Woman, 102, gets her PhD, after being denied by Nazi regime

Source: DigitalJournal

A 102-year-old German woman will become the oldest person to receive a PhD, which will be awarded to her by the Hamburg University on June 9, almost eight decades after the Nazis blocked it because her mother was Jewish.

Ingeborg Rapoport's professor at Hamburg University accepted her doctoral thesis on diphtheria when she submitted it in 1938, but her exam forms were marked with a yellow stripe because she was "a first-degree crossbreed" according to Nazi racial categorizations. Consequently, she was not permitted to complete her oral defense and was denied a PhD.

Rapoport escaped from Germany the same year and made her way to the United States, alone and poor. She applied to 48 medical schools, but was only admitted to one . She got married in 1946 and moved along with husband Samuel Mitja Rapoport to communist East Berlin in 1952.

She retired in 1973 from Berlin’s renowned Charite Hospital as head of the Neonatology Department.



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