The German counterpart to this probably belongs to Hanns Scharff, who was an interrogator for the Luftwaffe and specialized in questioning American pilots.

Unlike many other German interrogators, Scharff avoided physical means and torture to acquire information. He instead chose mind games and played to his subjects vulnerability of desiring hope and reprieve from life as a POW. He was know for his forest walks where he’d take his prisoner on a walk and asked casual questions about the soldiers life and his day to day living. Scharff would often exchange jokes and food to build a relation with the person he desired information from so they’d be more willing to share secrets with someone they considered to be a friend in a place where peace of the mind was scarce. For those who proved reluctant to succumb to Scharff’s charm, he would conduct detailed research from Luftwaffe files to get people to be more participatory. Scharff took advantage of the Gestapo’s fearsome reputation, offering himself as the prisoners only escape from being dragged away by the infamous group. He would ask questions he already knew the answer to, if the prisoner refused to talk he’d provide the answer assuring that he already knew everything. Tricked into a false sense of security that nothing could be divulged that he already didn’t know, they’d begin to answer questions for him without his que, often unaware of the significance of what they were saying.

After the war, Scharff emigrated to the US where he shared the secret of his craft with the military and law enforcement, and quickly were adopted by numerous governments across the world. His techniques proved revolutionary and those same tricks were later used in another high profile case decades later. In the early 2000s a lowly American FBI agent named George Piro used those same techniques proposed by Scharff to uncover the secrets of Saddam Hussein. In his several month long interogation, Saddam revealed the infamous claims that Iraq was linked to weapons of mass destruction and to Al Queda were unsubstantiated.