It is based on the novel of the same name by Peter Norden,[4] covering the real life events of the Salon Kitty operation, under which the Sicherheitsdienst took over an expensive brothel in Berlin, had the place wire tapped, and replaced all the prostitutes with trained spies, in order to gather information on various members of the Nazi party and foreign dignitaries.

Wallenberg (Helmut Berger), an ambitious Nazi SS commandant, devises a plan to select a special group of female informants in order to plant them as prostitutes in a high class brothel on the eve of World War II in order to collect intelligence on various important members of the Nazi party and foreign dignitaries who frequent the establishment.

However, when one of the informants named Margherita (Teresa Ann Savoy) discovers that the surveillance project resulted in the execution of her lover, Luftwaffe pilot Hans Reiter (Bekim Fehmiu), she enlists Kitty to help her take down Wallenberg.

Production designer Ken Adam had recently suffered a nervous breakdown while working on Barry Lyndon, and he described his participation in this film as creatively regenerative.

[2] In a review at the time of the UK release, the Monthly Film Bulletin found the film to contain "a script that does nothing more than pile up the perversions as fast as possible (the characterisation hardly rises above the stock Nazi heavy while the motivation is consistently, and laughably, crude)" and hoped that "Italian directors will soon examine their recent track record of the atrocities of Nazi Germany (The Damned, The Night Porter, and now Salon Kitty) and abandon the subject for a long while to come.