customer of the salon with a regular girl, and later arranged a wiretap to three cables. After that, British intelligence heard some of the same conversations as the SD. Air raid and closing As the war progressed, the clientele of Salon Kitty decreased. In July 1942, the building was demolished during a British air attack and the brothel had to be relocated. Within the year the SD decided to abandon the project and handed the salon back to Schmidt, with the threat that she should keep silent or face retaliation. Madame Schmidt did not talk about the matter even after the war. She died in 1954, at the age of 71, without revealing the identity of any of her former employees. The number of Gestapo recordings from the brothel was estimated by the Stasi (East German Security Service) to be about 25,000. Virtually all of the recordings have since been lost or destroyed due to their post-war unimportance. According to a 2005 article in Die Tageszeitung, the brothel continued to exist after World War II under the management of Schmidt's son and daughter. In the 1990s, it was turned into a home for asylum-seekers, which was closed soon after because of local protest against the residents. Media The story of what happened at Salon Kitty first came to light in Walter Schellenberg's memoirs, published in Germany in 1956 under the title The Labyrinth. Peter Norden later expanded the story in his 1973 book Madam Kitty. This book became the basis for the highly controversial 1976 film Salon Kitty, directed by Tinto Brass and starring Helmut Berger as Walter Schellenberg (renamed Helmut Wallenberg) and Ingrid Thulin as Kitty Schmidt (renamed Kitty Kellermann). The 1981 BBC comedy drama Private Schulz, about a German fraudster and petty criminal's unwilling World War II service in the SS, prominently features the salon. In the first episode, Schultz has been given the job of manning a listening post in the brothel's basement and recording the conversations picked up by the hidden microphones. The concept of the Gestapo using a brothel full of spies to find traitors within the Nazi regime has been recycled several times in various European Nazi exploitation films. See also Prostitution in Germany Sexual slavery by Germany during World War II German military brothels in World War II References Sources Printed Online World War II espionage Brothels in Germany Society of Nazi Germany