The Birth of Salon Kitty, Wartime Berlin’s Premier Brothel and Nazi Spy Trap

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SS-Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich had an idea. It was not an unusual event, for the feared head of Nazi Germany’s Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office, the RSHA) – the umbrella organisation that would run the Hitler regime’s chief organs of terror – was a constantly fertile source of schemes to better control, intimidate and persecute the country’s cowed population. This plan, however, first formulated in Heydrich’s mind shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, was audacious and amoral even by the debased standards set by the man known as ‘Hitler’s hangman’.

It was, in the vulgar words of a modern German historian, to ‘fuck for the Führer’. Heydrich intended to take over Berlin’s most notorious and exclusive brothel, known as ‘Salon Kitty’. Using a combination of hi-tech, state-of-the-art eavesdropping devices, and specially selected and trained women, distinguished both by their erotic charms and their devotion to the Nazi cause, the scheme would be to spy on the brothel’s male clientele. Important foreign visitors to the Reich’s capital would be cultivated by Heydrich’s agents and discreetly directed to sample the joys of the city’s leading ‘house of pleasure’.

With his cynical view of human nature and his knowledge of the moral frailties of his fellow Nazi leaders, Heydrich knew that visitors to the brothel would also include leading National Socialists – indeed, he himself made frequent use of such establishments. And he had no qualms about spying on his colleagues and rivals. The information thus gleaned would be added to the stock of damaging secrets gathered in the files that that were steadily accumulating in his office safe.

Heydrich envisaged that once through the doors of Giesebrecht-strasse 11 in Berlin’s prosperous western Charlottenburg quarter, visitors would be warmly welcomed by none other than the establishment’s famed owner and ‘madam’, Kitty Schmidt herself. After plying them with Champagne, fine wines or spirits in the relaxed high-bourgeois atmosphere of the salon’s luxurious reception lounge – all plush velvet chairs and curtains, reproductions of Old Master paintings and ornate wall mirrors in the cosy Biedermeier style – Kitty would produce with the utmost discretion her special ‘private’ album. This picture book would feature alluring photographs of the twenty girls who worked at the salon and – a fact unknown to the men eagerly turning the album’s pages – who were also agents in the employ of Heydrich’s SD (Sicherheitsdienst), the secret service of the SS. Rigorously chosen for their physical attractiveness, high sexual appetites and erotic skills – and with some originating from the upper reaches of the Reich’s high society – these women were also selected for their intelligence, were fluent in at least one foreign language, and above all were blindly devoted and indoctrinated adherents of National Socialism. Specially selected for their roles, they would be initiated into the ranks of the SS and trained to combine professional ‘business’ with their more subtle secret work: extracting indiscreet information from their clients in post-coital pillow talk.

At the same time – and unknown to their unwitting clients – their conversations would be recorded on some fifty hidden microphones carefully placed in the salon’s ‘love rooms’. The sounds and words picked up by these bugs, then the very latest technology available in the armoury of the SD’s surveillance weapons, would be fed down through hidden tubes to Salon Kitty’s cellar. Here a staff of five SD technicians – sworn to secrecy on pain of death – would be on permanent round-the-clock duty, recording and monitoring the results on wax discs or more advanced magnetic tapes. This belt-and-braces approach to his project was typical of Heydrich’s thorough perfectionism, making assurance doubly sure and doubly secure. All these plans were but gleams in Heydrich’s narrow gimlet eyes on the day in 1939 when he summoned his subordinate Walter Schellenberg to his office to put the proposal to his most trusted and efficient lieutenant.

The meeting that was the genesis of Salon Kitty was held in Heydrich’s office in the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais, a vast and sprawling eighteenth- century rococo palace that had once belonged to Germany’s former ruling imperial family, the Hohenzollerns. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, the palace and surrounding buildings, including the former Prinz Albrecht Hotel and the neighbouring arts and crafts museum, had been taken over by the Nazi’s mushrooming security services as the headquarters of their feared organs of terror. The Gestapo, the secret political police, had their HQ inside the complex, along with the SS – the Nazis’ elite security force who staffed the regime’s concentration camps and would provide the personnel to carry out its dirtiest future task, the Holocaust of Europe’s Jews. Also located there were the SD, the SS’s own intelligence and espionage division. The palace’s cellars had been converted into narrow windowless cells in which the regime’s open opponents – and those even suspected of being so – were imprisoned, abused, brutalised and sometimes executed. By the late 1930s the mere words ‘Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse’ had become a feared euphemism known to every German as the location of terror, torture and disappearance into the Nacht und Nebel (night and fog) of the concentration camp system, and ultimately in many cases to their deaths.

The spider at the centre of this web of terror was Reinhard Heydrich himself. Fiercely bright, and just as fiercely brutal, cynical and ruthless, Heydrich was both a meticulous and permanently suspicious bureaucrat who imagined that everyone – loyal Nazis, obedient subordinates and open enemies alike – shared his own malign nature. He was therefore building a mountain of information about the character flaws and weaknesses of hundreds of officials who worked for him, ready to use it against them should the opportunity and necessity arise. The idea of converting an exclusive brothel into a spy centre suited such a purpose perfectly.

Answerable only to his own immediate boss, the SS overlord Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, and to Hitler himself, in 1939 Heydrich was busy finalising his bureaucratic plans, which would be completed within the year, to centralise the organs of terror into a single umbrella organisation under his personal control: the Reich Security Main Office – or RSHA. As master of the Reich’s machinery of terror, spying and repression, Heydrich, still only in his mid-thirties, thoroughly deserved Hitler’s awed tribute to him as ‘the man with the iron heart’. Feared and hated by even his closest colleagues – his intelligence service rival Admiral Wilhelm Canaris described him as the Reich’s ‘most intelligent monster’ – the cruel and ice-cold Heydrich’s formidable but twisted brain was forever devising devilish fresh schemes to spin his web of control over new areas; which is why he had called Schellenberg in to see him.

Walter Schellenberg was a man cast in Heydrich’s own malign mould. Even younger than his boss, the thirty-year-old lawyer turned SD functionary came from a similar middle-class and musical milieu.

Where Heydrich’s father Bruno had been a composer of unsuccessful Wagnerian operas and head of the musical conservatory in his native city of Halle, Schellenberg’s father was a manufacturer of pianos in the western Saarland province. Both families had suffered the economic impoverishment caused by rampant inflation under the Weimar Republic in the 1920s. This had reduced many middle-class families like the Heydrichs and Schellenbergs to genteel penury, and had made them enemies of democracy and easy prey for the extremist message of the rising Nazi movement. The Schellenbergs had even been forced by economic need to leave Germany for neighbouring Luxembourg. Returning from there, Walter Schellenberg had been recruited by the SD as an informer while studying law at Bonn University. He joined the SS in 1933.

The young man’s intelligence and his cynical willingness to put the demands of the party and his ambitions for his own career above formal legal restraints soon attracted Heydrich’s admiring attention. After efficiently performing various espionage tasks in France and Italy by way of initiation into the secret intelligence world, Schellenberg joined Heydrich in preparing the ground for creating the RSHA as the central body of the Nazi terror state above and beyond the rule of law. It was Schellenberg who had suggested both the title and the structure of the RSHA, and it was during his work preparing this that Heydrich tasked him with the extra job of setting up Salon Kitty as a spy centre.

Heydrich and Schellenberg were hardly models of the official public line on sexual morality and marital fidelity preached but rarely practised by the Third Reich’s leaders. Heydrich had been forced to resign from his first chosen career in the navy in 1931 by a court of honour for ‘conduct unbecoming an officer’. He had broken his promise to wed the daughter of an influential friend of the head of the navy, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder. But that disgrace had led to the launch of his spectacularly stellar second career in Nazi intelligence when the woman he did marry that year, Lina von Osten, a keen Nazi, encouraged her unemployed husband to apply to Himmler for the job of creating an intelligence service for the SS. Though without any experience in the intelligence field – in the navy he had been a signals specialist – Heydrich, a keen consumer of spy pulp fiction, used that and his own innate intelligence to sketch out within half an hour the outline of what would swiftly become under his leadership the SD. Himmler was suitably impressed by the plan, and by the tall young man’s blond and impeccably Aryan appearance, and gave him the job. Though he remained married to Lina, and would father four children with her, Heydrich had a high sex drive and was a regular visitor to Berlin’s brothels. It was almost certainly such visits that had planted the seed of his idea of using a bordello as a listening post. Schellenberg, though less of a sexual adventurer than his boss, was equally ruthless and amoral. He had recently ditched his first wife, a seamstress of humble origins who was eight years older than him, for being an unsuitable partner in his future career ambitions. The first Frau Schellenberg, Käthe Kortekamp, had generously paid his way through university. In dumping her, as a consolation prize for her loss, Schellenberg gave his jilted spouse a clothing company confiscated from its Jewish owners.

Schellenberg saw his second wife, Irene Grosse-Schönepauk, a tall and elegant middle-class woman whom he would wed in 1940 after divorcing Käthe, as a more suitable spouse for the future senior role he envisaged for himself. If he had any bourgeois misgivings about venturing into the underground world of commercial sex, Schellenberg was quite prepared to suppress them on Heydrich’s orders in the higher interests of pleasing his boss and furthering his promising career.

According to Schellenberg’s self-serving post-war account, Heydrich’s first unexpected question at their meeting was to ask whether he was faithful to his wife. On Schellenberg answering in the affirmative – despite the fact that he was in the midst of exchanging his first wife for his next – Heydrich proceeded to unfold a sketch of his grand plan. He was finding it difficult, he told Schellenberg, to gather information via the usual methods and channels – reports from informers and paid agents. Wouldn’t it be more effective and fruitful to overhear targets in an informal setting and atmosphere where tongues loosened by alcohol would be more likely to wag? What he had in mind, he added, was to post young and attractive women in a restaurant, or perhaps somewhere even more intimate, to listen to their drunken dates and pick up information that would be of value to the secret services.

According to Peter Norden, author of Madam Kitty, published in 1973, Schellenberg, after hearing these details, begged to be entrusted with the execution of the scheme. Heydrich was a busy man. He speedily ordered Schellenberg to produce his first preliminary report within a week and sent him on his way. There may have been another secret reason why Heydrich had selected Schellenberg for the task of setting up Salon Kitty, and one that would have appealed to the SD chief’s devious and malicious nature: he suspected that his young protégé might have been enjoying a secret extra-marital affair with a young married woman. With delicious irony, the woman in question was none other than his own wife, Lina Heydrich.

There is no doubt that in the late 1930s the Heydrich marriage was in deep trouble. As he built his empire of terror, Heydrich spent less and less time with his wife and young children. Lina strongly suspected that her husband, with his strong sexual appetite, was taking time off to visit bars and brothels and indulge in casual erotic liaisons. Lina, for her part, was not a woman to accept her husband’s infidelity without complaint and keep quiet as a good Aryan wife should. A forceful personality in her own right, Lina took her revenge by indulging in affairs herself. She is reported to have had relationships with the Nazi artist Wolfgang Willrich, who painted and drew portraits of her husband in 1935, and with an SS officer named Wilhelm Albert. Most significantly for the Salon Kitty story, however, was her ‘friendship’ with Schellenberg.

It is certain that Lina and Schellenberg had formed an intimate bond soon after they first met at an official function in 1935. After the war, Lina admitted that she had deliberately and publicly flirted with the handsome young functionary in order to arouse her husband’s jealousy. But it is quite likely that the liaison went further than that. Certainly, Heydrich had good reason to think that it had. In his own post-war account, Schellenberg relates an extraordinary story. After enjoying a typical drunken evening letting off steam with his boss and another sinister police official, Heinrich Müller, Schellenberg claimed Heydrich told him that he had spiked his drink with a deadly poison and would only give him the antidote if he told the truth about his relationship with Lina. Schellenberg blurted out some sort of confession of intimacy, after which, he said, he decided that it would be best if he never saw Lina Heydrich again. If there is any truth in this story, it is highly likely that giving Schellenberg the Salon Kitty assignment was a twisted form of revenge that would have appealed to Heydrich’s warped mind.

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Excerpted from The Madam and the Spymaster: The Secret History of the Most Famous Brothel in Wartime Berlin, by Nigel Jones, Julia Schrammel, Urs Brunner. Copyright, 2023. Published by Pegasus Books. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

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