In October 1932, Franz von Papen, the right-wing Chancellor of the Republic, banned same-sex couples from dancing together in public, effectively killing the clubs in which Heike worked. The Nazis came to power three months later, and as well as stepping up the attacks on Germany’s LGBT population, they resolved to destroy its Modernist culture.
Perhaps surprisingly, Schad was not targeted, and unlike many of his Dadaist associates and Neue Sachlichkeit contemporaries whose works featured in the notorious Degenerate Art exhibition, he stayed in Berlin, being allowed to submit to the Great German Exhibition of 1934. He remarried in 1947, five years after meeting the young actress Bettina Mittelstadt. In 1943, his studio was destroyed in a bombing raid, and when he resumed painting in the 1950s, his style had become kitsch. He died in Stuttgart in 1982, aged 87.
After Schad’s letter, we know no more about Heike. The Nazis raided Hirschfeld’s Institute on 6 May 1933, seizing its records and burning its library before repurposing the building and making the El Dorado into the SA’s headquarters. Dora Richter had already tried to flee Germany but failed, and was never seen again after the attack. We can only assume that Heike disappeared with her.