Dora Lindenberger née Raphael

Dora Lindenberger was born Dora Raphael in Posen (now Poznan, Poland) on December 11th 1887. In 1912 she married Adolf Lindenberger, son of Isaak Lindenberger, in Berlin, where she settled. Whereas three of Adolf’s brothers were sent to the United States to expand Isaak’s salmon business, Adolf and Dora remained in Berlin, where Adolf was put in charge of the Lindenberger shop in the central Berlin marketplace. Dora occasionally helped out in the shop. Adolf had been trained in music and had hoped for a career as a composer and remained disappointed throughout his life at being forced into the family business. The couple had two children, Manfred (1914-2008) and Hanni (1921-43). Dora encouraged Manfred to undertake medical studies at the Humboldt University, from which he eventually graduated with a degree in dentistry. He was able to emigrate to the United States in 1937, but to practice dentistry there he was forced to go through dental school once more in his adopted country.
During the early 1930s financial constraints forced Adolf, Dora and their family to give up their private apartment and to move in with Adolf’s father and his unmarried brother Nathan at the family house at Georgenkirchstraße 31. Manfred remembered a political meeting his sister held at the house before his departure in 1937. Dora overheard the participants at the meeting and, realizing the potential danger to the family, insisted that Hanni and her friends meet elsewhere. Adolf died a presumably natural death on 12 December 1941. Hanni married Gerd Meyer, both of them members of the Herbert Baum resistance group, the following month; Gerd moved into the Lindenberger house.
After the death of Isaak in October 1941 and of Adolf two months later, Dora was living alone with Hanni and subsequently with Gerd as well. On May 18, 1942, the Baum group staged a sabotage of the Nazi anti-Soviet exhibit “Das Sowjet-Paradies,” for which nearly all members of the group were subsequently arrested. Dora, together with the mothers of several members of the group, attended her daughter’s trial in the Volksgerichtshof on December 10, 1942. Hanni was executed by guillotine together with other Baum-group members on March 4, 1943. Dora was deported to Auschwitz on June 26, 1943. She was survived by two brothers who had settled in Berlin but who emigrated during the 1930s to the then-Palestine, where a number of their descendants now live.