Ursula Maria Martius was born in Munich , Germany on September 16 , 1921 . Her mother was Jewish and an art historian and her father , an ethnographer , came from an old German Protestant family . Franklin once stated that her father was an " Africanist . " Because of the Nazi persecution of the Jews , her parents tried to send their only child to school in Britain when World War II broke out , but the British refused to issue a student visa to anyone under 18 . Ursula studied chemistry and physics at Berlin University until she was expelled by the Nazis . Her parents were interned in concentration camps while Franklin herself was sent to a forced labour camp and repaired bombed buildings . The family survived The Holocaust and was reunited in Berlin after the war
The Holocaust
The Holocaust
Ursula Franklin