Ingeborg Rapoport
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Dr. Ingeborg Rapoport M.D. |
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| Born |
Ingeborg Syllm 2 September 1912 Kribi, Kamerun |
| Died | 23 March 2017 (aged 104) |
| Residence | Berlin, Germany |
| Nationality |
German (East German 1952–1990) |
| Alma mater |
University of Hamburg Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania |
| Occupation | Physician and professor in East Germany |
| Known for | Oldest person to receive a Ph.D. (age of 102) |
| Political party | Socialist Unity Party of Germany |
| Spouse(s) | Samuel Mitja Rapoport |
| Children | 4 |
| Awards | Patriotic Order of Merit, National Prize of East Germany and other East German awards |
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. She fled Nazi persecution and emigrated to the United States in 1938, where she completed her education in medicine. 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 GDR (East Germany). She became the first chair of neonatology in whole Germany and retired in 1973. She was a member of the Socialist Unity Party of East Germany.
In East Germany, Rapoport received Habilitation in 1959. She was awarded the National Prize of East Germany as well other awards. 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.
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.
Ingeborg Syllm was born in 1912 to Protestant German parents Paul Friedrich Syllm and Maria Syllm in Kribi, Cameroon, a German colony at this time.
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".
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