Charlotte Wolff was born on 30 September 1897 in Riesenburg, West Prussia (now Prabuty, Poland) into a liberal middle-class Jewish family.
She changed her academic focus to medicine and after further study at Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) and Tübingen, completed a degree as a physician at Berlin in 1926.
[1] As a Jew, she could no longer work after the Nazis came to power and emigrated to France, where she lived with friends in Paris and the artist's community of Sanary-sur-Mer.
Wolff was an active lesbian as early as her student days;[2][3] in Berlin she had an "Aryan" partner who left her for fear of the Nazis.
[1] In Germany, she was not a member of a political party but joined the Association of Socialist Physicians (Verein Sozialistischer Ärzte) and sympathised with the Independent Social Democrats.
[5][6] The Human Hand (1942)[7] was termed "a curious mixture of fact, theory, hypothesis, and conjecture" by one academic reviewer,[8] and "unconvincing, to say the least" by another who nonetheless saw promise in the general approach,[9] but a third wrote that it "merit[ed] serious reading.
"[10] The disapproving reviewers noted that hand similarities had led Wolff to infer the descent of man and of Capuchin monkeys from a common origin in the Americas.