A trained milliner, Dora Kanner owned a hat salon in Berlin. During the 1938 November pogroms, she fled to her acquaintance Elsa Blochwitz. She stayed with her for nine months. After that, Dora Kanner lived as a sub-tenant of her friend Margarete Nebel, who was also Jewish. Warned by their landlady, the two women went underground in December 1942. They had to change hiding places frequently, often spending the day at Elsa Blochwitz’s home. Blochwitz also arranged for them to stay with acquaintances. From May 1943, Dora Kanner and Margarete Nebel usually stayed in an apartment behind a shop in the Prenzlauer Berg district. When it was destroyed in an air raid at the end of February 1945, they used the general chaos to conceal their identities and register as victims of bomb damage.
They went to Havelberg and turned to Gerhard and Wally Hagemann, who had already hidden a cousin of Dora Kanner’s, Lina Kahane and her husband Jacob. The Hagemanns found them quarters nearby.
After their liberation, Dora Kanner and Margarete Nebel lived with Elsa Blochwitz in Berlin again for a time. In January 1947 they emigrated to the UK.
