Agathe Lasch (born 4 July 1879, in Berlin; died 18 August 1942, in Riga) was a German philologist. She was the first female professor of German studies in Germany, and the first female professor at the University of Hamburg. She is a pioneer of the historical study of the Middle Low German language. As a Jew, Lasch was murdered during the Holocaust. Life Lasch was born into a family of Jewish merchants in 1879. Like her three sisters, she first trained as a teacher (1898) and then taught at various girls' schools and vocational schools until 1906. In 1906 she received her Abitur from the Kaiserin Augusta Gymnasium in Charlottenburg (Berlin). After this she was able to study German in Halle and then at Heidelberg under the supervision of Wilhelm Braune, and received her doctorate in 1909, despite the fact that as a woman she was not permitted to attend courses in Berlin in 1908. Because of her impressive achievements she was offered a job as Associate Professor at the women's liberal arts college Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania. Here she produced her Middle Low German grammar (1914), which is still a standard reference work in Germanic linguistics today. Due to the USA's entry into the First World War, Lasch returned to Germany in 1917 to take up a post as Assistentin in German at Hamburg. Following her habilitation (1919), in 1923 she was the first woman to receive the title of professor at the University of Hamburg, and the first female Germanist to receive this title in all of Germany. In 1926 an extraordinary chair in Low German philology was created for her at Hamburg. There, Lasch continued the study of the linguistic history of Berlin that had begun in her dissertation, and published these in 1928 in her book Berlinisch. In addition, she worked with Conrad Borchling on two large dictionary projects to systematically capture the lexicon of Middle Low German and of the Hamburgisch dialect. In 1928 she was able to publish the first volume of her Middle Low German dictionary (Mittelniederdeutsches Handwörterbuch). The dictionary of Hamburgisch only started to appear in 1956 on the basis of her preparations. Researchers from abroad were briefly able to prevent her being dismissed immediately once the Nazi Party came to power, but in 1934 she was nevertheless stripped of her professorship. In 1937 she moved to Berlin to live with her