Salon Kitty, the SS run brothel in Berlin. Live broadcast. скачать в хорошем качестве

Salon Kitty, the SS run brothel in Berlin. Live broadcast.

Salon Kitty was a high class brothel in Berlin set up by the security services, the SD, during WW2. I Kitty was the nickname of the Madame and brothel owner, Kätchen Emma Sophie Schmidt. She was born in Hamburg on 25 June 1882. As a young woman Kitty went to the UK as a piano teacher . Presumably, Kitty returned to Germany after the end of the First World War. She settled in Berlin with her daughter. In 1922 she went into business at Budapester Strasse 27 with her first brothel. The law in the Weimar Republic was quite lax and in any case this was Berlin in the 1920s where anything went. In 1935 she sought new accommodation which she disguised as a boarding house, to Kurfürstendamm 63 and in 1939 to Giesebrechtstrasse 11, which is very close. Well-known public figures, foreign diplomats and high-ranking officials of the National Socialist regime were apparently among the customer base. The idea of opening or converting a brothel for espionage purposes is said to have come from Reinhard Heydrich , then the head of the security police and SD . At least that's what SD foreign chief Walter Schellenberg claims in his memoirs published in 1959, the first written document to mention Salon Kitty by that name. Heydrich may have been inspired by his fondness for British spy novels which had so impressed Heinrich Himmler when he applied for a job with the SD in 1932. Heydrich commissioned Schellenberg with the planning, who writes in his memoirs: “So I set about renting a suitable house using a front [...] Double walls, modern listening devices and automatic long-distance transmission ensured that every word spoken in this 'salon' was recorded and transmitted to a control center. The technical maintenance was the responsibility of the security service, and the domestic staff from the maid to the waiter consisted of secret agents.” It is disputed whether Kitty Schmidt was forced to cooperate or whether she made her house available voluntarily. One story is that Kitty was attempting to escape from Germany and she was caught. Schellenberg then gave her a choice. Open a brothel for us or be forced into doing something less agreeable. During renovation work in the 1960s, sockets and cables were found in a twelve square meter basement room that ran from the basement to the third floor. Condoms were the sine qua non and the service cost 200 marks. To put this into comparison, this is roughly what an industrial worker would earn in one month at the time. The qualifications required for work were to be "Intelligent, multilingual and National Socialist-minded’. Kitty Schmidt valued style and class, not only in clothes but also in manners. Usually only a few ladies were available on the premises, others were pictured in albums and could be summoned by telephone if needed. Using the code word “I come from Rothenburg’’, clients could have access to the ladies in the album. Their role was to loosen the tongues of the clients with alcohol and physical exertion and thus elicit information from them. According to Walter Schellenberg, Salon Kitty provided "excellent information", however, he does not give one single example of the excellent information received. Apparently it was an open secret among the visitors that all conversations were bugged and recorded. Count Galeazzo Ciano told his interpreter Eugen Dollmann: "Heydrich must be very stupid if he thinks that I don't know about his gentlemen in the next room. He should hide the microphones more carefully." Other prominent guests and clients at Salon Kitty included the head of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler , Sepp Dietrich , Reich Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and NSDAP Reich Organization Leader Robert Ley . Joseph Goebbels probably popped in too when no starlets were available. Frequent visitors were also Heydrich and Schellenberg which brings me neatly onto the point of the brothel. I think that these two set the whole thing up for themselves, a place they go could for a free bee at the tax payer’s expense. Both of them were noted for nights on the town, indeed in the 1920s when Heydrich had been in the navy, according to his ship mates he used to spend a lot of time visiting such institutions at ports of call. Only then he was a foreign sailor and had to pay for services received. Now he was the head of the SD and one of the most feared men in the Third Reich. Heydrich and Schellenberg also used to go out drinking together in the small hours. To make it even more interesting, Schellenberg was sleeping with Heydrich’s wife. One day, Heydrich told Schellenberg that he had poisoned his drink and would only give him the antidote after a full confession from him. As his wife had already told Heydrich of what she and Schellenberg were up to, then Heydrich probably just wanted confirmation.   / historysite     / alanheath