Heinz Pannwitz


Heinz Pannwitz real name Heinz Paulsen was a German Nazi Gestapo officer and later Schutzstaffel officer. Pannwitz was most notable for directing the investigation into the assassination of Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich on 27 May 1942 in Prague. In the last two years of the war, Pannwitz ran the Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle, a Gestapo counterintelligence operation against the Red Orchestra espionage network.

Life

As a child, Pannwitz belonged to the Christliche Pfadfinderschaft Deutschlands
scout association. As a youth Pannwitz was a member of the Evangelical Church in Germany but left due to divisions in the church over their stance towards Hitler and the Nazis. After completing his schooling, Pannwitz was employed as a fitter, but by 1931 was unemployed. Pannwitz then attended university to study theology and philosophy.

Military career

In February 1932, Pannwitz joined the Hitler Youth. In August 1933, Pannwitz joined the Sturmabteilung after the transfer of power to the Nazis, and transferred in 1939 to the Schutzstaffel. In 1935, Pannwitz performed one year of military service in the Wehrmacht and was then discharged in the rank of Lieutenant. On 1 May 1937, he joined the Nazi Party.
During 1936, Pannwitz successfully applied to join the police service at the Berlin Police Headquarters and joined the Berlin Police. On 10 September 1938, he became a criminal police detective with the Berlin Criminal Investigation Department, where he headed the "aggravated burglary" department. On September 1938, in accordance with the Munich Agreement, Germany annexed the Sudetenland. In March 1939, after the full occupation of Czechoslovakia, Pannwitz was transferred in July 1939 to Prague to be a Gestapo officer, assigned to Amt IV, section 2a of the Reich Main Security Office. In Prague, he was responsible for the Gestapo control room Unit IIa, which was responsible for investigating assassinations, illegal possession of weapons and sabotage.

Heydrich assassination

After the assassination attempt on Reinhard Heydrich, the Stellvertretender Reichsprotektor in Bohemia and Moravia and SS Obergruppenführer, on 27 May 1942 in Prague, Pannwitz was promptly ordered at the direction of a Special Commission to investigate the assassination of Heydrich. Pannwitz was the author of the official final report on the assassination. In September 1942, Pannwitz was promoted to Kriminalrat, equivalent to SS-Hauptsturmführer or SS-Sturmbannführer. As Pannwitz was not prepared to remove a Gestapo-critical passage from the report after submitting the official final report, he was heavily criticized by the Gestapo. In the autumn of 1942 Pannwitz was then transferred by acquaintances in the Abwehr to the Wehrmacht and was posted for several months as a Non-commissioned officer to the Eastern Front.

Red Orchestra

In the spring of 1943, Pannwitz was assigned to the State Police Headquarters in Berlin, working there for several months with the aim of investigating the Red Orchestra.
From August 1943 until the spring of 1945, Pannwitz directed the Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle operation in Paris and France, as a successor to Karl Giering. The Sonderkommando was a counterintelligence unit established by Gestapo to investigate and arrest the People of the Red Orchestra. After the Gestapo had managed to detect and unmask Glawnoje Raswedywatelnoje Uprawlenije agents in France, the Netherlands, and Belgium, members of the Sonderkommando successfully attempted to bring some of the GRU's agents under their control, in effect turning them. The Sonderkommando used the discovered radio stations for playbacks, using a German radio team to control and send back disinformation to the Moscow information centre of the GRU and to obtain information about the Resistance in return. This procedure was coordinated with the head of the Gestapo in the Reich Security Main Office, Heinrich Müller. One of the groups that Pannwitz was trying to destroy in Belgium was the Trepper Group. Pannwitz used various members of the Trepper Group for playbacks, such as Hermann Isbutzki.

Capture

On 3 May 1945 Pannwitz was captured by French forces in a hut on a mountain near Bludenz, Vorarlberg, Austria, along with Anatoly Gurevich who was a double agent and who was previously a member of the Trepper Group. Both were taken to Paris to be interrogated and eventually turned over to Soviet authorities. Pannwitz believed that if he was turned over to the US he would face charges for War crimes, so instead opted to be sent instead to the Soviet Union.
In Moscow all were immediately arrested and locked up in the Lubyanka. Pannwitz tried to justify his decisions to the Soviet interrogator Viktor Abakumov, who didn't believe that Pannwitz was running playbacks for almost two and a half years. Pannwitz offered his counterintelligence services to the Soviets for some time but nevertheless was eventually sentenced to 25 years in a Soviet Gulag for destroying the communist networks in Europe. Pannwitz was released early in 1954. In January 1956, after he was released, Pannwitz returned to Germany from the Soviet Union.

CIA and Gehlen Organization

Pannwitz returned to Germany with Friedrich Panzinger, a former SS officer who was also a Soviet agent. Panzinger's purposes in Germany were to penetrate the Gehlen organisation through his old Gestapo contacts.
Panzinger's actions drew suspicion on Pannwitz from the Federal Intelligence Service who suspected that Pannwitz was also a Soviet agent.
In August 1956, the BND organisation hired Pannwitz, perhaps to keep him away from the Central Intelligence Agency or the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Although the BND was planning to interrogate Pannwitz, who they considered a potentially important source, the BND failed to learn anything and, in turn, failed to send any reports to the CIA, as promised. Pannwitz through these proceedings seemed to be more concerned with money, insisting throughout his employment with the Gehlen Organization that his previous wartime Gestapo service as a Regierungsrat and his years in Soviet captivity should be recognised for pension purposes. By February 1958, Pannwitz had effectively achieved this.
In 1959, the BND finally handed Pannwitz over to the CIA. Again Pannwitz put money first and tried to get a long-term contract instead of monthly payments. Essentially Pannwitz was not going to tell his story unless he was paid for it. By mid-1959, the CIA had completed debriefing and were satisfied that he was not a Soviet agent. The CIA noted that Pannwitz tried to portray the brutal and inhuman Gestapo in a favourable light.
Pannwitz lived until his death with his wife in Ludwigsburg, where he worked as a sales representative.

War crimes

Pannwitz would have faced charges of war crimes at the end of the war had he stayed in Germany. The evidence for this involves the killing of Suzanne Spaak and part of her family. Spaak was a member of the French resistance and later the Trepper Group, who was arrested on 9 November 1943 in Brussels. After being tortured, in January 1944 Spaak was sentenced to death. Pannwitz ordered her to be killed when the liberation of Paris was only a few days away on August 1944. Spaak was shot by Pannwitz in her cell at Fresnes Prison. To hide his crimes he had the corpse buried in a cemetery at Cimetière parisien de Bagneux with the words A Belgian. At the same time, he sent a letter to Foreign Minister of the Belgian exile registry, Paul-Henri Spaak assuring him that his sister in law, Suzanne had been taken to Germany and was safe.