Inside infamous Nazi-era brothel Salon Kitty — and how hypocritical Third Reich leaders used sex workers to their advantage

When the Nazis came calling in 1939, Kitty Schmidt wasn’t interested. She was the madam of “Salon Kitty,” a swank brothel in Berlin and one of the last sex-for-sale establishments legally allowed to operate in Germany.

When higher-ups in the Nazi party suggested Kitty turn her business into a high-tech spying center to electronically eavesdrop on her high-end clients, Schmidt declined. She wasn’t an ardent Nazi, and was offended by the party’s antisemitic views.

Still, she knew Hitler’s Nazi party wouldn’t take “no” for an answer, so she tried to flee the Fatherland.

She sent money to three Jewish friends in London with the intention of opening a brothel there and smuggled millions of Reichsmarks out of Germany by sewing it into the undergarments of her traveling “girls.”   

When trying to escape the Third Reich Kitty was captured near the Dutch border, getting dragged back to a Berlin prison where she was starved and beaten.

But given the options of a 2-year jail sentence, getting sent to a concentration camp, or rethinking her refusal to not help the Nazis at Salon Kitty, Frau Schmidt changed her tune.  

“I’ll do everything you ask,” she told her tormentors, as recounted by Nigel Jones, Urs Brunner, and Dr. Julia Schrammel in “The Madam and the Spymaster: The Secret History of the Most Famous Brothel in Wartime Berlin” (Pegasus Books).

The German economy tanked in the 1920s in the aftermath of their World War I defeat; the country during the Weimar Republic was rife with vice.

Brothels, strip joints, drag shows and pornography were everywhere, and many formerly-upstanding citizens were forced to work the sex trade just to survive. One family with an upper-crust past paraded their two daughters around in the nude, hoping to make a buck from anyone interested in buying their time. Syphilis, gonorrhea, and tuberculosis were widespread.

Germany’s louche lifestyle largely ended in 1932, when Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party swept into power.

The Nazis closed nearly all those dens of iniquity, with Hitler in “Mein Kampf” calling sex workers a “disgrace to humanity.” The Nazis’ fundamental problem with the country’s rampant vice was that it contradicted the party’s official stance regarding women, that being a German woman’s “only purpose was to birth and raise Aryan babies . . . as monogamous, faithful wives.”

But Hitler’s ruling party wasn’t completely naïve, the authors write.

“In order to lure as many foreign visitors to Berlin as possible for the 1936 Summer Olympics . . . the Nazis issued special permits to some 7,000 prostitutes licensing them to ply their trade in the city.” 

The Nazis’ hatred of homosexuality offered another challenge when it came to the outlawing of German prostitution. 

“Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, in a private speech addressed to SS group leaders . . . declared: ‘In this area [i.e., prostitution], we will be very generous, because we cannot on the one hand try to prevent our youth drifting into homosexuality, and on the other hand bar every way out of this. That would be insane.’” 

But the biggest hurdle the Nazis faced when trying to eliminate Germany’s licentious pastimes was that the party’s upper echelon was populated primarily by sex fiends.

“Every woman tempts me to my very core,” admitted propaganda minister Josef Goebbels. “I storm about like a hungry wolf … Sometimes I hardly understand myself.” 

Though Goebbels was a true party believer and should have therefore adhered to the idea sex was for procreation alone, his voracious sexual appetite earned him many lovers, despite having a club foot and a limp. Because he controlled the German media, Goebbels ended up bedding any actress he wanted — regardless of what those women thought — and was called “the cock of Schwanenwerder” (for the neighborhood where he lived) or “the noble buck of Babelsberg” (the German name for that country’s film industry).  

Married Heinrich Himmler, meanwhile, was considered the most puritanical of all the Nazis, yet he managed an affair with Munich singer Karoline Diehl even before getting to his most serious infidelity. That was with his secretary, Hedwig Potthast — “Häschen,” or “little bunny,” he called her — who at the onset of World War II became the Reichsführer’s full-time mistress. 

Martin Bormann, the Reichsleiter (organizational leader) of the Nazi Party, had an “unbridled” sexual appetite. He was both the father of 10 children with his wife and the long-time lover of the actress Manja Behrens, an affair Bormann’s spouse knew about, and approved of. 

“Heydrich’s purpose at Salon Kitty was to spy on its guests — those from both home and abroad — by offering them sexy, feminine companionship.”

author Urs Brunner

Robert Ley, head of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Labour Front) had torrid trysts with girls who were scandalously young. He also enjoyed an affair with opera singer Inga Spilker, whose subsequent pregnancy inspired him to divorce his wife though she was in the hospital with a heart condition. 

The end of that marriage may have been for the best, as one witness recalled a dinner party when Ley drunkenly ripped off his wife’s clothing in front of all their guests to celebrate “the wonders of German female beauty.” It wasn’t long after the divorce that the wife killed herself.

Though the head of a Nazi Party steadfastly against homosexuality, rumors abounded that a young Adolf Hitler enjoyed his fair share of same-sex love. He was a supposed fan of S/M as well, which was suggested by his carrying a “ubiquitous whip.” 

Hitler’s various lovers confessed to his outré desires, too. In 1937 the actress Renate Müller met Adolf for what she figured was “conventional sexual encounter” but instead experienced an “unpleasant surprise.” She said Hitler lay on the floor naked and called himself her “slave,” reaching climax only when the actress physically and verbally abused him and beat him with his own whip. 

The affair Adolf shared with his half-niece Geli Raubal was both erotic and dark, apparently bringing her no sexual satisfaction at all. Geli said der Führer orgasmed only when she squatted over and urinated on him.

Those claims were never confirmed because Geli soon ended up dead, shot with Hitler’s own Walther pistol in a supposed suicide. 

Given the sensual penchants of Nazi leadership, it was no surprise in 1939 when SS-Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich — nicknamed ‘’Hitler’s hangman” — suggested turning Salon Kitty into a listening post of love.

Heydrich was a roué himself, whose career in the German Navy was doomed when he left his upper-crust fiancée at the altar to have an affair with another officer’s wife. His subsequent nights of Berlin debauchery often ended with Heydrich “in the arms of one or more whores.” 

Having strong-armed Kitty Schmidt into cooperating, the brothel regular Heydrich turned her Salon Kitty — “all plush velvet chairs and curtains, reproductions of Old Master paintings and ornate wall mirrors in the cosy Biedermeier style” — into a much-bugged bordello.

Heydrich’s minions redecorated the establishment with hidden cameras in most rooms and 50 microphones throughout the house.

Behind newly-built double walls were tubes fed down into the building’s basement, where Nazi spooks — sworn to secrecy under the threat of death — were on duty around the clock to accumulate the resulting information on wax discs. 

Heydrich’s purpose at Salon Kitty was to spy on its guests — those from both home and abroad — by offering them sexy, feminine companionship. He hoped those satiated visitors might then “reveal useful information” during “post-coital pillow talk.” 

Everyone who worked at Salon Kitty, from Kitty herself down to the waiters and maids, were Nazi operatives. The women who sold their bodies there were recruited by Heydrich for their beauty and worldliness, the ability to speak a foreign language, a devout dedication to the Nazi cause, and, most importantly, a willingness to “f–k for the Fuhrer.”  

During Salon Kitty’s years of operation in World War II, approximately 80,000 discs filled with audio and video were accrued and sent to Gestapo headquarters.

Confirmed visitors during that time included the Italian foreign minister (and Mussolini’s son-in-law), Count Gian Galeazzo Ciano; Nazi Gen. Friedrich “Fritz” Fromm; Hans von Tschammer und Osten, the head of the Nazi state sports organization; and Heydrich himself, although the SS-Gruppenführer insisted all listening devices be turned off before he headed into the boudoir. 

Ultimately, whatever information might have been unearthed at Salon Kitty remains lost to history: The thousands of discs accumulated by the Gestapo were never found, meaning whatever secrets Salon Kitty’s contented customers may have whispered to those clandestine call girls will never be known.

That’s not to say SS-Gruppenführer Heydrich’s evil plan didn’t work perfectly, or so said one of his underlings in a post-war memoir. 

“The bugging operation certainly brought results — the most surprising information was yielded by some of the guests.”