Erwin Rosenthal, born in Breslau, was the only son of the doctor, musician and composer Felix Rosenthal and his wife Elisabeth, née Donat, known as Else. At the end of the First World War, the family returned to their hometown of Vienna, where they lived in an apartment at Josefstädterstraße 87 in Vienna’s 8th district.

After the annexation of Austria to the German Reich in March 1938, Erwin Rosenthal and his mother Else were directly threatened by Nazi persecution; Felix Rosenthal had already died in 1936. Erwin Rosenthal, a technician by profession, lost his job at Kabelfabrik & Drahtindustrie A.G. at the end of April 1938 and left Vienna for England in June 1939. He handed over his removal goods to the shipping company Bäuml, which was to transport them to Hamburg. The lifts contained the artistic estate of his father and his aunt, the cello virtuoso and musician Josefine Donat, who had died in 1936 and had bequeathed a valuable Italian cello along with various music scores to her nephew. In Lancashire, Erwin Rosenthal married the Viennese refugee Alice Grün in October 1939. After the beginning of World War II, he was interned as an ‘enemy alien’ from June to November 1940. The Vugesta seized Rosenthal's removal goods in October 1940, ordered them back from Hamburg and disposed of them. As a result, numerous handwritten and printed music scores belonging to Rosenthal ended up in the Austrian National Library (ÖNB). Else Rosenthal, who had not managed to escape, was deported together with around 1,000 other Jews on the 21st deportation transport from Vienna to the Izbica ghetto in Lublin on 15 May 1942 and was presumably murdered in the Sobibor or Belzec extermination camp.

After Erwin Rosenthal successfully initiated restitution proceedings after 1945 regarding his father's musical estate that had remained in Vienna, he donated numerous compositions and manuscripts to the ÖNB. In 1949, the Rosenthal couple emigrated to the USA. Erwin Rosenthal died in 2001 and Alice Rosenthal in 2008 in Connecticut, USA. To this day, part of the family estate and the cello have remained unfound. In 2004, the Art Restitution Advisory Board recommended the return of three manuscripts and four prints, which had not been the subject of the restitution proceedings in 1946/47, to Erwin Rosenthal's legal successors. It was only through recent research that objects in the ÖNB's music collection with the proof of origin of the musician Josefine Donat (3 music manuscripts and 5 music prints), who died in 1936, could be assigned to the ownership of her nephew Erwin. The Art Restitution Advisory Board recommended the return of these objects at its meeting on 27 September 2024.