The secrets of the Berlin brothel run by Nazi spies

Forced into working with the SS, Kitty Schmidt's remarkable life is investigated in a new book by Nigel Jones, Urs Brunner, Julia Schrammel

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Kitty's Salon by Nigel Jones, Urs Brunner, Julia Schrammel, book review
'Nazisploitation': a scene from Salon Kitty, the 1973 film about Kitty Schmidt Alamy

In 1924 a Berliner was approached on the street by a green-booted woman: “Want to be my slave? Costs only six billion and a cigarette. A bargain. Come along, honey!” Quite the opening line, but nothing out of the ordinary for the time. This is Berlin as painted in all its contorting fleshiness by George Grosz and Otto Dix; packed with wounded war veterans, racketeers, and capitalists “feeding off the decadence like carrion crows”. It’s a startling statistic, but of just over 4 million inhabitants it is estimated that “120,000 girls and women and around 35,000 boys and men sold their bodies professionally”.

Kitty’s Salon, a collaboration between British historian Nigel Jones and journalists Urs Brunner and Julia Schrammel, tells a tale of sex and surveillance centred around the notorious madam Kitty Schmidt, whose high-end brothel would be repurposed by the SS during the Second World War to spy on senior Nazi officials and members of high society. While Schmidt provides a focal point, this is a warts-and-all exploration of a “half wickedly glamorous and half dangerously perverse” world of prostitution and control that starts in Weimar Germany and ends decades after the Second World War. It’s a murky and salacious story but, while a good amount of space is dedicated to titillating rumours, it also knows when to take itself seriously.

After their rise to power, the Nazi backlash against “moral laxity” was swift. One sad example is that of Else Krug. She plied her trade in Düsseldorf for 10 years before being arrested in a 2am raid in 1938, one of around 20,000 “asocials” rounded up. She was sent to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp specifically for women, and later gassed at Bernburg. Margarete Buber-Neumann, a friend of hers inside the camp, describes an unbroken character: “She knew what she was, and she insisted that she was good at what she did.”

Schmidt meanwhile was arrested trying to flee across the Dutch border, and coerced into Nazi service. Back in Berlin she was subjected to an ordeal that “she had only heard about as whispered rumours reported by fearful friends” – locked for a fortnight in a dank cell, only brought out to face a barrage of shouted questions, slaps and blows. She came to cooperate with Walter Schellenberg, the SS operator tasked with turning the brothel into a surveillance operation. He had likely been given the task as a punishment for an affair with the wife of his boss, “the spider at the centre of this web of terror”, Reinhard Heydrich. A listening-post was set up in the basement, where at least three technicians eavesdropped on pillow-talk using microphones hidden in the bedrooms.

Salon Kitty is not the only instance of Nazi hypocrisy when it came to sexual morality. For the 1936 Berlin Olympics around 7000 prostitutes were given temporary permits to work. Elsewhere in the territories occupied by the Wehrmacht, some 500 military brothels were opened – both to service German troops and to practise another, despicable kind of warfare. In the French city of Brest a Synagogue was repurposed. In occupied Poland and Eastern Europe, women and girls were abducted off of the street and forced into sexual slavery.

There is a film treatment called Salon Kitty, directed by Tinto Brass, a 1976 romp of sexual emancipation that blends high art and soft porn. This book offers a more factual, if often harrowing, account – cutting back the “plethora of legends and wild rumours, spiced with lurid tales”. This is true in its treatment of its female characters, but when it comes to the real villains it has more in common with “Nazisploitation” than its authors would suggest. A preface admitting that “even the basic facts are still uncertain” tees up a catalogue of dubious stories: speculation that “Hitler was both a sadomasochist and suffered from real or imagined impotence”; narration of the Führer’s infatuation with a married woman, Helene Hanfstaengl, which ends with him grovelling on his knees while he “begged to be her slave”; his years-long affair with Maria “Mimi” Reiter, the daughter of a left-wing political opponent. There are similar intrusions into the sex lives of many senior Nazis. Joachim von Ribbentrop, rumoured to be one of Wallis Simpson’s lovers before her involvement with Edward VIII, “reportedly sent her a bouquet of seventeen carnations to represent the number of times they had made love”. In the course of seeking out the truth a lot of dirty laundry gets aired, but why should sex turn the architects of real atrocities into carnival grotesques?

It is a sobering and necessary move, therefore, to include a chapter that addresses Schmidt’s relationship to the Holocaust head-on. This is carried out with real sensitivity to the evidence. On one hand, Schmidt’s doctor described her as “no Nazi and very friendly to the Jews”. On the other, she “lived and ran a business in a house from which Jews were compulsorily deported to their deaths”. This book portrays her as a figure torn between friendly feelings for her Jewish friends and her own struggle to survive, but it’s a difficult case to make. Is it solidarity or exploitation when she smuggles money into England to help her Jewish friends set up a brothel for her? I still can’t say with confidence – but it’s a story that deserves to be told, even if it does cut across many of our modern sensibilities.


Kitty’s Salon is published by John Blake at £22. To order your copy for £16.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books