Alcohol and unprofessional ladies turned out to be a better method of obtaining information for the Nazis than even the most brutal torture. This is the story of an enterprising brothel. She took out money from wealthy Jewish clients, and when they ran out, she did not hesitate to get along with SS men.
The exclusive Berlin brothel run by Kitty Schmidt offered more than just standard entertainment to its unfamiliar customers. By indulging in love games, one could inadvertently become a Nazi informant or a screen star . Kitty's salon was not an ordinary brothel. It was a secret SS center, full of all kinds of listening devices, hidden cameras, microphones recording all customer conversations and their bedtime achievements.
Let's use the prostitutes!
SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, it was he who was behind the creation of Salon Kitty (Bundesarchiv; lic. CC-BY-SA).
All the major Nazis had their own intelligence structures. It was no different in the case of Reinhard Heydrich, known as the brain of Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS. Heydrich chose to get information in the most perfidious way - by checking the delinquents' bed! In the Third Reich, prostitution was exterminated. The ingenious Reinhard decided to make use of the activities of the morons.
With the help of an agile brothel, Kitty Schmidt built a luxurious brothel full of spy equipment. It was in this unusual way that he learned about things that could compromise many an important personage of the world of that time.
The leading politicians of the Third Reich and allied countries used to visit Kitty. The Reich Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, his Italian counterpart, Mussolini's son-in-law, Count Galeazzo Ciano, and also Martin Bormann, Hitler's secretary, used it there. When Heydrich himself came - and according to the recollections of the employees he did it quite often - the whole equipment was turned off.
Resourceful brothel
Who was Kitty Schmidt and what prompted her to cooperate with the Nazi regime? Did Berlin prostitutes get bored with the standard package of services, so they started playing spies?
Tenement house at Giesebrechtstrasse 11 in the Charlottenburg district of Bielsko. The Kitty Salon was located in this building. (photo:Peter Kuley; license CC ASA 3.0)
Kitty owned a "boarding house" in Berlin. Before the Nazis took power in Germany, it prospered thanks to a wealthy clientele of Jewish origin. When the Nazis took the helm of the government, whoever could, fled from the Third Reich. Others met a dismal fate. The brothel-goers are also gone.
Hitler and his degenerate gang became so dominated that in 1939 Kitty Schmidt herself decided to flee Germany. Unfortunately she was caught. Walter Schellenberg, head of German intelligence (SD), personally interrogated her. He offered her a simple solution. Either the guesthouse will be converted into a brothel for information gathering, or Schmidt will be sent to a concentration camp and killed. So the choice was simple. This is how an innovative brothel with frivolous "intelligence agents" in the lead role was created.
Bed excesses and secrets of the elite
The salon functioned practically until 1945, despite increasing Allied air raids. Flowing customers, often under the influence of alcohol, said everything the SD wanted to hear. And so the son-in-law Mussolini managed to get information about how Italy wanders between the Reich and the Allies.
Probably thanks to the news from the Kitty Salon, Adolf Hitler decided to introduce the Wehrmacht to Italy and begin the military occupation of the country of the former ally. Who would have thought that the fate of the Italian state was decided by one heady evening culminating in dusty copulation!
Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano (second from left) in Berlin. During his numerous visits to the capital of the Third Reich, Ciano was a regular visitor to the Kittty Salon, where he unknowingly revealed many state secrets. (source:Bundesarchiv, photo:Hoffmann; lic. CC-BY-SA)
Martin Bormann also became extremely talkative when used with girls. Prostitutes were free to listen to all party matters, but Reinhard Heydrich also listened. He could then blackmail and even liquidate his opponents.
Joachim von Ribbentrop boasted about his ideas about future peace after the end of the war. It made the eavesdroppers laugh. For Ribbentrop was a man whom even the highest Nazi dignitaries considered a limited fool. I wonder if the political consequences of the Molotov Pact were discussed during Kitty's passionate pranks?
State weight brothel
The German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop also frequently visited Kitty Schmidt (source:Bundesarchiv; lic. CC-BY-SA).
The importance of the Salon is evidenced by an intriguing fact. When Allied bombs hit the site in 1942, repair crews were to work non-stop to bring Kitty's Salon into serviceable condition. The Nazis may not have completed their defenses, but the brothel has quickly resumed operations.
As soon as the Soviet troops began to approach Berlin, the staff of the brothel was evacuated along with all the tapes. The Russians found little. Kitty Schmidt died in the 1950s without revealing the place where the compromising material was deposited. However, there were people who decided to find them at any cost. One of them was the journalist Pieter Norden. The search for "tapes of truth" is successful!
It turned out that they were not evacuated far. They ended up in the eastern part of Berlin. And, ironically !, the entire 25,000 CDs with recordings containing the most intelligence of the Third Reich were saved thanks to prostitutes, so conscientiously exterminated in Hitler's state.
The information concerned the system of mutual dependencies, the situation on the fronts, political and cultural events. From them emerged an image of the struggle for influence in the Nazi party and in the entire thousand-year-old Reich. And already hearing or seeing the erotic exploits of the most important Nazis - priceless!