Ingeborg Rapoport to Become Oldest Recipient of Doctorate After Nazi Injustice is Righted
Ingeborg Rapoport was 25 when she wrote her doctoral thesis, but she had to wait until Wednesday to defend it before an academic committee—77 years later.
Ms. Rapoport, a 102-year-old retired neonatologist who lives in Berlin, submitted her thesis to the University of Hamburg in 1938, five years after Adolf Hitler took power. Her topic was diphtheria, an infectious disease that was then a leading cause of death among children in the U.S. and Europe.
Ms. Rapoport’s professor, a one-time Nazi party member, praised her work, she recalled. But that wasn’t enough. “I was told I wasn’t permitted to take the oral examination,” she said.
Academic authorities in Berlin cited “racial reasons” for the ban: Ms. Rapoport, née Syllm, was raised as a Protestant, but her mother was Jewish, making her “a first-degree crossbreed” in Nazi parlance. Officials marked her exam forms with a telltale yellow stripe and deemed her ineligible for academic advancement.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/from-nazi-germany-a-tale-of-redemption-1431576062
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Just wow! 