Ingeborg Rapoport

Ingeborg Rapoport (2 September 1912 – 23 March 2017) was a German pediatrician who was a prominent figure in East German medicine and, at age 102, the oldest person to receive a Doctorate degree.

Rapoport studied medicine in Hamburg in Nazi Germany, but was denied a medical degree because her mother was of Jewish ancestry.

Ingeborg Syllm was born in 1912 to Protestant German parents Paul Friedrich Syllm and Maria Syllm in Kribi, in the then German colony of Kamerun, present-day Cameroon.

Shortly after her birth, the family moved to Hamburg, Germany, where she grew up with her parents.

Both her parents were Protestant Christians, but her mother had Jewish ancestry.

She was raised as a Protestant.

Her father was a businessman with conservative and German nationalist beliefs, and descended from the Sillem family, a prominent Protestant family from Hamburg, with Syllm being a variant spelling.

Her parents divorced in 1928.

Ingeborg Syllm studied medicine at the University of Hamburg and passed the state examination as a physician in 1937.

The following year she submitted her doctoral dissertation about diphtheria.

Because she was categorized as a "Mischling" (i.e. someone with both Jewish and "Aryan" ancestry) by the Nazis, she was not permitted to defend her thesis and was denied the medical degree.

Her thesis supervisor, Rudolf Degkwitz, attested that he would have accepted Rapoport's thesis "if it was not for the existing racial laws".

She fled Nazi persecution and emigrated to the United States in 1938, where she completed her education in medicine.

Rapoport immigrated to the United States in 1938.

She interned in medical schools in Brooklyn, New York, Baltimore and Akron, Ohio.

She completed her graduate education at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania (absorbed by Drexel University) in Philadelphia and received an M.D.

Rapoport worked as a pediatrician at the Children's Hospital in Cincinnati, and went on to become the head of the outpatient department.

She met her husband, Samuel Mitja Rapoport, in Cincinnati.

In the early 1950s, as a result of an investigation of her and her husband for un-American activities, she left the United States and eventually, after staying in Vienna for a year, moved to the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).

Rapoport became politically engaged after witnessing the poverty of the black population in the US, but when the House Un-American Activities Committee launched an investigation of Rapoport and her husband for engaging in communist activities, they left the United States in 1950.

They first went to Austria, but found it difficult to get employment there due to the influence of the CIA.

While in Vienna, they looked for work in several west European countries including England, France, and Scandinavia who were reluctant to take communist immigrants seeking political asylum.

Similar efforts in Israel also did not work out because the Rapoports were also avowed anti-Zionists.

In 1952 Rapoport moved to East Germany, after her husband was offered the chair of Biochemistry of the Humboldt University in East Berlin.

In East Germany, Rapoport was co-founder of the Society of Perinatology of the GDR, council-member of the European Society of Perinatology, a member of the "committee for the reduction of infant mortality", and head of a national research project on perinatology.

In East Germany, Rapoport received Habilitation in 1959.

She was awarded the National Prize of East Germany and Honoured Doctor of the People as well as other awards and honorary titles.

As a pediatrician, she helped to considerably reduce infant mortality in East Germany, which, during her active years was even lower than in West Germany.

She was awarded a Habilitation in 1959 and was employed at the Humboldt University and Charité Hospital in Berlin.

She was the founder of the first clinic of neonatology in Germany and appointed as a Professor of neonatology in 1969.

She became the first chair of neonatology in the whole of Germany and retired in 1973.

She was a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany.

She retired in 1973.

She was a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany.

After the fall of communism, Rapoport defended the GDR in several interviews.

Rapoport said that "East Germany was not a state of injustice" and denied that East Germany was an immoral state.

She described the critical depiction of East Germany in German media and scholarship and inquiries into the crimes of the Stasi as "slander."

Also, Rapoport said that, despite its faults, East German society was superior with respect to its health system, social network, and education system to what she experienced in the Weimar Republic (Germany), United States, and currently in Germany.

In 2015, the Faculty of Medicine of Hamburg University corrected the injustice of the Nazi regime and awarded her a medical degree after an oral examination.

She became the oldest person to receive a Doctorate degree at the age of 102.