The Fuhrer's Prodigal Daughters: how the Nazi spy brothel was organized

The enticing title of the book by the international journalistic triumvirate "Kitty Salon" will cause movie lovers to associate it with the infamous 1975 film by Tinto Brass. However, on paper, the actual sexual component is not at all as prevalent as in the films of the Italian erotomaniac. Critic Lidia Maslova presents the book of the week specifically for Izvestia.

Nigel Jones, Urs Brunner, Julia Schrammel

Kitty's Salon: Sex and Espionage in the Third Reich

Moscow : Alpina Nonfiction, 2026 . — translated from English — 360 p.

Almost more than the strawberry itself, the authors pay attention to various undercover personnel intrigues associated with the abundance of competing special services in the complex hierarchy of the Nazi regime (the word "gadyushnik" is often used with pleasure in Russian translation). These intrigues are quite confusing, and the number of people involved in some kind of "double game" is large enough that the reader periodically feels about as puzzled as Stirlitz over "Information for Reflection." Sometimes it is difficult to get rid of the feeling that in the proposed journalistic investigation, the real facts are very densely mixed with fiction.

It is all the more difficult to separate one from the other, since the only book so far written about a special Berlin brothel for surveillance and wiretapping, "Madame Kitty" by Peter Norden from 1973, was declared by the author himself (hiding under a pseudonym) as a "documentary novel" where fictional characters also act. This does not prevent the authors of the Kitty Salon from actively relying on Norden in terms of specific figures, prices and volumes of espionage work, however, they have reason to suspect unreality, for example, of a certain Untersturmfuhrer Karl Schwartz, Walter Schellenberg's "right—hand man", which in reality was allegedly intelligence officer Alfred Naujoks, an assistant to the head of the RSHA. Reinhard Heydrich.

The authors describe Heydrich's life and personality in great detail, creating a colorful portrait of probably one of the most repulsive characters in world history: "Heydrich was feared and hated even by his closest colleagues: his rival in intelligence, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, referred to him as the "smartest monster" of the Reich. The formidable but twisted brain of the cruel and cold-blooded Heydrich generated more and more diabolical schemes aimed at expanding his web of control."

In addition to Norden's book, an important source of information in the Kitty Salon is the memoirs of the head of the foreign intelligence service of the SD, Walter Schellenberg, published after his death in 1956. On the one hand, they seem to be trustworthy, the authors of the book write, citing Alan Bulock, an authoritative historian and British biographer of Hitler. But, on the other hand, the authors of the Kitty Salon repeatedly repeat that it is precisely in terms of covering the activities of the spy brothel that Schellenberg "becomes suspiciously evasive" and diligently avoids specifics, devoting only a few pages to the institution.

So there is not much to profit from in terms of the content of the intelligence obtained in the brothel: Schellenberg only reports that this information was "excellent" and concerned mainly diplomatic secrets, "which Heydrich, with his constant cunning, subsequently uses against Ribbentrop and his Ministry of Foreign Affairs." In the same part of the book, the authors casually, not without comicality, expose Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop as a moron.: "Ironically, Ribbentrop himself was among the most important clients of the Kitty salon, unaware that the source of the secret leaks was the very building he visited so often."

Of the few piquant details that have been scraped together to date, perhaps we can mention the black socks that Count Gian Galeazzo Ciano (Italian Foreign Minister and Mussolini's son-in-law) did not take off in bed with salon employee Liesel Ackerman, who opened up in an interview with Der Spiegel magazine in 1976 and said, among other things what a difficult choice the police put her in front of: either a seedy establishment on Giesebrecht Strasse in a prestigious area of Charlottenburg, or a factory that produced tank tracks.

Photo: Global Look Press/Felix Vogel

Ciano is associated with one example of the real foreign policy "exhaust" from the brothel, although the intonation with which it is presented is also slightly vague: "We do not know for sure whether Ciano's bed conversations with Liesel and other women he met in Berlin played a role in his eventual discrediting and death." but, one way or another, the Nazis grew distrustful of his increasingly explicit anti-war position. They began to put pressure on Mussolini, and in 1943 he removed his son-in-law from the post of Minister of Foreign Affairs, demoting him to the post of envoy to the Holy See in the Vatican."

Another anonymous old lady, who decided to recall her turbulent youth, in 2004 does not provide anything more specific than general information, which you can already guess: "The women who worked with her in the salon wore elegant evening dresses and were trained in high society manners and methods of extracting secrets from their clients.". And the chapter "In search of Kitty Schmidt" begins with an honest warning that it will also not be possible to tell in detail about the mysterious hostess of the salon "due to the extreme scarcity of primary sources" and the lack of such valuable material evidence for biographers as letters and diaries. However, there is evidence from Karin Zikerik, the granddaughter of the caretaker of the house on Giesebrechtstrasse, who as a child watched the notorious Kitty enter and then leave the building.

Reconstructing the life of the salon owner in a hypothetical way as much as possible, the authors at some point even resort to graphological expertise, drawing conclusions from a miraculously preserved postcard with Kitty's signature about such traits of her character as "optimism, temperament and self-control." Otherwise, Kitty's figure remains shrouded in mysterious fog, as well as many other details of her establishment's existence. Admiral Canaris speaks about him most soberly and wittily in the book. After learning about the salon organized by Heydrich, Canaris, in a conversation with one of his agents, expressed skepticism about the effectiveness of border espionage.: "Firstly, I would never agree to send an Abwehr officer to a brothel, and secondly, I cannot imagine that during ordinary sex with a girl, a diplomat would suddenly stop and start discussing his country's military plans with her, and then lie down again and do what he came here for.".