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Dr. Rahel Liebeschütz-Plaut * 1894

Martinistraße 52 / UKE, vor dem neuen Hauptgebäude (Hamburg-Nord, Eppendorf)

Dr. RAHEL
LIEBESCHÜTZ-PLAUT
JG. 1894
FLUCHT 1938
ENGLAND
ÜBERLEBT

further stumbling stones in Martinistraße 52 / UKE, vor dem neuen Hauptgebäude:
Dr. Ernst Delbanco, Dr. Walter Griesbach, Dr. Arthur Haim, Dr. Erwin Jacobsthal, Dr. Hermann Josephy, Dr. Victor Kafka, Dr. Otto Kestner, Dr. Paul Kimmelstiel, Dr. Walter Kirschbaum, Dr. Martin Mayer, Dr. Ernst-Friedrich Müller, Dr. Heinrich Poll, Dr. Ernst Sieburg, Dr. Hans Türkheim, Dr. Friedrich Wohlwill

Rahel Liebeschütz-Plaut, née Plaut, born on 21 June 1894, flight in 1938 to Britain

Neue Rabenstrasse 21
Martinistrasse 52 (UKE [Eppendorf University Hospital], in front of the new main building)

Rahel Liebeschütz-Plaut was born on 21 June 1894, the daughter of Hugo Carl Plaut, bacteriologist and director of the fungal institute in Eppendorf, and his wife Adele. With her three older siblings, Theodor, Hubert, and Carla, she was educated at home by tutors and her parents until she attended the first Realgymnasium [a high school focused on science, math, and modern languages] admitted for girls in 1908 at the age of 15. She obtained her university entrance qualification through an external examination at the Johanneum high school.

Rahel Plaut studied medicine in Freiburg, Kiel, and Bonn, where she passed the state examination in the spring of 1918. Initially, she worked as a medical intern at the Israelite Hospital and as a trainee doctor in the internal medicine department at Eppendorf Hospital. In Sept. 1919, she was dismissed, as were all female physicians, to make room for war returnees. The director of the Physiological Institute, Otto Kestner, who was also a friend of her father, offered her an assistant position.

From 1919 to 1924, she worked as a scientist at the Physiological Institute and published 27 scientific papers, some jointly with colleagues or Otto Kestner. In 1923, she became the first female physician to qualify as a professor at the Medical Faculty in Hamburg and the third female physician in Germany ever to do so, with a thesis on the blocking of skeletal muscle.

When she married the historian Hans Liebeschütz in 1924, she was dismissed by the Senate because of the so-called "double-earner paragraph.” She continued her teaching career despite the birth of three children.

She was ostracized from the social life of the predominantly male doctors. Some colleagues did not greet her when passing on the extensive grounds of the hospital. The doctors’ casino, famous and infamous, the cafeteria and social meeting place of the doctors, was off limits to women. As a private lecturer, she sat, like the few other female physicians, in the cafeteria at a small table for women next to the large table for the male medical interns.

In 1933, Rahel Liebeschütz-Plaut was deprived of her teaching license by the Nazis, as were all her other Jewish colleagues, and she was thus forced to stop working at the university. In 1938, all Jewish physicians were also deprived of their license to practice medicine, and henceforth, they were only allowed to call themselves "healers of the sick” ("Krankenbehandler”).

She emigrated to Britain with her family in Dec. 1938. Busy with caring for her children as well as her mother and mother-in-law, she was no longer active as a scientist. She still volunteered with the Women’s Royal Voluntary Service at the age of 90 to give back to the country that had welcomed her.

She returned to Germany after the end of World War II only for visits of those friends who had stood by her until 1938.

In 1989, she was invited to the 100th anniversary of Eppendorf Hospital as a guest of honor of the Medical Faculty and, accompanied by her daughter, was able to witness her rehabilitation and the recognition of her scientific work at the age of 95.

Rahel Liebeschütz-Plaut died at the age of nearly 100 on 22 Dec. 1993, in Hull, England, where she had lived with her daughter.

Translator: Erwin Fink
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: May 2021
© Doris Fischer-Radizi

Quelle: Doris Fischer-Radizi, Vertrieben aus Hamburg. Die Ärztin Rahel Liebeschütz-Plaut. Göttingen 2019. Wallsteinverlag (dort weitere Quellen- und Literaturangaben).