Liddy Bacroff

alt=Text engraved into a square brass plate: "Hier wohnte Heinrich Habitz, "Liddy Bacroff", JG. 1908, ERMORDET 6.1.1943, KZ Mauthausen"

Liddy Bacroff (19 August 1908 – 6 January 1943) was a German performer and sex worker of the Weimar Republic era, persecuted and murdered by the Nazi regime during World War II. Bacroff rejected her male sex assigned at birth and self-identified as a "transvestite". Bacroff was imprisoned several times for "homosexual acts" under Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code and ultimately was murdered in the Mauthausen concentration camp.

Life Liddy Bacroff was first raised by her grandparents, and then adopted by Joseph Habitz, the later husband of her mother. Upon adoption she was given the legal name Heinrich Habitz, which later would not be changed. Bacroff was considered "difficult to raise" and was sent to reformatory for a year. After abandoning a mercantile internship, she worked several office and messenger jobs, and then became a circus "dance lady". In 1924, at the age of 16, Bacroff was first sentenced to six weeks in prison by the District Court of Ludwigshafen for an offense under Section 176 (3) of the Reich Criminal Code, which criminalized sexual offenses involving minors; later the penalty was waived. In 1929, she was sentenced by the District Court of Mannheim for a two-month prison sentence for "unnatural fornication" under Paragraph 175. In November 1929 Bacroff finally left Ludwigshafen and moved first to Berlin, and then to Hamburg, to be active in prostitution and transvesting/female impersonation shows under the name Liddy Bacroff.

In 1930, Bacroff was arrested for theft again and sentenced to two months in prison. Shortly after release from that sentence, Bacroff had to serve another month's imprisonment for trespassing. Almost a year later, in May 1931, Bacroff was sentenced again, this time to four months in prison for homosexual acts under Paragraph 175. In 1933 and 1934 Bacroff was sentenced to six and ten months in prison, respectively. The life story of Liddy Bacroff can be heard as an audio recording on the website www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de. It quotes Bacroff's notes from her stay in prison.

In May 2016, Mannheim Theater Oliv staged the play named (Want to flirt, romp, flatter! Let me - I'm Liddy), in which Bacroff's story was presented on stage on the basis of personal writings and other documents.