In the rustling of the silk sheets, the sighs of pleasure and the slanderous insinuations of the powerful people of the Third Reich who detested each other mixed together.
Wehrmacht officers called propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels Quasimodo because of a foot that tended to widen when walking, causing him to limp. Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was considered “as imbecile as an elephant”. And Wilhelm Canaris was mocked by his sailors according to whom – other than an admiral – he was worth “less than a buccaneer”.
In Berlin with the swastika, a (luxury) brothel – at number 11 Giesebrechtstrasse, in the Charlottenburg district – was transformed into an espionage center. It was managed by Katharina Schmidt who, having put away the skirts of the active prostitute, had recycled herself in the role of maîtresse.
They called her – confidentially – with the pet name of Kitty, so her brothel became “Salon Kitty”. There, with kilometers of wires, through dozens of microphones and on hundreds of discs, a formidable amount of gossip was filed – sometimes scabrous, sometimes ridiculous – in any case useless for a significant intelligence project. The “big ear” learned that Albert Speer – the architect of the regime – considered Martin Bormann “unbearable”. That Bormann – Adolf Hitler’s secretary – criticized General Adolf Eichman for his “prone to superficiality”. That the number one of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, did not completely trust even his “deputy” Kurt Daluege. And that Bormann, Himmler and Daluege saw in Speer a man “stiff as marble” who was employed in the construction of the palaces of the Reich.
Malice good for fueling power wars within the Führer’s magic circle. Effective for increasing distrust between hierarchs. But unlikely to support the burden of war.
The journalist Giorgio Ferrari is the one who puts together the fragments of stories where political intrigues are intertwined with carnal sins, who, for the publisher Neri Pozza (240 pages, 20 euros), signs the book significantly entitled The Alcove of Spies. Salon Kitty, sex and espionage in the Third Reich.
The project to transform a brothel into a counter-espionage center was developed by the Gestapo leaders: Reinhard Heydrich, who was given the hierarchical title of Gruppenführer, and his deputy, Walter Schellenberg. They seemed like two sides of the same coin. Without mental reservations, they identified with the religion of Nazism which they believed they could consolidate through breathtaking bureaucratic pedantry. Both showed themselves with a façade of impeccable culture but were unable to hide a borderline personality, bordering on paranoia. And both, before sorting into dossiers the rumors reported to others, had had to avoid those that affected them personally.
Heydrich was forced to face opponents who – secretly – referred to him by the name Moises, insinuating his Jewish descent. A mocking allusion which, in the climate of racial hostility, was worth an unmitigated shame. It was necessary for him to appoint a commission to ascertain that his genealogical record was one thousand percent Aryan. Schellenberg, for similar reasons, divorced his wife – Kathe Kortekamp – who ran a small tailor’s shop but – an irreparable fault – had too many Jewish customers.
Equipping a pleasure house to try to discover the most intimate feelings of the patrons was not even a completely original idea. Messalina had tried to read Suetonius in ancient Rome by enlisting some friends to investigate the political beliefs of their clients. In the alcove, confidences that normally remain behind more formal behaviors escape.
Similar initiatives were promoted by Theodora, in Constantinople, by the Tsarina of Russia or by the Council of Ten of the Serenissima who “bought” the confidences gleaned from the courtesans of Venice. And feudal Japan had “female agents” – kunoichi – who used female graces to secure information for counterintelligence. Results? Negligible. As in Berlin, after all, despite the deployment of a formidable technological apparatus.
The Salon Kitty dating house was already there. It had survived the advent of Nazism. In the previous season of the Weimar Republic, with Germany defeated, hungry and depressed, the sense of desperation and the desire to enjoy the last moment could coexist. In Berlin, there were 500 thousand telephone lines although most remained silent. The elevators worked but the houses remained cold. The cigars, although presented with the pretentious names of “Havana” or “Brazil”, were packaged with cabbage leaves. However, there were 120 thousand prostitutes who, for half an hour of false love, asked for 6 million marks (vouchers to buy half a loaf of bread) and a cigarette.
Hitler swept everything away with some indulgence for those who knew how to stay in the shadows, without being too noticed.
The basement of Salon Kitty became a listening center with shifts of soldiers changing every four hours. In the rooms, “militarized” girls worked. The casting, to choose the best, took place in Stuttgart. Each had to be young and – obviously – beautiful, with the ability to be intriguing without appearing vulgar. They moved with elegance, were intelligent and, despite some debt to justice, faithful to Nazi ideology.
Of the hundred who were examined, 22 were found to be suitable. During the training course, they practiced how to ask the right questions, with the necessary naturalness, as if it were innocent curiosity, thrown in there, more to fill the empty time than to really obtain a complete answer.
Peering through the keyhole, Heydrich and Schellenberg cataloged vices, manias, sexual tendencies and perversions. The bad moods confided between the sheets brought about forty colonels to the Eastern Front, which was (almost) equivalent to a death sentence. Sepp Dietrich was demoted despite occupying the role of commander of Hitler’s bodyguard. Chief of Staff Werner von Fritsch was forced to resign due to a wiretap that revealed his homosexual relationship, carried out in an alley in Potsdam. And a list was drawn up of 1,200 Englishmen “to be arrested once Great Britain was occupied”.
The Spies’ Nest was a masterpiece of state voyeurism as challenging as it was inconclusive. Whispers critical of the German government caused the expulsion of Dorothy Thompson who, credited as a journalist for the New York Herald, was declared “unwelcome”. Just as, at different times, it happened to Norman Butt of the Times and Louis Lochne of the Associated Press.
How could those beliefs, whispered in a whisper, influence the world conflict? Could it be useful to know that Mussolini’s son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano, was fascinated by Hildegard’s charms, asking her to wear the long emerald dress? «Your Führer», he confided, accusing, «lies as he breathes. He declares himself our friend but also a friend of the English. It is clear that he knows neither us nor them.” Embarrassing judgments (for the Germans) but unusable. What was the purpose of Foreign Minister Ramon Serrano Suner’s assurance that Spain would not join Germany in the war? Or that Hungarian diplomats, reporting the opinions of their government, commented that the alliance with Hitler was “uncomfortable” but that there was no question of a transfer of alliances with the enemy front?
In espionage, German failure is certified when compared to the resourcefulness of their British counterparts. In London, a Polish mathematician found the key to reading communications that occurred with the Enigma code considered “penetration-proof”. The Allies managed to decipher it and not make it clear that they had discovered it so as to know the enemy’s intentions and maintain the first move advantage. The rest is history.
