Ilse Schwidetzky

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Ilse Schwidetzky, later known as Ilse Rösing, was a German anthropologist born on 6 September 1907 in Lissa and died on 18 March 1997 in Mainz. Her parents were Georg and Susanne Schwidetzky. Susanne had studied math in Berlin around 1900 and died in 1911 of tuberculosis. Georg studied law and had a political career that ended with World War I; the family then moved to Leipzig, where he worked for Die Deutsche Bücherei, a large library. Ilse had siblings Eva (1905–1958) and Walter (1910–1996), and a half-brother Georg (born 1917, died 2003). She was related to Oscar Schwidetzky, who invented the ace bandage and was the first non-doctor admitted to the American Medical Association; Leopold Schwidetzky was her great-grandfather.

Ilse studied history, biology, and anthropology in Leipzig and Breslau. From the 1930s she worked as an assistant to Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt, a leading racial theorist in Nazi Germany. She married Bernhard Rösing in 1940; he was a professor and they lived in different cities. They had three children, including Ina Rösing (an ethnologist) and Friedrich Wilhelm Rösing (an anthropologist). Bernhard Rösing died in 1944 in a train accident while serving in a military reserve unit during World War II.

Ilse wrote about her wartime experiences in The War Years. After the war she joined the Anthropological Institute at Mainz University in 1946, succeeding Eickstedt as Mainz Professor of Anthropology in 1961, and she retired in 1975. She published under her maiden name, Ilse Schwidetzky. She was a member or honorary member of many academic associations.