Dr. Selma Graf

Our School Name

Why Dr. Selma Graf?

With our school name, we honour a citizen of Bamberg who was the first woman to practise medicine among Bamberg’s doctors and who was also deeply committed to social causes. By remembering her, we send a clear message against forgetting the victims of racist and antisemitic persecution and extermination under the National Socialist regime of terror. At the same time, we reaffirm our school culture as open-minded, pluralistic and diverse.

Who was Dr. Selma Graf?

Dr. Selma Graf, born in 1887 in Nuremberg as the daughter of the respected Jewish merchant family Reichold, was among the first women who were allowed to study medicine and earn a doctorate in Erlangen.

After converting to Catholicism, she married the pharmacist Konrad Graf and moved with him to Bamberg. There, she ran a practice at Franz-Ludwig-Straße 15 as a gynaecologist and paediatrician. Dr. Selma Graf was valued as a helpful, socially minded doctor who took particular care of women in need and those who were disadvantaged.

From 1933 onwards, Dr. Selma Graf’s life was shaped by the Nazis’ anti-Jewish legislation.

In 1938, she was arrested on allegations of having performed abortions and, in 1939, was sentenced in an antisemitically motivated trial to 7 years in prison and the loss of her civil rights.

In 1942, Dr. Selma Graf was deported from Aichach Prison to Auschwitz and murdered there.