The grandfather of Blaise Metreweli, scheduled to take over leadership of the UK’s foreign intelligence service (MI6), was a Nazi collaborator who oversaw atrocities in occupied Ukraine, the Daily Mail has revealed.
Metreweli’s father, Constantine, was naturalized in British-administered Hong Kong in 1966. The London Gazette identified him at the time as Dobrowolski, known as Constantine Metreweli, of uncertain nationality.
In a story published Thursday, the Mail confirmed that Constantine was the son of a German-Polish Ukrainian man – also named Constantine – who worked for the Nazis and was implicated in the mass killing of Jews and other atrocities during World War II.
The newspaper said it had reviewed “hundreds of pages of documents held in archives in Freiburg, Germany, detailing the extraordinary – and blood-soaked – life and times of Dobrowolski, which are themselves worthy of a spy thriller.”
According to the records, Dobrowolski Sr. was born into a family of noble landowners in what is now Ukraine’s Chernigov Region. Following the Bolshevik Revolution, the estate was violently plundered, leading the younger Constantine to become a fierce enemy of the new authorities.