A Nazi Wrong Made Right—After 77 years

In 1938, Ingeborg Rapoport (née Syllm), a 25-year-old graduate student at the University of Hamburg in Germany, had just completed her thesis on the infectious disease, diphtheria. But with Hitler in power, Rapoport, who was raised Protestant (though her mother was Jewish), was banned from taking the oral examination for “racial reasons,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “Officials marked her exam forms with a telltale yellow stripe” despite the fact that her professor, then a member of the Nazi party, supported her academic work.

“My medical existence was turned to rubble,” Ms. Rapoport told James Graff ofWSJ. “It was a shame for science and a shame for Germany.”

According to the article, Rapoport and her family were “spared” from the Nazi concentration camps; soon, she emigrated alone to the U.S. where she found work at hospitals around the country. Shortly thereafter, she earned a degree in medicine and got a job in a Cincinnati hospital where she met her future husband, an Austrian-Jewish physician and biochemist named Samuel Mitja Rapoport. They had four children.

Ms. Rapoport’s son Tom, a Harvard Medical School professor, told her story to the current dean of the University of Hamburg’s medical faculty, who took up the cause.



The dean, Dr. Uwe Koch-Gromus, soon realized that the bureaucratic challenges weren’t minor. In March, the university’s legal department said that for three reasons—her original paper couldn’t be found, she had never completed her oral defense, and she had earned an M.D. from the U.S. anyway—Ms. Rapoport should just be given an honorary degree.



Neither Dr. Koch-Gromus nor Ms. Rapoport was content to plaster over the injustice with an honorary doctorate; instead, he devised a legal pathway for her to qualify for the real one she was denied, and Ms. Rapoport started boning up.



Her main practical obstacle has been her failing eyesight—she can’t read or use a computer. So she had relatives and biochemist friends trawl the Internet for the last seven decades of scientific advances in diphtheria studies and report back by phone.



“I know a lot more about diphtheria now than I did then,” said Ms. Rapoport.

On Wednesday, Dr. Koch-Gromus and a couple of professors administered Rapaport’s oral examination. And on June 9, “Ms. Rapoport will become, by all available evidence, the oldest person ever to receive a doctoral degree,” reports WSJ.

Read the entire story here. It’s just incredible.