Reinhard Heydrich and the bugged Berlin brothel

Kitty’s Salon is the only English-language book about the eponymous wartime Berlin brothel, which was rigged with microphones and surveillance equipment by the SS to capture the secrets of foreign ambassadors, political rivals and high-ranking government officials. Led by ‘the man with the iron heart’, Reinhard Heydrich, it is one of the last Nazi operations still shrouded in mystery.

It is easy to see why. Right from the outset, the book’s authors, Nigel Jones, Urs Brunner and Julia Schramel, note that there are ‘practically no cast-iron sources for the events at Salon Kitty and the people who frequented it’. This is most likely why, after an introduction, the subject doesn’t reappear until chapter eight of the book. The bulk of Kitty’s Salon is about the sexual proclivities of the Third Reich’s most senior members and a history of prostitution in Germany, from the liberal Weimar period through Hitler’s ascent to power and all the way up to 1945.

Most information about the brothel comes from Madam Kitty, published in German in 1970, whose author Peter Norden described it as a ‘documentary novel’ (the authors of this book note that ‘he certainly did serve up some untruths’). It spawned the famous sexploitation film Salon Kitty in 1976.

Kitty’s Salon relies primarily on the 1956 memoirs of Heydrich’s counter-intelligence leader Walter Schellenberg to uncover whatever can be known about the brothel’s operation. No doubt trying to distance himself from the Nazi leadership, Schellenberg writes that Heydrich proposed setting up a place where VIP visitors would be offered ‘seductive feminine companionship’, and that in ‘such an atmosphere, the most rigid diplomat might be induced to unbend and reveal useful information’. He reveals that he set up such a place in Berlin, installing microphones and SD technicians in the basement.