Not long after, Henney and her father went on the run; splitting their time between the cities of Berlin and Hamburg to avoid the Nazis and later fleeing from the invading Soviet army.

[3] In an interview, Henney recalled that at one point during this period, she found twenty bombshells scattered on her front lawn.

At age 10, Henney took the admittance exam for admission to the Abitur High School in Hamburg, Germany, from which she would graduate.

She worked as a movie theater cashier, making 57 cents an hour, and[6] taught classes at the university, teaching up to twelve credits a semester.

The latter made her responsible for coordinating the hiring and managing of off-campus professors and teaching assistants, as well as making her a liaison with the university's numerous international students.

[2] It was during this time that Henney wrote her dissertation "The theory of set-valued additive functions defined on base-cones in Banach spaces with values in the collection of compact, convex sets".

[4] The adviser to her dissertation was German Professor Gottfried Köthe, the founding director of the Institute for Applied Mathematics at the University of Heidelberg.

[7] Instead of receiving her diploma during the award ceremony, she was handed a blank piece of paper, as she had forgotten to pay the university's graduation fee.

[9] While developing her thesis, in 1962 Henney researched and published such projects as "Set-Valued Quadratic Functionals" and "One-Parameter Semigroups".

[2] Henney's accomplishments have made her the recipient of several distinguished honors, ranging from her membership in Phi Beta Kappa to her distinction as a member of both Who's Who of American Women and The World's Who's Who.