Samuel Mitja Rapoport
American biochemist (1912–2004)
Samuel Mitja Rapoport (27 November 1912 – 7 July 2004) was a Russian-born German university professor of biochemistry in East Germany. Of Jewish descent and a committed communist, he fled Austria after its annexation by Nazi Germany, and moved to the United States. In 1950, as a result of an investigation of un-American activities, he was offered a professorship in East Berlin. He was married to pediatrician Ingeborg Rapoport.
Biography
Rapoport was born into a Jewish family in Volhynia near the Russian-Austrian border in what is now Ukraine and his family resided there from 1912 to 1916. They later moved to Odessa, Ukraine on the Black Sea coast. At the conclusion of World War I, he saw the Russian Revolution and witnessed the barbaric warfare of the Russian Civil War.
His family left Odessa for Vienna, Austria in 1920. Already sympathetic to left-wing views, he joined the Communist Party out of protest against the rise of fascism. At the age of 13 he found in his father's archives works written by Friedrich Engels.
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