In The Madam and the Spymaster, a trio of journalists probes the story of a German bordello that purportedly doubled as a listening post (Charlotte Shane, July 4, 2023).
THE MADAM AND THE SPYMASTER: The Secret History of the Most Famous Brothel in Wartime Berlin, by Nigel Jones, Urs Brunner and Julia Schrammel
The brothel owner Kitty Schmidt began to sneak portions of her savings out of Nazi Germany sometime in the mid-1930s, often by sending her girls to London with cash sewn in their underwear. By 1938, officials had caught on, but thanks to her police connections, she wasn’t formally charged with currency smuggling. Still, her time had come. If she wanted to flee the Third Reich, it had to be now.
A wealthy Italian client was poised to aid Kitty in her escape plan, but the telegram she sent him in preparation for her trip was intercepted and passed along to the SS functionary Walter Schellenberg.
Schellenberg, as fate had it, was searching for a location to serve as a listening post, a place where unsuspecting men inside and outside the Nazi ranks would be lulled into airing their disloyal thoughts in rooms rigged with microphones. The SS caught up with Kitty before she could cross the Dutch border, locked her in a windowless cell at Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse and abused her until she agreed to cooperate with Schellenberg’s scheme.
It’s a gripping story, and a largely unsubstantiated one. Although Schellenberg’s memoirs describe the existence of such an establishment, where all the staff, “from the maids to the waiter,” were spies for the Nazi regime, most of what we know is likely invented. In “The Madam and the Spymaster,” the journalists Nigel Jones, Urs Brunner and Julia Schrammel try to uncover the facts.
The mythmaking around Salon Kitty goes back half a century. In the 1970s, Schellenberg’s memoirs inspired the journalist Joseph Fritz (under the pseudonym Peter Norden) to write “Madam Kitty,” a novelized “true story.” Norden’s version of events was adapted in 1976 as a sexploitation film by the “Caligula” director Tinto Brass.
These twin products, particularly the blockbuster book, enhanced the legend’s notoriety if not its veracity. Viewers of the movie, in which Kitty teams up with one of her girls to destroy their Nazi overseer, would be forgiven for thinking that every character was a fiction.
Kitty, as the authors show, was a real woman, born Kätchen Emma Sophie Schmidt in Hamburg in 1882 to a salesman and his wife. In her early 20s, Kitty worked in Britain as a piano teacher; gave birth to a daughter, Kathleen; and married a Spanish man who later shot himself.
After World War I, Kitty brought her daughter back to Germany and opened her first brothel in Berlin. Commercial sex was effectively legal under the new Weimar government but became criminalized and heavily regulated again in the wake of its collapse. When Kitty opened a new establishment in 1935, she listed it as a hostel on official documents. Then the Nazis came calling.
Kitty’s life, as well as many significant developments in Salon Kitty’s history, “can only be traced in outline, rather than told in detail,” the authors admit in the ninth chapter of “The Madam and the Spymaster,” a book that 190 pages earlier promised to tell “one of the very last untold stories of the Third Reich.”
The book has its roots in Brunner’s conversations with a film producer who wanted to make a new movie about the salon despite having no “cast-iron sources.” Most of the key players, including Kitty and the Nazi officials most intimately involved with the project, were dead by the time Brunner and company began their research, and few primary source documents surfaced during their efforts. The authors are upfront about these absences, though they can’t resist teasing new revelations. “The truth of the matter,” they write in the first chapter, “we can now reveal.”
What follows is an interminable amount of padding concerning Nazi culture and crimes primarily oriented around sex: Nazi-arranged prostitution in concentration camps; the sex lives of “the Nazi elite”; the competition between the chief of security Reinhard Heydrich, the apparent mastermind behind Salon Kitty’s takeover, and his superior, the SS chief Heinrich Himmler. The thought process seems to be that anyone picking up the book is looking for titillation from any source no matter how tangential. The tension between academic rigor and cinematic aspirations delivers a frustrating result, one unlikely to please history buffs or casual readers.
The diversions are especially disjointed in the fifth chapter, which includes a summation of Leni Riefenstahl’s career and a condensed biography of Hitler as traced through his sexual exploits, none of which took place in a brothel. (Readers are informed that “it is difficult to believe that he was capable of having any sort of sex” by the end of the war.) The authors justify these inclusions as context without which one can’t understand “the story of Salon Kitty,” but it’s hard to fathom what these details illuminate.
Despite occasional grandstanding, the authors are scrupulous about delineating the holes in the very story they’re trying to construct, and that’s admirable. It must have been incredibly disappointing to spend so much time and energy in the pursuit of evidence that wasn’t forthcoming.
Arguably, “The Madam and the Spymaster” has provided a useful service in collecting and sorting the extant materials related to Salon Kitty, but this study makes up less than half of the book and by necessity gives extensive space to unreliable narrators. Peter Norden, who died in 1995, is cited regularly, but his research materials are unaccounted for and his book was denounced by Kitty and her family, who did not cooperate with his fact-finding mission. The result was a book in which Norden most likely “gave his own fantasies free rein,” the authors write. Schellenberg, living off his book’s advance, was financially incentivized to include prurient details, and his memoirs are full of “outright lies and distortions,” as one of his journalistic contemporaries put it.
The book’s worst offense is that it’s boring. Filmmakers of the past and present have correctly divined that Nazis and sex are endlessly captivating subjects, and yet here the authors can’t quite make the mix come to life. “It would be good to know more of the actual human tragedies that unfolded behind the scenes of the fabled Nazi espionage bordello,” they write, but “that must remain an area for fantasy.” It’s a shame the truth, scant as it was, couldn’t have been made as compelling as fiction.