Liddy Bacroff

Stumbling block for Liddy Bacroff, made out in her legal name

Liddy Bacroff (* on August 19, 1908 in Ludwigshafen , bourgeois Heinrich Eugen Habitz after adoption ; † January 6, 1943 in Mauthausen concentration camp ) worked on travesty stages and in prostitution and wrote some texts. Bacroff rejected the assigned male gender role and was referred to as a transvestite according to the parlance of the time . It is unclear whether Bacroff was transsexual . Bacroff was imprisoned several times for homosexual acts under Section 175 and killed in the Mauthausen concentration camp .

Life

Liddy Bacroff grew up with her grandparents and was then adopted by Joseph Habitz, who later became her mother's husband. Bacroff was given the name Heinrich Habitz , neither first name nor civil status were ever changed. Classed as "difficult to educate", Bacroff was put in a correctional home for a year. After a broken commercial apprenticeship, Bacroff worked in simple office and messenger jobs and then as a "dance lady" at a circus. In 1924, at the age of 16, Bacroff was sentenced to six weeks' imprisonment for the first time by the Ludwigshafen District Court for an offense under Section 176 (3) of the Reich Criminal Code ; later the sentence was waived. In 1929 the Mannheim District Court imposed a two-month prison sentence for "unnatural fornication" according to § 175 RStGB. In November 1929 Bacroff left Ludwigshafen for good and moved first to Berlin, then to Hamburg. Bacroff worked there in prostitution and travesty shows and took the name Liddy Bacroff .

In 1930 Bacroff was arrested again and sentenced to two months in prison. Shortly after his release from prison, Bacroff was again served a month's imprisonment. Barely a year later, in May 1931, Bacroff was sentenced again, this time to four months' imprisonment for homosexual acts under Section 175 of the RStGB . In 1933 and 1934 Bacroff was sentenced to six and ten months' imprisonment, respectively.

In prison, Liddy Bacroff wrote several texts about his own emotional world: Freedom! (The tragedy of a homosexual love) and An experience as a transvestite. The adventure of a night in the Adlon transvestite bar! .

In 1936 Liddy Bacroff was prosecuted for the first time according to § 175 a No. 4 RStGB, which was newly introduced by the National Socialists and made "commercial fornication" a punishable offense, and was sentenced to two years by the Hamburg District Court in the Bremen-Oslebshausen penitentiary with the revocation of civil rights for sentenced to three years.

After his release from prison in January 1938, Liddy Bacroff tried to evade constant police surveillance . Bacroff moved with forged registration papers - whereupon a wanted note was initiated. Liddy Bacroff was denounced two months later on March 25, 1938, when someone told the police that "a man in women's clothes" was sitting at a table with another man in the restaurant "Komet". Both people were arrested. Bacroff's table partner testified that he thought he had met a woman. Bacroff testified to police that he was wearing women's clothing "out of an abnormal disposition to buy on a homosexual basis". The following can be read in the minutes of the statement: “In the period from the time I had served my sentence until my arrest, i.e. from January 15, 1938 to March 25, 1938, I had about 3 men a day for 9 weeks. They gave me an average of RM 3. It has also happened that I received up to RM 10 from a client. In most cases I met my cavaliers on the street (St. George); in the rarest cases in a pub. Sometimes I spoke to people or vice versa. After we had agreed on the price, we went to the Kucharsky boarding house at the corner of Hansaplatz and Bremerreihe. The pensioner knew that I was a man-woman. "

On April 4, 1938, Liddy Bacroff submitted an application for "voluntary" castration . She was then examined by a forensic doctor from the Hamburg health department. The doctor classified Bacroff as "incurable", which was equivalent to a death sentence . In his report the doctor wrote: “H. is basically a transvestite. In terms of overall habit, he is accordingly feminine infantilistic, in terms of voice eunuchoid [...] As Urning = stick boy = passive pediatrician, he will probably continue to work after his possible castration, because in the absence of higher emotional powers, the immoral of his actions, e.g. B. Earning money through passive paederasty as a stick boy cannot be made comprehensible. He feels happy in his life situation and does not think about making a decent living from work. [...] He is therefore already permanently fixated, i. H. the habitual: the sexually criminal habitual form. […] Preventive detention is necessary due to the absolutely unfavorable forecast. As a personality in the form described, he is and will undoubtedly remain a moral spoiler of the worst kind and must therefore be eliminated from the national community. "

On August 22, 1938 Liddy Bacroff was the Hamburg Regional Court because of 'commercial sodomy "as" dangerous habitual criminals "to three years in prison followed by preventive detention condemned.

After the Gestapo and pre-trial detention, Liddy Bacroff was transferred to the Bremen-Oslebshausen prison in October 1938 and, after serving the sentence, was admitted to the Rendsburg security facility in October 1941 . In November 1942 he was transferred to the Hamburg police authority and then taken to the Mauthausen concentration camp, where Liddy Bacroff was murdered on January 6, 1943.

Commemoration

A stumbling block was set for Liddy Bacroff at her last place of residence in Hamburg, at 79 Simon-von-Utrecht-Strasse . Liddy Bacroff's life story can be heard as an audio recording on the website www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de and the smartphone app Stolpersteine ​​in Hamburg . Accompanied by sounds from the present, it is quoted from Bacroff's notes during his prison stays.

In May 2016, the Mannheim Theater Oliv staged the play Will flirt, romp, flatter! Let me - I am Liddy , in whom the story of Bacroff was prepared as a theatrical collage based on personal writings and other documents.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Bernhard Rosenkranz, Gottfried Loren: Hamburg on other ways: The history of gay life in the Hanseatic city . Lambda Edition, Hamburg 2006, ISBN 978-3-925495-30-4 , pp. 62 .
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h} Bernhard Rosenkranz, Ulf Bollmann: Liddy Bacroff (Heinrich Habitz) 1908–1943. In: gedenkstaetten.at. Undated, accessed June 4, 2020.
3. ^ Bernhard Rosenkranz, Ulf Bollmann, Gottfried Lorenz: Heinrich Habitz called "Liddy Bacroff" * 1908. In: Same : Homosexual persecution in Hamburg from 1919-1969. Lambda, Hamburg 2009, ISBN 9783925495328 , pp. 63–65 and 198 ( online at stolpersteine-hamburg.de, with 14 minutes of audio).
4. ↑ Stolpersteine ​​project sets biographies to music. In: Welt.de. November 13, 2010, accessed June 5, 2020 . 
5. ↑ Audiobiography Liddy Bacroofs on www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de. Retrieved June 5, 2020 . 
6. ↑ When you are in the wrong body. In: Rheinpfalz.de. August 12, 2016, accessed June 5, 2020 . 
7. ↑ “Want to flirt, romp, flatter! Let me - I'm Liddy. " A life story full of love and passion. In: Lesbian and Gay Association Germany - Rhineland-Palatinate. April 28, 2016, accessed June 5, 2020 . 
8. ↑ How a Hemshöfer boy Liddy Bacroff became. In: Rheinpfalz.de. May 9, 2016, accessed June 5, 2020 .