Ingeborg Rapoport’s professor at Hamburg University accepted her doctoral thesis on diphtheria when she submitted it in 1938, but her exam forms were marked with a yellow stripe because she was “a first-degree crossbreed” according to Nazi racial categorizations. Consequently, she was not permitted to complete her oral defense and was denied a PhD.
Rapoport escaped from Germany the same year and made her way to the United States, alone and poor. She applied to 48 medical schools, but was only admitted to one . She got married in 1946 and moved along with husband Samuel Mitja Rapoport to communist East Berlin in 1952.
She retired in 1973 from Berlin’s renowned Charite Hospital as head of the Neonatology Department.
Last year, when her story came to the attention of the dean of Hamburg University, Professor Uwe Koch-Gromus, he allowed Rapoport to take her oral test again, after a gap of 77 years and she passed the test. Rapoport says:
It was very hard. Because I’m almost blind, I can’t read anything. I know a lot more about diphtheria now than I did then.The university wanted to put right past wrongs and have demonstrated great patience, for which I am really thankful.
Koch-Gromus, dean of Hamburg University, said the centenarian had done more than prove a point.
It was a very good test. Frau Rapoport has gathered notable knowledge about what’s happened since then. Particularly given her age, she was brilliant.
As per Guinness Book of World Records, Rapoport, 102, will become the oldest person ever to receive a PhD beating out a 97-year-old German.
