Michael Achmeteli

Michael Achmeteli (მიხეილ ახმეტელი, Mikheil Akhmeteli) (1895–1963) was a Georgian émigré scholar, an expert on Soviet agriculture and sometime chief of Wannsee Institut, the SS-controlled research institute of Soviet studies in Nazi Germany.

Born in Borjomi, south-central Georgia, then part of the Russian Empire, Achmeteli studied at the University of Kharkiv between 1915 and 1917 and was sponsored by the government of the newly independent Georgia to continue his studies at the University of Jena in 1919. The Soviet takeover of Georgia precluded him from returning to his homeland. Achmeteli obtained a doctorate at Jena in 1925 and joined the Institute of Eastern Europe in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland) in 1926. In 1937, the Nazi leadership transformed part of this institute into its own research institution located near Berlin, the Wannsee Institut. Achmeteli was made the director of this new institute. He was initially on friendly terms with Alfred Rosenberg and the authorities expected him to provide the expertise on Soviet economy. Under the pseudonym Konstantin Michael, he wrote a book on Soviet agriculture and forced collectivization. He was dismissed as the chief of Wannsee Institut in 1940. During the World War II years, he chaired a Berlin-based Georgian National Committee, which focused on delivering Soviet Georgian POWs from the Nazi concentration camps through recruiting them into the Georgian Legion. After the war, Achmeteli settled in Munich and worked as professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University. He remained in opposition to the Soviet rule in Georgia and participated in the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations.