The Allies certainly thought so, and if you read some books on the subject like Carlo d'Estes' one, they will agree. However, more recent thinking is reviewing that. I recall one lecture at the National WW2 Museum, Mr d'Estes had to cancel at the last minute. Roger Cirillo spoke instead, and the first words out of his mouth were "The talk you are going to get from me is certainly not the one you would get from Carlo..."

The book directly on point to your question is "Fighting Patton", by Harry Yeide. https://www.amazon.com/Fighting-Patton-George-Through-Enemies/dp/0760345929 He was inspired to write the book by the same reason you were: He watched the movie, and was intruiged by the intelligence officer with the bio data on Patton. So he decided to go find out what the Germans actually thought of the man. Did they really have an intel analyst focused on him?

Apparently nobody had really done this before. There were certainly some post-war interviews with German officers which spoke fairly highly of Patton, but they are somewhat suspect given the overall circumstances. What Harry did was to totally ignore everything which had been written about Patton after the fact, and dig into the German archives to see what the Germans were saying about him at the time. The conclusion appears to be that for most of the war, the German general staff either didn't know who this guy was, or didn't care because they had bigger problems. The lite version is this article written by him. http://www.historynet.com/patton-the-german-view.htm

Case in point: Patton was famously put in charge of FUSAG, the fictional organisation which would cross the Channel on D-Day, and attack the Pas de Calais. Thus tying down the German forces away from Normandy. The theory being, that wherever Patton was, that's where the real attack would be. However, the Germans did release a packet of biographies of general officers they believed might be involved in the attack into France and were worth writing about. Patton's name is notable for not being on that list.

Once the Germans finally started to pay a bit more attention to the man, they did respect some of his abilities. But they weren't always so. Patton's opponent in Lorraine was the outstanding Herman Balck, who called Patton's command at the time 'bad and hesitating.' They didn't always know who was in charge across the way at the time. Eventually when they were able to associate commanders with units, they identified him as dangerous in certain circumstances, but not exactly the American secret weapon.

After reading Harry's book, I wrote the following article. https://worldoftanks.com/en/news/chieftain/chieftains-hatch-truth-we-know-it/