The Gestapo: Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police)

[Alex Linder]

[David Irving quotation, 2011]

The media image of the Gestapo specialists as mindless thugs who relied on "torture and the whip" is quite wrong; they were highly trained professionals who used solid pedantic detective work to get their men, and more often than not asked only that they sit down and write essays for the Gestapo, which the officials then solidly and pedantically compared. Not exactly Hollywood stuff, but closer to the truth, I suspect. As for the traitors of Rote Kapelle, Pannwitz emphasizes that they were pro-Moscow traitors, of an unusually voracious sexual appetite (which he described), men and women who sold their own country for a variety of motives, none of which can rightly be termed "anti-Nazi resistance".

The CIA turned Pannwitz round against Moscow as one of their most valuable assets. He had two protectors, one American (CIA) and one West German (Ministry of the Interior). Unfortunately for him, both gentlemen were briefly on leave one day when a regular Munich policeman arrested him on a war crimes charge on August 8, 1959. Pannwitz died at once in the time-honoured Gestapo manner -- swallowing the cyanide capsule he never left home without.

http://www.fpp.co.uk/docs/Irving/RadDi/2011/200311.html