Ingeborg Syllm-Rapoport, who became Germany’s oldest recipient of a doctorate almost eight decades after fleeing the Nazis, has died at the age of 104.
A specialist in newborn care, Syllm-Rapoport received world-wide attention when she passed her oral exam at the University of Hamburg at the age of 102, in 2015.
Born in 1912 in Cameroon, which was then a German colony, Ingeborg studied medicine in Hamburg. However, in 1938, she was refused to take her oral exam for her PhD 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 supervisor, 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."
Ingeborg finished her degree in Philadelphia and in 1950 left America with her husband, the Russian-born scientist Samuel Mitja Rapoport, for Vienna. In 1952, the couple went to East Berlin where Ingeborg became the first head of neonatology at East Germany’s prestigious Charité hospital.
Rapoport is survived by four children, nine grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren.
