Jenny Kahane was the daughter of the Jewish businessman Jacob Kahane and his wife Lina, and grew up in Berlin. She had to perform forced labor from 1941. After the major raid at the end of February 1943 she went underground, as her parents had previously. When the Kahanes’ hiding place was hit during an air raid in November 1943, Jacob Kahane turned for help to Gerhard Hagemann, who lived with his wife Wally and their six children in Havelberg northwest of Berlin. He worked as an auditor in the episcopal ordinariate in Berlin. The Catholic family took them in without hesitation.
With Gerhard Hagemann’s help, Jacob Kahane and his family were able to pose in Havelberg as “bombed-out Berliners” and received “Aryan” identity papers and food ration cards. Having been allegedly bombed out, Jenny Kahane was soon called up to work in a Havelberg armaments factory. To evade doing so, she went to Hesse, where she was able to work in a field hospital. She was delighted to find her parents again after the war. After the Berlin Wall fell, Jenny Klein née Kahane contacted the Hagemann family and suggested them to the Israeli Holocaust memorial center Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.