Ingrid Elisabeth Sommer
22 April 1938 — 13 January 2026 · aged 87
LMU paediatric professor, child refugee from Breslau and doctor to generations of children
München, Germany Born in Breslau (now Wrocław) Resting at Nordfriedhof, MunichAbout Ingrid
Ingrid Sommer was six years old when she left Breslau in the bitter January of 1945 with a rucksack, a doll with one arm, and a sentence her mother repeated all the way to Bavaria: 'We keep our hands for work.' She never forgot it, and she made it the shape of a life.
Her family reached a village near Kempten in the Allgäu, where a farmer gave them the attic and her mother took in sewing. Ingrid walked four kilometres to school each day and read everything she could borrow, including, to the farmer's astonishment, his veterinary manual. In 1957 she began medicine at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, one of nine women in a year of two hundred, and qualified in 1963. She trained in paediatrics at the Dr. von Haunersches Kinderspital, specialised in kidney disease in children, and in 1983 became professor of paediatric nephrology at LMU, where she worked until 2006.
Students feared and adored her for the same habit: she insisted on speaking to the child first, kneeling to eye level, before she read a single chart. 'The patient is the smallest person in the room,' she said. 'Start there.' She built the first dialysis programme for children in southern Bavaria, wrote a textbook chapter that a generation of residents learned by heart, and trained more than forty doctors, several of them refugees themselves.
In 1966 she married Wolfgang Sommer, a physicist, who died in 2015. They raised Matthias and Katharina in a flat in Schwabing where the piano lid was never closed. She hiked in the Alps every summer until she was eighty-three, made the finest Marillenknödel in Munich, and after retirement volunteered at the Malteser clinic for people without health insurance, treating the uninsured and the frightened. 'I know what it is to arrive with nothing,' she said, 'and I know what a kind doctor costs. Nothing.'
Ingrid died on 13 January 2026 at home in Munich, in her own bed, with her children beside her and snow on the roofs outside. She leaves Matthias, Katharina, three grandchildren and generations of grown-up patients who still send her postcards.
“The patient is the smallest person in the room. Start there.”
- Faith
- Protestant
- Place of birth
- Breslau (now Wrocław)
- Resting place
- Nordfriedhof, Munich
- Passed away
- 13 January 2026, München
Funeral Service
Thursday, 22 January 2026 at 10:00 UTC
Add to calendarLife journey
Fled Breslau as a child
1945 · Breslau (Wrocław)
Left the city in winter with a rucksack and a one-armed doll.
Medical studies (Staatsexamen)
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München1957 – 1963 · Munich
One of nine women in a class of two hundred.
Paediatric resident and senior physician
Dr. von Haunersches Kinderspital, LMU1964 – 1983 · Munich
Specialised in kidney disease in children and started the first dialysis unit for them.
Married Wolfgang Sommer
1966 · Munich
A marriage of forty-nine years.
Professor of Paediatric Nephrology
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München1983 – 2006 · Munich
Trained more than forty doctors and led the paediatric nephrology service.
Volunteer doctor
Malteser Migranten Medizin2006 – 2025 · Munich
Treated patients without insurance every Thursday for nineteen years.
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Family & connections
Ingrid is survived by
- Matthias Sommer· Son
- Katharina Brandt· Daughter
- 3 grandchildren· Grandchildren
- Hannelore Kraus· Friend
Tributes & memories
6 people have shared a memory of Ingrid.
Knew Ingrid? Share a memory with the family and everyone who loved them.
Sign in to write a tribute- DW
Visiting fellow from Boston, 1994
Ingrid hosted me for a year, took me hiking in the Alps and made me carry the soup. I learned more nephrology from her than anywhere else and more about kindness than from anyone. I still say 'start with the smallest person in the room' to every trainee.
- DO
Father of a former patient
My daughter was five when she was admitted with kidney failure. Professor Sommer knelt on the floor and told her the machine was a friendly dragon that ate bad things. My daughter is thirty now, and a nurse. She tells her own patients about the dragon.
- DH
Former resident, born in Tehran
I came to Munich in 1991 speaking medical German from a textbook. Professor Sommer corrected my grammar at the bedside, in whispers, so no patient noticed. She told me she had once been 'the girl from Breslau with the accent'. I now head a paediatric department myself. She is why.
- HK
Friend since school in Kempten
We shared a bench in the Allgäu in 1947, two refugee girls with the same homesickness and one pencil. She always did the sums and I did the drawing. Seventy-eight years later we still spoke every Sunday. The phone call is the hardest thing to lose.
- PA
Colleague, Dr. von Haunersches Kinderspital
She walked onto the ward every morning at seven and knelt beside the smallest bed first. It was not a gesture; it was a method. Thirty years of colleagues copied it and nobody did it as well. The children knew she was talking to them, not about them.
- EH
Neighbour in Schwabing
The winter the building lost its heating, Frau Professor went door to door with a thermos of Glühwein and a stack of blankets. She was seventy-four. 'Nobody should be left cold,' she said. She stayed until the plumber came.
