Europe

Fabled Nazi-era brothel Salon Kitty finds new life

Berlin Letter: New book about alleged Nazi collaborator sparks interest of Netflix

The apartment building in Berlin which housed the Nazi-era brothel Salon Kitty. Photograph: Ullstein Bild via Getty Images

Derek Scally's face
Derek Scally in Berlin
Wed Dec 30 2020 - 01:00

When Kitty Schmidt died in Berlin in 1954, her obituary noted the passing of “the owner of an establishment run along Paris customs and favoured arranger of gallant entertainment for foreign guests of the Reich government”.

Nothing remains of the establishment but in my neighbourhood most have heard of Salon Kitty, and what made the brothel unique: the microphones.

Visitors came by afternoon and evenings, mostly by taxi. Down the Kurfürstendamm boulevard and take a right into Giesebrechstrasse, a discreet residential street with Kaiser-era four-storey apartment blocks with decorative plaster facades.

Inside, number 11, the third-floor apartment – spread over 500sq m – was advertised as a boarding house for actors. Visitors were greeted by a young woman in a maid’s uniform and in the parlour, day or night, two or three women in cocktail dresses made polite conversation.

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There was a large carpet on the parquet floor, heavy chairs and sofas, thick curtains, a chandelier, a gramophone on a pedestal, cabinets containing crystal glasses. Near the window, a grand piano was covered with a brocade covering. In the side corridor with private rooms, a pink light burned day and night.

Magda Frintropp, a neighbour, remembers the salon as “bombastic, with lots of silk, lovely lights and wall lamps, all very discreet”.

“You would have an album laid out in front of you and you could choose your type,” said Frintropp.

One unnamed former worker at Salon Kitty told German television 15 years ago of her former boss: “She didn’t take stupid women, she liked women who were married and who wanted to earn a bit on the side. Most of the time the men knew nothing.”

Weimar Republic

Katharine Schmidt was born in 1882 in Hamburg, one of six children, who moved to England and worked as a governess and piano teacher. A single mother with a daughter, she decided to move to Berlin – after her sister said the streets of the Weimar Republic capital were “paved with gold”.

From 1918 she began renting rooms – by the hour – and was already a brothel owner when she settled in the Giesebrechstrasse in 1939. The Nazi takeover six years earlier had triggered a puritan purge of the sinful Weimar-era German capital. Prostitution was considered un-German, though a small number of brothels continued to operate – under strict surveillance from the health department.

To stay in business, one version of the Salon Kitty story has Schmidt striking a deal with Reinhard Heydrich, feared head of security services, to adapt her high-end brothel into a surveillance object.

Another more dramatic version claims Kitty refused to accept Nazi informers into her staff and was arrested en route to the Netherlands. To avoid a jail term, or worse, she agreed to co-operate after all.

Before his death in 2006 Werner Raykowski, Nazi-era diplomat and personal assistant to foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, remembers daily dispatches from the brothel, written on brown paper, crossing his desk.

“It was often embarrassing what people said in a relaxed atmosphere, not realising they were being spied on,” he said.

Decades on, he remembered the fascist Italian foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano – son-in-law of Mussolini – as a regular visitor and an abundant source, “because he talked so much”.

Concealed wires

Few details exist on the actual surveillance but, during a 1960s renovation, builders found considerable quantities of wires hidden under the plaster, all leading to the cellar. Out of bounds for all in the 1940s, this is presumably where salon customers were listened to and where, in the case of VIP guests, wax discs were cut for senior Nazis.

Decades on, debate rages over whether Kitty Schmidt was a victim of the Nazis, a perpetrator or an opportunist. That the salon survived the war – and appears in no official documentation – suggests she had high-level protection.

Kitty took her secrets to the grave and the many unanswered questions about her salacious set-up make it a dream subject for film-makers and writers. A new German book, Kitty’s Salon, has sparked the interest of Netflix.

The new scriptwriters will have to work hard to beat the notorious 1975 film Salon Kitty, starring Helmut Berger in a series of increasingly ludicrous SS/Flash Gordon uniforms.

A bizarre cross between the musical Cabaret and exploitation classic Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS, the 1975 film pitched the salon as a place where “degradation was duty, and love not only an art . . . but a weapon”.

It’s unlikely Kitty would have approved.