-06-30T00:52:20","slug":"new-head-of-britains-mi6-is-granddaughter-of-ukrainian-nazi-mass-murderer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/225331\/","title":{"rendered":"New head of Britain\u2019s MI6 is granddaughter of Ukrainian Nazi mass murderer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Daily Mail claims to have exclusively revealed that the new head of Britain\u2019s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, Blaise Metreweli, is the granddaughter of a Ukrainian Nazi collaborator.<\/p>\n<p>The Mail cites archival research in Germany disclosing that Metreweli\u2019s grandfather was Constantine Dobrowolski, \u201ca Ukrainian dubbed \u2018The Butcher\u2019 who defected from the Red Army to become the Fatherland\u2019s chief informant in the region of Chernihiv in Ukraine.\u201d But it also makes clear that this \u201cresearch\u201d was only undertaken as a damage limitation exercise after Russian sources had already begun investigating Metreweli\u2019s real family background.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"db relative center\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/6534a913-392e-4700-aa6d-0bdf5b10160d\" style=\"max-height:100%\"\/>Blaise Metreweli [Photo: MI6]<\/p>\n<p>The Mail\u2019s account begins by painting a nonetheless devastating picture of Dobrowolski, who\u00a0remained in Nazi-occupied Ukraine while the rest of his family fled following the liberation of the region by Soviet troops in 1943.<\/p>\n<p>Based they say on archives held in Freiburg, Germany, the Mail details:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Dobrowolski was known as \u201cAgent No 30\u201d by his Wehrmacht commanders. He had vowed revenge against the Russians ever since they killed his noble land-owning family after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.<\/li>\n<li>The Soviet Union put a 50,000-rouble bounty on the local spy chief described as \u201cthe worst enemy of the Ukrainian people\u201d.<\/li>\n<li>Handwritten letters to his Nazi superiors boast of Dobrowolski \u201cpersonally\u201d taking part \u201cin the extermination of the Jews\u201d and killing hundreds of Ukrainian resistance fighters. Personal accounts record his looting the bodies of Holocaust victims and laughing at the sexual assault of female prisoners.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>After the death of his family in 1917, Dobrowolski obtained a fake ID and travelled to Moscow but was caught in 1926 and sentenced to ten years in Siberia for anti-Soviet agitation, anti-Semitism and concealing his ancestry. <\/p>\n<p>On the outbreak of war, back home in Ukraine, he immediately reported to the War Commissariat and requested to be sent to the front where he defected to the Nazis at the first opportunity on August 4, 1941.\u00a0\u201cI wanted to use the panic to get over to the German side in this way, and all the more quickly,\u201d Dobrowolski wrote. <\/p>\n<p>He served with an SS tank unit and later told Nazi officers, \u201cThere, I oversaw captured Russian vehicles and personally took part in front-line action near Kyiv and in the extermination of Jews.\u201d He is self-reported to have left for his home district of Sosyntsia once again, on September 22, 1941, just seven days before the Babyn Yar massacre of 30,000 Jews involving his unit. <\/p>\n<p>In Sosyntsia, Dobrowolski took part in operations that led to the murder of more than 300 Jews, organising a Ukrainian police unit of 300 men who \u201ccleared\u201d 12 sub-districts between October and December 1941. <\/p>\n<p><a class=\"db avenir f6 lh-title pa1 br2 tc mw6 mw7-l bg-black-05 mt3 center\" href=\"https:\/\/www.wsws.org\/en\/special\/pages\/trumps-coup-and-how-to-fight-it-live.html?utm_source=wsws&amp;utm_medium=in-article-ad&amp;utm_campaign=in-article-ad-june15-event\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/1750312574_499_99599b87-c3f0-4bec-bffb-907ff25c4b1d\"\/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A witness, interrogated by the Germans, claimed Dobrowolski gave him a gold watch from one of the victims and that his home was filled with carpets, tablecloths, silk shawls, and a luxurious fur coat, \u201cwhich originated from the Jewish executions in Ponornytsia.\u201d In his own accounts, Dobrowolski boasted of having \u201ccleansed\u2026 undesirable elements,\u201d for which he was commended by a Hungarian colonel. After this, the Soviets put the 50,000-rouble bounty on his head.<\/p>\n<p>He became a local intelligence chief, joining the Nazis\u2019 secret military police, the Geheime Feldpolizei (GFP), in July 1942. A contemporary German assessment described him as \u201ca convinced opponent of Bolshevism and, accordingly, the most hated man among the Bolsheviks.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>When the Nazis were on the brink of defeat in 1943, he was granted a request to get his wife Varvara\/Barbara and son out of Snovsk to Germany. Barbara claims to have been a widow when marrying in 1947, though the Mail reports Dobrowolski still listed in a 1969 Soviet book documenting the enemies of the USSR as a \u201cwanted case\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>The article is accompanied by an editorial comment making explicit that the Mail\u2019s motivations are a damage limitation exercise. <\/p>\n<p>Headlined, \u00a0\u201cTruth can stop Putin smears on MI6 boss,\u201d it states, \u201cMalign actors\u2014including Vladimir Putin\u2019s supporters\u2014have already been digging into her family background. It was only a matter of time before they discovered the same facts and twisted them into a propaganda weapon against Ms Metreweli and Britain\u2026 she should be allowed to focus on the job she is impeccably qualified to do: Keeping Britain safe from our enemies.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The article makes clear that the Mail was in a race against time and was likely briefed by MI6, which would have been well aware of Metreweli\u2019s pedigree.<\/p>\n<p>The Mail states that \u201cher grandfather\u2019s wartime crimes\u2026 will be seized upon by the Kremlin, which has sought to portray Ukrainians as \u2018Nazis\u2019 and similarly smear Kyiv\u2019s Western backers since its illegal full-scale invasion in 2022. Indeed, Vladimir Putin\u2019s supporters have already discovered that her paternal heritage is Ukrainian, not Georgian as her surname suggests, and tried to use that fact to imply she is descended from a Nazi.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Tracing her family tree backwards, the Mail describes her father, also named Constantine, as a British military veteran and renowned radiologist who raised his daughter and her siblings in Hong Kong. His real family name is recorded in the London Gazette, an official UK government journal of record, from 1966, in an entry reading, \u201cDobrowolski, Constantine (known as Constantine Metreweli); Of uncertain nationality.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This was not the Mail\u2019s discovery, which they acknowledge. The article reports, \u201cIt did not take long for Putin\u2019s agents, who have a far more pernicious interest in the Metreweli back story, to find this. For them, this was proof enough that the incoming MI6 spy chief was a Ukrainian, despite the Dobrowolski surname also being common in Poland.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"db avenir f6 lh-title pa1 br2 tc mw6 mw7-l bg-black-05 mt3 center\" href=\"https:\/\/www.wsws.org\/en\/special\/pages\/freebogdan.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"dn db-m\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/1751244739_207_a267e9a9-a360-4724-b0af-db66239b3337\"\/><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"db dn-m\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/1751244740_324_306a06b9-8d68-48fc-a905-ae307559f40f\"\/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>They cite an unnamed \u201cRussian propagandist\u201d for posting information on social media and suggesting that \u201cthis was somehow evidence that it was likely her grandfather was a Nazi.\u201d The relevant post notes, \u201cPost-war Ukrainian emigration to Britain largely consisted of members of the SS Galicia division who surrendered to the British in Italy\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>The Mail tries to dismiss these \u201cunfounded claims\u2026 soon being widely repeated in the Russian Press.\u201d But it is documented that many members of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician) and other Ukrainian Nazis were allowed into Britain. The \u201cRimini List\u201d details 8,000 members of the Nazi division entering Britain, with only 32 denied entry because of their war records. This is despite the fact that the regiment was made up of volunteers that took part in notorious massacres in Ukraine and Poland.<\/p>\n<p>It was this online activity, the Mail states, that \u201cset in motion a race between historians in Russia, Georgia and Ukraine to get to the truth\u201d\u2014by which is meant an attempt by Britain\u2019s intelligence service to get control of a damaging narrative.<\/p>\n<p>Later they add that as the Mail\u2019s team scoured the Federal Military Archives in Freiburg, Germany, \u201cthe Russians were closing in,\u201d citing \u201clong blog posts\u201d on Dobrowolski \u201cwhose crimes are well documented in Soviet histories. They had not yet made the link to the new MI6 chief, but it was only a matter of time.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The revelations highlight both historical and contemporary relations between British imperialism and Ukrainian Nazis.<\/p>\n<p>The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its paramilitary wing the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) were collaborators of the Nazis as they murdered up to 1,600,000 Jews and hundreds of thousands of members of the Red Army and Ukrainian, Polish opponents of the Nazis. The OUN\/UPA is believed to have killed 25,000 Soviet servicemen, policemen and frontier guards, two-and-a-half thousand party workers, and about six hundred chairmen of collective farms and village councils, and to have massacred at least 100,000 Poles.<\/p>\n<p>Yet the OUN\u2019s founder, Stepan Bandera, is today hailed as a national hero by the far-right regime of Volodymyr Zelensky, of which the UK is a leading ally and military supplier in the proxy war against Russia.<\/p>\n<p>Whatever the official claims that Blaise Metreweli, a career spy since her days at Cambridge University, had no knowledge of her grandfather\u2019s politics and was never informed by her family or her superiors, she is the product of the fetid anti-communist milieu within British ruling circles, of which Ukrainian expat families make up an important component.<\/p>\n<p>On this score, notwithstanding the Mail noting the supposed irony of her grandfather fighting against Britain\u2019s then wartime ally the Soviet Union alongside the Hitler regime, there is more continuity than difference in the motivations of the Dobrowolski-Metrewelis across the generations.<\/p>\n<p>Join the fight for socialism! <\/p>\n<p>Fill out the form to be contacted by someone from the WSWS in your area about getting involved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Daily Mail claims to have exclusively revealed that the new head of Britain\u2019s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6,&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":225332,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5018,3,4],"tags":[76991,748,88881,393,4884,58503,23582,1144,712,16,657,15,1764],"class_list":{"0":"post-225331","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-britain","8":"category-uk","9":"category-united-kingdom","10":"tag-blaise-metreweli","11":"tag-britain","12":"tag-constantine-dobrowolski","13":"tag-england","14":"tag-great-britain","15":"tag-mi6","16":"tag-nazi","17":"tag-northern-ireland","18":"tag-scotland","19":"tag-uk","20":"tag-ukraine","21":"tag-united-kingdom","22":"tag-wales"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114769582401904580","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225331\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/225332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}