Heinz Pannwitz

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Heinz Pannwitz (born July 28, 1911 in Berlin ; † 1975 ) was a German Gestapo officer and SS leader .

Life

Pannwitz belonged to the Christian scouts. After completing his school career, Pannwitz worked as a machine fitter, but became unemployed in 1931. Pannwitz then obtained the higher education entrance qualification on the second educational path. Then Pannwitz completed a degree in theology. According to the Spiegel editor Heinz Höhne , Pannwitz is said to have been a “supporter of the Confessing Church ” during the Nazi era .

After power was handed over to the National Socialists , Pannwitz joined the SA in August 1933 , from which he was taken over to the SS in 1938 . In the SS (membership number 307.916) he reached the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer in November 1942. From May 1, 1937, Pannwitz was a member of the NSDAP (membership number 5.373.334). With the Wehrmacht Pannwitz did a year of military service in 1935 and was then dismissed from the Wehrmacht with the rank of NCO.

Pannwitz then successfully applied for admission to the police service at the Berlin Police Headquarters and entered the police service in 1936. On September 10, 1938, he became a candidate for the detective inspector at the Berlin criminal police, where he headed the "Serious Burglary" department. After the " smashing of the rest of the Czech Republic ", Pannwitz was transferred to the Gestapo in Prague in July 1939 . At the State Police Headquarters in Prague he headed Section II g (assassinations, illegal possession of weapons and sabotage) from 1940 . After the assassination attempt on the deputy Reich Protector in Bohemia and Moravia and SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich on May 27, 1942 in Prague, Pannwitz was immediately deployed to lead the special commission to investigate the Heydrich assassination. Pannwitz was the author of the official final report on the Heydrich assassination attempt. In September 1942 Pannwitz was promoted to Kriminalrat. Since Pannwitz, according to his own statements, was not prepared to remove a passage critical of the Gestapo from the report after the official final report had been submitted, he was heavily criticized by the "state police". Pannwitz was then called up in the fall of 1942 by acquaintances in the Abwehr office for the Wehrmacht and was deployed for several months as a sergeant on the Eastern Front. In the spring of 1943, Pannwitz was assigned to the Berlin State Police Headquarters in order to familiarize himself with the topic of the Red Chapel for several months , with the aim of investigating people from the Red Chapel.

From August 1943 to the spring of 1945, Pannwitz was Karl Giering's successor and headed the Red Chapel Special Command in Paris for the tracking and control of people in the “Red Chapel” . After the Gestapo succeeded in uncovering agents of the Glawnoje Raswedywatelnoje Uprawlenije (GRU) in France, the Netherlands and Belgium, members of the Sonderkommando successfully attempted to bring some of the identified GRU agents under their control. The Red Chapel Special Command used the discovered radio stations for radio games to disinformation to the Moscow news center of the GRU and to obtain information about the Resistance . This procedure was coordinated with the head of the Gestapo in the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) Heinrich Müller .

Pannwitz went with the officer of the Soviet military intelligence service GRU Anatoli Markowitsch Gurewitsch (camouflage name Kent ) and two other people in early May 1945 at Bludenz in French custody, who was arrested in Marseille in November 1942 and included in the radio game . The prisoners were then transferred to the Soviet military administration in Paris. On June 7, 1945, Pannwitz and Gurewitsch were taken to Moscow by plane , immediately arrested by the NKVD , imprisoned in the Lubyanka and interrogated. Pannwitz was sentenced to twenty years of forced labor after a trial in the Soviet Union in 1946 and returned to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1955 .

After his return, Pannwitz u. a. in January 1956 and March 1959 two papers on the Heydrich assassination attempt. Pannwitz lived with his wife in Ludwigsburg until his death , where he worked as a sales representative.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Heinz Höhne: Password: Director. The story of the Red Chapel. Fischer S. Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt a. M 1970, p. 260
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h Hans Coppi junior : The "Red Orchestra" in the field of tension between resistance and intelligence work. The Trepper Report of June 1943 .; in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, edition 3/1996, p. 455
  3. ↑ a b c Stanislav F. Berton (ed.): The assassination attempt on Reinhard Heydrich on May 27, 1942. A report by Kriminalrat Heinz Pannwitz (PDF; 7.1 MB); in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 4/1985, p. 671
  4. ↑ In the Spiegel series written together with Gilles Perrault (Der Spiegel 1968 No. 21–30, May 21 to July 22, 1968) on the Red Chapel, however, this assertion does not appear.
  5. ^ Stanislav F. Berton (ed.): The assassination attempt on Reinhard Heydrich on May 27, 1942. A report by the criminal inspector Heinz Pannwitz ; in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 4/1985, p. 670f.
  6. ^ Stanislav F. Berton (ed.): The assassination attempt on Reinhard Heydrich on May 27, 1942. A report by the criminal inspector Heinz Pannwitz ; in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 4/1985, pp. 705f.
  7. ^ Hans Coppi junior: The "Red Orchestra" in the field of tension between resistance and intelligence work. The Trepper Report of June 1943 .; in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, edition 3/1996, p. 446
  8. ^ Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 448f.
personal data
SURNAME Pannwitz, Heinz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Gestapo officer and SS leader
DATE OF BIRTH July 28, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH 1975