Kitty's Salon

Book excerpt: There is no book in English about the wartime Berlin 'salon' run by Kitty Schmidt under the secret control of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the architects of the Final Solution Salon Kitty was the most notorious brothel in the decadent Berlin of the Weimar Republic - the city of Cabaret. But after the Nazis took power, it became something more dangerous: a spying centre with every room wired for sound, staffed by women agents specially selected by the SS to coax secrets from their VIP clients. Masterminded by Reinhard Heydrich, the spymaster whom Hitler himself called 'the man with the iron heart', the exclusive establishment turned listening post was patronised by the Nazi leaders themselves, not knowing that hidden ears were listening. One of the last untold stories of the Second World War, Salon Kitty's sensational true history is now revealed by historians Nigel Jones, Urs Brunner and Dr Julia Schrammel. After years of painstaking research and investigation, the story they tell sheds new light on Nazi methods of control and coercion, and the way that they used and abused sex for their own perverse purposes.