Oliver-James Campbell

Kitty’s Salon is the only English-language book about the eponymous wartime Berlin brothel, which was rigged with microphones and surveillance equipment by the SS to capture the secrets of foreign ambassadors, political rivals and high-ranking government officials. Led by ‘the man with the iron heart’, Reinhard Heydrich, it is one of the last Nazi operations still shrouded in mystery. It is easy to see why. Right from the outset, the book’s authors, Nigel Jones, Urs Brunner and Julia Schramel, note that there are ‘practically no cast-iron sources for the events at Salon Kitty and the people who frequented it’. This is most likely why, after an introduction, the subject doesn’t reappear until chapter eight of the book.

In September 1890 a Frenchman called Louis Le Prince left his brother in Dijon and boarded a train to Paris, with the intention of connecting to London and then to Leeds, before finally joining his wife Lizzie and family in New York. But the weeks turned into months, and to his wife’s astonishment and dismay he never arrived or saw his family again. He had disappeared. A mere eight months later Thomas Edison would unveil the ‘Kinetograph’ to the world, claiming his apparatus to be the birth of the moving image, featuring ‘pure motion recorded and reproduced’ for the first time. Recognising the device as a version of one invented by her missing husband, Lizzie became convinced that Edison was behind Louis’s disappearance.