The Madam and the Spymaster by Urs Brunner, Nigel Jones and Julia Schrammel: Featured Excerpt

AUTHORS’ FOREWORD

The legend of Salon Kitty is well known to historians, filmmakers, cinema goers, and indeed to anyone taking more than a passing interest in Nazi Germany. But until now, verifiable facts have been few, and myths, rumours and legends have accumulated. The bare bones of the story go something like this: Salon Kitty was a well-known and exclusive Berlin brothel catering to high-class VIP clients both under the Weimar Republic and after Hitler’s rise to power. Shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War it was converted by the Nazi secret services into a sophisticated ‘listening post’ to spy on VIP visitors, both foreign and domestic, using a combination of sophisticated hidden microphone ‘bugs’, and specially trained ‘amateurs’: spy-prostitutes who would extract indiscreet information from their clients during pillow talk accompanying their erotic encounters.

Variously described by historian Hans-Peter Bleuel as ‘the Third Reich’s most prominent establishment of love for sale’; by the Der Spiegel journalist Fritz Rumler as ‘a high-class brothel’; and by documentary film director Rosa von Praunheim simply as ‘a place for spies to meet’, the truth about the establishment’s history and functions has proved tantalisingly elusive.

According to ‘Peter Norden’ (the pseudonym of journalist Joseph Fritz), author of the only previous book on the story, Madam Kitty (1973), which was the basis for the notorious Nazi sexploitation film Salon Kitty (1976), the brothel was utilised by the Nazi secret service under Reinhard Heydrich to spy on their friends and enemies after the brothel’s owner and manager Kitty Schmidt was brutally coerced into co-operating with the project. The brothel was already up and running when the Nazis first took an interest in it, and its owner was no ordinary ‘madam’ but an intelligent and sophisticated socialite at the heart of inter-war Berlin society. If we are to believe Norden’s account, Kitty was compelled into this clandestine collaboration after being brutalised in a cell at the notorious HQ of the Nazi secret police and security apparatus in Berlin’s Prinz-Albrecht- Strasse, where she was threatened with being sent to a concentration camp if she did not co-operate.

The originator of the plan to convert the brothel into a listening post and surveillance centre was Reinhard Heydrich himself. The cruel, ruthless and utterly amoral Heydrich was creator and chief of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office) or RSHA, an umbrella organisation under which he was combining all the rival security and secret police arms of the Reich into one monstrous maw of repression and terror. Heydrich’s plan for Salon Kitty was simple. His intention was to employ specially trained prostitutes to pull a Mata Hari-style stunt not only on important foreign diplomats and visitors, but also on the Nazi party’s own top leaders and officials. The sex workers would extract information from their clients’ conversations, which, unknown to them, would also be picked up on concealed state-of-the-art listening devices, recorded on wax discs or newly developed magnetic tapes, and constantly monitored by a team of SS technicians installed in the brothel’s basement.

Urs Brunner first stumbled on this astonishing story in 2011/12 when his film production company, ‘Angel & Bear Productions’, was approached by the film producer Mark Boot, who was considering making a new film of the story. He was looking for a business partner to develop and produce the movie and his pitch was persuasive. Mark’s portfolio included owning the licensing rights for the films of the Italian director Tinto Brass, including his 1976 movie Salon Kitty, dubbed by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper as ‘the most sophisticated of all trash movies about the Nazis’.

We were encouraged to pursue the story because at the time film and television producers were showing renewed interest in Berlin during the inter-war years. Though perennially fascinating, the city of Cabaret and Weimar decadence on the cusp of Hitler’s takeover was then presenting a more nuanced cinematic picture of the Nazis than had previously been the case. National Socialists were no longer just being paraded as the thuggish, one-dimensional bad guys in action flicks, or acting out their perversions in sexploitation films. Now they were the protagonists in serious films with Oscar ambitions such as Downfall (2005) and on German television. High-quality TV series about the Nazis and their incubation under Weimar such as Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter (2013) or Babylon Berlin (2017) were sold around the world. Likewise, Anglo-American productions such as Valkyrie (2008) starring Tom Cruise as Count Claus von Stauffenberg, Hitler’s would-be assassin, and a distinguished British cast, or Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds (2009) were other successful examples of the genre.

The first and most urgent question facing us as we looked at the Salon Kitty story was to what extent there were historical documents in the public domain, and what was based on secondary sources or literature. As we started to search for the historically documented story, we made a startling and sobering discovery: there were practically no cast-iron sources for the events at Salon Kitty and the people who frequented the brothel at Berlin’s Giesebrechtstrasse 11 in the western Charlottenburg quarter of the city. That at least was the result of our first round of – admittedly superficial – research. Instead of hard facts we came across a plethora of legends and wild rumours, spiced with lurid tales clearly designed for commercial exploitation. Initially, therefore, we were forced to agree with Die Welt newspaper, which, in 2004, concluded:

There was indeed a brothel in Giesebrechtstrasse, and the women there may have given reports to the police. Anything else that’s said about ‘Salon Kitty’ is probably invented, feeding on a combined smattering of historical knowledge, dirty imagination, and analogies with the methods of modern intelligence services.

Instead of just accepting this deflating conclusion, however, we were tempted to dig deeper. What led us on was Peter Norden’s book Madam Kitty (1973). For all its invented scenes and imagined conversations, and the author’s own admission that it was a ‘documentary novel’ somewhere between fact and fiction, it seemed to us to contain a core of truth that fitted the known facts. Norden also proudly labelled his book ‘a true story’. With due respect for a writer’s creativity and imagination it was hard to believe that he had merely invented all those ‘facts’. In any case, it piqued our interest and curiosity, so we optioned the film rights for Norden’s book and began our own serious investigation into Kitty Schmidt’s murky past and the details of what went on at her establishment in the Giesebrechtstrasse.

We began by systematically scrutinising the available literature and archives, along with accounts by contemporaries, press articles, and film and photographic material. Our search took several years and proved to be exciting – if time consuming and demanding. In the end, as the material accumulated, we forgot our original intention to just make a film, and this book is the result.

The book traces the activities and biography of the owner of the eponymous salon – Kitty Schmidt herself – and through her tells the story of the brothel that she ran. We attempt to separate fact from fiction as precisely as possible, and based on the recollections of contemporaries as well as memoirs, photographs and numerous secondary sources we have shed light on a very murky story, and at last told the full story of the salon, its owner, her ‘girls’, and the ‘guests’ they entertained and spied upon.

The story of Salon Kitty cannot be adequately covered and completely comprehended without a fuller knowledge of the Third Reich, the society that produced it, and of the history and methods of its espionage, police and intelligence services. We have, therefore, explored this dimension and set the story firmly in the wider context of Weimar Berlin, its famously louche and decadent nightlife and prostitution scene, and the way that the Nazis used and misused sex and eroticism for their own dark ends.

We describe the role that sex and prostitution played in Germany as a whole in the 1920s and 1930s, looking behind the image of glamorous Weimar portrayed in films like Cabaret to the seedy reality beneath. We examine the astonishing range of clubs and sexual services available to those who paid in the economically depressed and politically desperate country. We show how the Nazis used and abused sex when they came to power in 1933, on the one hand repressing the more overt manifestations of eroticism, and on the other abusing it for their own perverse purposes – such as in the brothels of their concentration camps, and the Lebensborn (Fount of Life) programme derived from the Nazis’ racist ideology, to breed a ‘pure’ Aryan race by encouraging women to produce children fathered by SS officers outside the ‘bourgeois’ confines of marriage.

We relate the story of the competing Nazi police and intelligence services – the Gestapo, the Kripo (Criminal Police), the Abwehr military intelligence agency, the SS and its own intelligence agency, the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service or SD) created and run by Heydrich. We tell of the dramatic rivalry and the strange love/hate relationship between Heydrich and his mentor, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr. We show how the all-encroaching Nazi police state created a climate of fear and terror with its official encouragement of denunciations by ordinary citizens of those suspected of opposition or disloyalty. The Nazi state, as we clearly demonstrate, was by no means a smoothly running machine operating with ruthless efficiency. Rather it was a mishmash of fiercely jealous personalities and competing agencies which got in each other’s way and bred mutual distrust and hatred.

Just as fierce were the personal feuds between the leading Nazi paladins themselves as they competed to win the ear and the favour of the Führer. The rivalry between Göring, Goebbels, Röhm, Ribbentrop, Bormann, Himmler and Heydrich was a constant battle, which materially contributed to the ultimate failure of the Third Reich. We look at the biographies of these brutal men to determine how their personalities and sexualities affected the disastrous course of German – and European – twentieth-century history.

The core of the book, however, remains the extraordinary story of Salon Kitty itself and the mysterious motivations of its owner. We investigate its origins under Weimar as Berlin’s most exclusive ‘house of pleasure’ and how and why it morphed into a Nazi-run brothel where the regime spied on society at large. We trace the course of Kitty Schmidt’s life, including the recollections of those who came into contact with her before, during and after her time as Germany’s most notorious ‘madam’. We question Kitty’s motivations: was she a cynical opportunist; a willing stooge of the Nazis who infiltrated and controlled her establishment; or just a woman doing her best to survive amidst intolerable pressures and threats? And how did this Aryan woman, with many Jewish friends and customers, perceive the all-pervading anti-Semitism lying at the core of the Nazi regime?

Finally, we journey to Giesebrechtstrasse 11 itself to visit the building at the centre of our story as it is today. Though badly damaged by an Allied bomb in 1943, Salon Kitty survived the city’s apocalyptic destruction in 1945, and resumed its chequered history. We enter the doors of the premises through which so many ‘distinguished’ (and undistinguished) feet trod before us; revisit the ‘love rooms’ where so many indiscreet secrets were spilled; and descend to the cellars where they were recorded by ever-listening ears. In uncovering the story of Salon Kitty we have told one of the very last untold stories of the Third Reich, its leaders and the Second World War.

Nigel Jones, Urs Brunner, Julia Schrammel

About The Madam and the Spymaster by Urs Brunner, Nigel Jones, and Julia Schrammel:

There is no book in English about the wartime Berlin ‘salon’ run by Kitty Schmidt under the secret control of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the architects of the Final Solution.

“Salon Kitty” was the most notorious brothel in the decadent Berlin of the Weimar Republic – the city of “Cabaret.” But after the Nazis took power, it became something more dangerous: a spying centre with every room wired for sound, staffed by female agents specially selected by the SS to coax secrets from their VIP clients.

Masterminded by Reinhard Heydrich, the spymaster whom Hitler himself called “the man with the iron heart,” the exclusive establishment turned listening post was patronised by the Nazi leaders themselves, not knowing that hidden ears were listening.

The Madam and the Spymaster reveals the sensational true story of this forgotten part of espionage history. The deep research undertaken by Nigel Jones, Urs Brunner and Dr Julia Schrammel sheds new light on Nazi methods of control and coercion, and the way sex was abused for their own perverse purposes.