Toni Ebel (1881 – 1961) artist.

Hugo Otto Arno Ebel was raised in Berlin, the eldest of eleven children. Ebel left home because of what was taken to be homosexuality, and worked, as a woman, in a women's dress shop while studying painting in Munich. She then travelled abroad with an older man.

However in 1911 Ebel was back in Berlin and had reverted to being male. He married and they had a son – however he was not comfortable in this role and attempted suicide several times. He was able to cross-dress only in private. He was drafted into the Army in 1916. After the war he became involved with the workers' movement, painted and made a living as a commercial artist. His wife became sick.

In 1928 his wife died. Ebel became Toni again and obtained a transvestity permit. A friend introduced Toni to Magnus Hirschfeld. From 1929-33 Toni lived in the basement and supplemented the domestic staff at the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft as she was too poor to pay for treatment, but did also donate paintings. She made a formal application for a legal name change. The surgeries by Drs Erwin Gohrbandt, Felix Abraham and Ludwig L. Lenz took only two years (compared to the seven years for Dörchen Richter) and were complete in 1931.

In 1934, after the Nazi takeover, Toni fled to Czechoslovakia, claiming to be a Jewess. She settled in Prague using the name Antonia Ebelová. In 1937 she moved to Brno.

Portrait by Josef Brück, 1952.

After the Second World War, Toni was able to claim compensation from the German Democratic Republic as a victim of Nazism. She was a minor painter and was recognized at the Akademie der Künste in East Berlin.

She died at age 80.

• Felix Abraham. "Genitalumwandlungen an zwei männlichen Transvestiten". Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft und Sexualpolitik, 18, 1931: 223-226. Translated as "Genital Reassignment on Two Male Transvestites". The International Journal of Transgenderism, 2,1, Jan-March 1998. Online.
• Sander L. Gilman. Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999: 276.
• Rainer Herrn. Schnittmuster des Geschlechts. Transvestitismus und Transsexualität in der frühen Sexualwissenschaft. Giessen: Psychosozial-Verlag 2005: 203-4.
  
• Ralf Dose. "Ralf Dose, Magnus Hirschfeld Gesellschaft, Berlin, Germany: Thirty Years of Collecting Our History - Or: How to Find Treasure Troves". LGBTI ALMS 2012: The Future of LGBTI Histories, 2012.06/18. http://lgbtialms2012.blogspot.com/2012/06/thirty-years-of-collecting-our-history.html.
  
• Julie Nero. Hannah Höch, Til Brugman, Lesbianism, and Weimar Sexual Subculture. PhD Thesis, Department of Art History and Art, Case Western Reserve University, 2013: 269. PDF.
  
• Ralf Dose. Magnus Hirschfeld: The Origins of the Gay Liberation Movement. 2014: 55.
  
• Přehled Historických Událostí Vztahujících Se K Tématu. (Overview historical events related to the topic) [Czechoslovakian Artists]:101. PDF.
  

Kunst in der DDR    Deutsche Digitale Bibiothek    Deutsche FotoThek
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Karl Giese, Hirschfeld’s lover, also fled to Brno, where he committed suicide after the German occupation.   It is not known whether Toni and Karl were in contact.

The document on Czechoslovak artists is not sure whether Toni was Jewish or Protestant.   There are claims both ways.  It was very difficult to claim refugee status as a transsexual in 1934, so it may have been easier to pretend to be Jewish.   Or maybe she was Jewish.

We do not know how she survived from the German occupation of Czechoslovakia until the creation of the German Democratic Republic in 1949.

Ludwig L. Lenz (1889- 1966) surgeon.

Ludwig Levy-Lenz was raised by a wealthy family in Posen, Germany (now Poznań, Poland). In 1909 he went with his younger brother Siegbert to medical school in Heidelberg and then Munich and Breslau.

In the Great War he set up a hospital for reconstructive surgery, and also supervised a military brothel. After the war, with his parents financial support, he opened a medical practice at the Rosenthaler Platz, Berlin.

In 1926, he divorced his first wife, Denise, a dancer, and moved his practice to the Berliner Westend. He worked at Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissen-schaft 1925 – 33. He was one of first surgeons to perform genital reassignment. He also published on abortion techniques, and he wrote booklets for the general public on how to avoid venereal diseases which were distributed in public toilets. His second marriage to  Elma Wilhelm lasted until 1932, the year that he and Felix Abraham operated on Dörchen Richter. He married his third wife, Marya Goldwasser, a Jewess twenty years his junior, in 1933, which was the year that the Nazis attacked and destroyed the Institut.

Ludwig and Marya fled to Paris, where Ludwig acquired new skills as a cosmetic surgeon. There was increased tolerance in the year before the Berlin Olympic Games, and Levy-Lenz returned and opened a surgical practice on the fashionable Kurfürstendamm. However in late 1936 he had to flee again.

In 1939 he was deprived of his German citizenship. He settled in Egypt, where he was very successful, and had a villa near the Giza pyramids. One of his first patients was the great singer Umm Kukthum. He was editor of the Cairo-based Revue of Medicine. In 1944 his second wife, Elma Wilhelm, had her property confiscated. However a French translation, La femme initiée, of one of his books was allowed to be printed in Paris during the German occupation.

After the war, Ludwig also practiced in Baden-Baden as a cosmetic surgeon, but he dropped his double surname. Jeanette Schmid had surgery with Dr Lenz in Cairo in 1964.

In 1965 he returned to Berlin, and died a year later.

Adele Bailey had surgery at his Cairo clinic in 1976.

Ludwig also wrote fiction.

• Peter Schmidt & Ludwig Levy-Lenz. Die Erfolge der Steinachbehandlung beim Menschen, Berlin: G. Ziemsen, 1921.
• Magnus Hirschfeld & Ludwig Levy-Lenz. Sexual-Katastrophen: Bilder aus dem modernen Geschlechts- und Eheleben. Leipzig: Payne, 1926.
• Maria Winter & Ludwig Levy-Lenz. Abtreibung oder Verhütung der Schwangerschaft? Berlin-Hessenwinkel: Verlag d. Neuen Gesellschaft, 1928.
• Ludwig Levy-Lenz. Die aufgeklärte Frau: ein Buch für alle Frauen. Berlin: Man-Verl, 1928.
• Ludwig Levy-Lenz. Janine: Tagebuch einer Verjüngten, Berlin: Man Verlag, 1928.
• Ludwig Levy-Lenz. Wenn Frauen nicht gebären dürfen: Bedeutg u. Methode d. Empfängnisverhütg gemeinverst. dargest. Berlin-Hessenwinkel: Verlag d. Neuen Gesellschaft, 1928.
• Arthur Koestler, A. Willy, Norman Haire & Ludwig Levy-Lenz. The Encyclopœdia of Sexual Knowledge. London: F. Aldor, 1934.
• Ludwig Levy-Lenz. La femme initiée, Paris: Le Caire, R. Schindler, 1943.
• Ludwig Levy-Lenz. Diskretes und Indiskretes: (Memoiren eines Sexualarztes). Dischingen/Wurttemberg: Wadi-Verlagsbuchhandlung, 317 pp 1951. English translation as Discretion and indiscretion: memoirs of a sexologist. New York: Cadillac Pub. Co., 512 pp 1951.
• Ludwig Levy-Lenz. Praxis der kosmetischen Chirurgie. Fortschritte u. Gefahren, 1954.
• “Ludwig levy-Lenz, M.D.” Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (1919-1933). http://www.hirschfeld.in-berlin.de/institut/en/personen/pers_11.html.
• “Ludwig Levy-Lenz (1889-1966)”. Archive for Sexology. www2.hu-berlin.de/sexology/GESUND/ARCHIV/COLLLNZ.HTM.
• Yasmene Jabar. “Dr. Ludwig Levy Lenz”. The International Transsexual Sisterhood. www.the-sisterhood.net/thepinknazi/id10.html. No Longer Available.

DE.WIKIPEDIA     WORLDCAT

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I was unable to find anything on Marya Goldwasser after 1933.  Surely she did not return to Berlin with Levy-Lenz in 1935.  Did she go to Cairo with him?

The dates of Lenz’ birth and death vary.   The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft site says 1889-1976.  The Archive for Sexology says 1889-1966.   de.Wikipedia says 1892-1966. !!

I would like to know more about Levy-Lenz’ Clinique de Berlin.  It would seem to still be operating in 1976 when Adele Bailey went to Cairo for surgery.  However when Sally Mursi, a native of Cairo, needed surgery in 1988, it apparently was no longer there.

Adele Bailey (1955 - 1978) murdered.

Adele had surgery in Egypt in 1976.  Probably that was at the clinic of Hirschfeld's colleague Ludwig Levy-Lenz who fled from the Nazis and started a practice there in 1939, although Levy-Lenz had died earlier. 

Adele worked as a prostitute in St Kilda, Melbourne, where she was arrested by police detective Denis Tanner.

In 1978 she moved to Bonnie Doon (map), 115 km away. She wrote to her sister that she was having an affair with Denis Tanner, and that she was afraid about a court case where she was to give evidence against an undercover policeman. She then disappeared.

In 1984, Jennifer Tanner of Bonnie Doon, Denis Tanner’s sister-in-law, was shot twice in the head, and in both hands, using a rifle that needed reloading. The police initially declared it to be suicide.

The coroner delivered an open finding, and criticized the police investigation. In 1988 Tanner was promoted to sergeant. In 1990 he was taken off the drug squad after allegations that he leaked information.

In 1995, seventeen years after her disappearance, Adele’s skeleton was found in a deserted mineshaft near Tanner’s property. Later the same year, Tanner’s farmhouse was burnt down. The police and others assumed a link between the two killings, and Denis Tanner was the only person who knew both women.

In 1998 a new coroner found that Tanner had killed Jennifer. The Office of Public Prosecutions did not proceed against Tanner on the grounds of insufficient evidence. In 1999 allegations were made that Tanner had had an improper relationship with Adele Bailey, but the coroner was unable to make a finding, and later Tanner resigned from the force.

That year the State of Victoria offered $50,000 for further information, and in 2005 upped the offer to $1 million.

In 2010, 32 years after the murder of Adele, there was a breakthrough in the investigation. Evidence was given to the Office of Police Integrity that Adele was at a party with several police officers and performed sex on one of them (not Denis Tanner).  He later that evening found out that she was transsexual, went berserk and beat her to death.  The other officers present covered it up.


*Denis Tanner is not the character in Coronation Street.

• Robin Bowles. Blind Justice: The True Story of the Death of Jennifer Tanner. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin. 1998.
• "Book stays open on transexual's mysterious death". ABC News. 03/06/1999. www.abc.net.au/7.30/stories/s27850.htm
• Robin Bowles. No Justice: An Investigation into the Death of Adele Bailey. Sydney: Pan Macmillan. 2000.
• “Copper in Trouble”. The Age. Feb 25 2003. www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/02/24/1046063962636.html. 
• Keith Moor. "New evidence implicates several former police officers in Adele Bailey murder". Herald Sun. July 27, 2010. 

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The press articles simply describe Adele as a 'transsexual prostitute' and give no further details. Given the prurient interest in trans women in other murder stories, this is no small mercy, but one does wonder how she went from being arrested to being a witness in a bigger case.


Furthermore, why would a small-town copper be arresting a 'prostitute' in the big city? St Kilda was not his manor.


The press interest is mainly in the other victim, Jennifer Tanner, and this is reasonable given that she was a local in a village of 755, and of course how do you commit suicide by shooting both hands and then twice in the head, or was it the other way around?



Video from the Herald Sun.

Jeanette Schmid (1924 – 2005) whistler.

Rudolf Schmid was born in Volary, Sudetenland (now in the Czech Republic). He was into cross-dressing and singing and dancing from an early age. At the age of 17 he served in the Wehrmacht in Italy until invalided home with typhoid fever.

Like many Sudeten Germans, he fled from Czechoslovakia in 1945, in his case to Munich, where he started a career as a female-impersonator. Using the name Jeanette he was appearing at the Hansa Theatre in Hamburg when he was invited to Tehran by the Shah of Iran and his wife. However in Tehran, his act and costume was too saucy, and he substituted whistling a polka by Johann Strauss and Offenbach’s Barcarole.

The drag whistler under the name Baroness Lips von Lipstrill appeared with Sinatra, Piaf and Dietrich.

Schmid lived for 15 years in Cairo, where he became a woman in 1964, with surgery by Ludwig Levy-Lenz, who had previously worked with Magnus Hirschfeld, and had done the genital surgery on Dörchen Richter in 1932.

Jeanette then moved to Vienna where whistling is an established art.

She was rediscovered in the 1980s by director Andre Heller, and then toured Europe and played Broadway.

Austrian decoration of Merit in Gold, 2004.

She died of the flu.

She can be seen in the documentary film Bellaria - So lange wir leben!, 2002, about a cinema in Vienna which shows old German films.

• “Whistling saved the day when her routine was deemed too risque”. Sydney Morning Herald. March 28, 2005. www.smh.com.au/news/Obituaries/Whistling-saved-the-day-when-her-routine-was-deemed-too-risque/2005/03/27/1111862255553.html?oneclick=true.
• Doris Blow. “Jeanette Schmid 1924-2005”. Doris’s Blowg!. March 22, 2005. dorisblowg.blogspot.com/2005/03/jeanette-schmid-1924-2005.html.
• Mel Gussow. “Review/Theater; 'Heller's Wonderhouse': Back to Old Vaudeville”. The New York Times. October 21, 1991. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE6DC1130F932A15753C1A967958260.

Dörchen Richter (1891 - 1933) waiter, cook, maid.

Rudolph Richter was born in the Erzgebirge region of Germany.

Dörchen or Dora attempted to tourniquet her penis at age 6. She expressed a strong dislike of male clothing, and was permitted to live as female.


She worked as a waiter or a cook in the fancy hotels in Berlin in the summer, and lived as a woman in the off-season. The police arrested her several times for cross-dressing, and she was sent to a male prison. Eventually a judge took pity on her and referred her to Magnus Hirschfeld who helped her obtain an official permit to dress in women’s clothes.

She was medically castrated in 1922 by Dr Erwin Gohrbandt at the Charité Universitätsmedizin in Berlin. She was offered vaginoplasty 1931, and so was one of the first persons to have a sex-change operation. The surgeons were Hirschfeld’s colleagues, Ludwig Levy-Lenz and Felix Abraham.

Afterwards Dörchen worked as a maid at Hirschfeld's Institut fuer Sexualwissenschaft until it was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933. She is not known to have survived this attack.

She was played by Tima die Goettliche in Rosa Von Praunheim’s movie about Hirschfeld.

Click for other Hirschfeld patients.

• Felix Abraham. “Genitalumwandlungen an zwei männlichen Transvestiten”. Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft und Sexualpolitik, 18: 223-226. 1931. English translation as “Genital Reassignment on Two Male Transvestites”. The International Journal of Trangenderism. 2, 1. Jan-Mar 1998. Case 1.   Online.
• Rosa Von Praunheim (dir & scr). Der Einstein des Sex - Leben und Werk des Dr. M. Hirschfeld (The Einstein of Sex: Life and Work of Dr. M. Hirschfeld). Scr: Chris Kraus, Valentin Passoni, Friedl von Wangenheim, with Tima die Goettliche as Dörchen. Germany/Netherland 100 mins 1999.  IMDB 
• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge, Ma, London: Harvard University Press. 363 pp 2002: 19-20, 292n13.
• "Rudolph R./Dorchen". Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (1919-1933). www.hirschfeld.in-berlin.de/institut/en/personen/pers_34.html