High Stakes and Light Kink

After sundown, at a respectable address in Berlin, Nazi libertines went in and out of Salon Kitty, a brothel that was an illicit little toast to the Weimar years. Inside, a single mother from Hamburg popped corks for Hitler’s minions and adversaries alike. The S.S. used the louche environment to spy on Kitty’s besotted patrons, through mikes in the upholstery and clerks in the basement. The transcripts are lost to time, and we can’t be sure whether the sex workers even knew about the side hustle. But the authors of The Madam and the Spymaster listen carefully, sorting through 80 years of echoes.

It’s tantalizing to imagine pillow talk changing the course of history. The concept of Salon Kitty has inspired biographers and filmmakers and memoirists with their semi-assertions and soft-core fantasies. The latest authors—Nigel Jones, Urs Brunner, and Dr. Julia Schrammel—strain to sort the facts. As they close in on the truth, the conclusion gets further away. Their nearly 300-page project is not an airtight testimony about what happened but a waltz through a whispery bordello, where something definitely happened.

Before the reader can cross the threshold into Salon Kitty, the authors spend half the book explaining how sex really mattered to the Nazis. On his path to power, Hitler gained followers by insisting all sorts of sex should be verboten. After World War I, German finances flopped, and the city turned seedy. Weimar good times were rooted in economic bad times, and inflation felt like a hole in the hull of the ship of state, with flapper-bobbed floozies doing the Charleston on the top deck.

It got worse. Middle-class daughters tumbled into sex work, just to keep families afloat. (Same goes for sons, some of whom even dressed as girls.) Scandalized by broken norms, God-fearing Germans could all agree there was a problem to solve, and the Nazi opportunists quadrupled down on culture-war power grabs, till they dreamed up their “Final Solution.”

Inside Salon Kitty, a single mother from Hamburg popped corks for Hitler’s minions and adversaries alike.

Of course, the ruling moralists abandoned all morality when they took off their jackboots. The book’s apex villain, Reinhard Heydrich, emerges as the swaggering Aryan who hurries to his next conquest, whether it be in a brothel bed or in the ranks of his rivals. Blond, musical, and athletic, he wields a violin’s bow and a charm offensive in his boss’s salon, and then a smear campaign against any officer who gets in the way of his bureaucratic empire-building.

Heydrich steered Nazi funding to Kitty Schmidt for her Belle Watling business, and he often made his presence known. Inside, he would have seen girls done up like Dietrich and foreign dignitaries stumbling up to the third-floor “love rooms,” with their belts and lips loosened after some champagne. Mussolini’s son-in-law was a regular playboy and proved a disloyal foreign minister to Il Duce, and Hitler eventually offed him. But we don’t know if his betrayals started at Salon Kitty. Nor do we know if the handsy Heydrich was interested in getting info or getting off.

It’s tantalizing to imagine pillow talk changing the course of history.

Sex gossip was often a weapon. Before World War II, Hitler’s officers turned on each other with tattling and false testimony. Several of the leadership purges were sex-related: Hitler’s early loyalist Ernst Röhm, who barely hid his gay affairs, lost everything in the Night of the Long Knives. Another turf warrior married a lady of the evening and, when her sordid past was exposed, was sent packing. Later, two Nazi officers with the same last name faced a tribunal, when only one of them hooked up with a rent boy. The powers that be punished them both.

The book also spends grueling pages on the Nazi efforts to pull the plug on Weimar party zones, and how some of the harlots wound up condemned to be sex workers inside the concentration camps. In a miserable incentive system, the hardest-working captives earned a chance for a state-sanctioned quickie, in one of the saddest chapters I’ve ever read.

So if sex was Hitler’s preoccupation and also his predicate for absolute rule, why did the absolute ruler care so much? The authors diligently create a dossier on anyone his mustache tickled. For sure, he had paramours other than Eva Braun. Clearly the Führer dismissed as asexual was hypersexual, but with a twist. Pain, scat, and piss come into play. Some testimony comes from his own half-niece, who indulged the Führer by standing over him as he lay on the floor, and she for one was not having fun. His half-sister’s daughter is one of several mistresses driven to extremes: some attempted suicide, some succeeded—and some deaths might have been explained away as suicides when something even darker was involved. He also hurt his dogs.

The authors diligently create a dossier on anyone Hitler’s mustache tickled.

The authors’ storytelling goes backward and then forward and back again. A reader can get dizzy tracking all the episodes and characters, as the book defies the German stereotype of extreme order. And yet the more the cards are shuffled, the more it feels like a full deck. I believe the authors’ findings: the Salon was home to high stakes and light kink, if you could look past the injustice of it all.

Many did. And they saw a sex bazaar with its own internal order. Kitty comes off as maternal to her employees, who describe their jobs as comfortable and consensual. (It’s a living!) The adults-only zone was also home to a child: Kitty’s enterprising grandson Jochem lures hookers to come upstairs (nude, naturally) to buy bonbons from his candy stash. Sure, the fascists who bankrolled the enterprise demanded racial purity outside the Salon—inside too!—and their brutality was a fact of life. But Kitty risked everything to help many Jewish neighbors escape Germany, we are told. She even hired a Jewish chambermaid, who had fake papers and a Resistance-fighter boyfriend.

So the murk of sex work gets further obscured in the fog of war. The legend of Salon Kitty is lurid and sad. And yet shtupping Nazis can be funny—dummkopf despots with their knickers down. And the path these evildoers follow out of their marital beds does lead them downward, even to firing squads. It’s not quite comeuppance über alles, as the authors follow biographies to often miserable endings.

Even when sources prove dissolute or drunk, the reader can trust the book’s relentlessness, because the authors know when to fold ’em. “Kitty Schmidt’s historic role from today’s perspective,” the authors say, “is difficult to define and presents more questions than answers.” Their work is exhaustive, and they sound pooped.

Ned Martel is a writer and producer in Hollywood. He was a journalist for 25 years