According to the Guardian, German and US-trained pediatrician Ingeborg Syllm-Rapoport, finally received her PhD on Tuesday almost 80 years after the Nazi regime denied her the right to defend her dissertation because her mother was a Jew.
She was handed her PhD certificate during a celebratory ceremony at the University of Hamburg, according to the newspaper.
She fled the Nazis before WWII in 1938, finished her medical degree in Philadelphia and returned to then East Germany in 1952, serving, in fact, as the first head of the neonatology department in East Berlin’s Charité University Hospital.
“We were impressed with her intellectual alertness, and left speechless by her expertise – also with regard to modern medicine,” Uwe Koch-Gromus, the dean of the university’s medical faculty, said.
She concluded her studies with the overall grade of magna cum laude.