Born in Berlin, Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann studied ethnology, anthropology and prehistory, among others with Adolf Spamer [de].

[1] She received a doctor's degree at the Humboldt University of Berlin in 1940, on the topic of the ethnography of the German village Josefsdorf (now Josipovac) in Slavonia.

[1] She also studied in Hungary, Banat, Transylvania, and Turkey, focusing on the relation between different ethnic groups.

[1] At the end of World War II, she was a Red Cross nurse in Prague, where she met Jews who had been liberated from the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

[1] When the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, she could no longer commute, and she accepted the offer of the University of Marburg to work at the Institut für mitteleuropäische Volksforschung, later to be called Institut für Europäische Ethnologie/Kulturwissenschaft.