The 102-year-old Jewish neonatologist Ingeborg Syllm-Rapoport, who wasn't allowed to defend her doctoral thesis in 1938 because she was part-Jewish, has become Germany's oldest recipient of a doctorate.
The former specialist in caring for newborns last month passed an oral exam and received her doctor title on Tuesday at the University of Hamburg. The faculity said it "cannot undo the injustice she suffered ... but can contribute to rehabilitating the darkest chapter of German history."
In 1938, Ingeborg was not admitted to the oral exam because her mother, the pianist Maria Syllm, was Jewish. Under the Nazis' 1935 racial laws the then 25-year-old could not complete her doctorate despite having complete her thesis on diphtheria. Her doctoral superviser Rudolf Degkwitz at the time confirmed that the thesis would have been accepted if "the laws in force concerning the [Jewish] ancestry of Miss Syllm did not prevent the conferral of a doctorate on her."
Syllm-Rapoport emigrated to the United States in 1938 and worked as a pediatrician, before moving with her husband to East Berlin in 1952. The mother of four then became the first head of the neonatology at Berlin's Charité hospital.
When the dean of the Medical Faculty of the University Hospital Hamburg Eppendorf, Uwe Koch-Gromus, learnt about the case, he instigated an oral exam of Ingeborg Syllm-Rapoport, which she passed, in his words, "brilliantly" last month.
Ingeborg Syllm-Rapoport is considered the oldest recipient of a doctorate world-wide.
