This account combines a few details.
The German-submarine gyroglider was a Focke -- the same company that produced the first controllable helicopter, famously demonstrated by flying it in an indoor arena around 1938. The Focke gyroglider had a 3-blade rotor.
Igor Bensen may have been intrigued by the Focke, but his gyros were derived not from that model, but from the free-flying Rotachute developed on the Allied side by Raoul Hafner. Its intended military function was to substitute for a parachute in infantry air-drops. Igor's earliest gyros were very, very close to Hafner's in design, right down to the overhead stick.
Bensen's B-7 was designed around the 40 hp Nelson engine. The B-7 had quite a substantial H-stab; the B-8 had almost none.
The B-8M proved to be a prolific killer of unwary amateurs. It had fast, light rotorblades and its short-coupled little H-stab made no handling difference (that I could notice anyway).
Ken Brock's version of the B-8M, with light wheels and a seat tank, may have been close to CLT, but the stock Bensen wasn't. It had very heavy, iron-hubbed industrial wheels and a steel outboard-motor gas tank mounted low. There was some degree of HTL which combined with very low rotor damping to make a machine that was very prone to pilot-induced oscillation a/k/a porpoising.
Once you learned to under-control and let the machine catch up to you, you were largely safe from porpoising. Many died before they could get this straight, however. Arguably a machine marketed in Popular Mechanics to non-pilots should have been more beginner-friendly.
At one point in the late 60's, the B-8M was killing about one pilot a month. We have yet to live down the horrible reputation that this disgraceful situation earned for gyros.
The introduction of offset redrives around 1980 made the HTL situation much worse for awhile, of course.
We've turned the stability problem around with CLT, H-stabs and much heavier, slower rotors than Bensen used. We'll see if the reputation problem likewise turns around. We've had quite a deep hole to dig out of.