Prof. Dr. med.
Heinrich Rosin
1863 - 1934

Heinrich Rosin was born in Berlin in 1863 as the son of the educator and religious philosopher Dr. phil. David Rosin and his wife Emma, née Meyer. His father David Rosin was head of the religious school of the Jewish community in Berlin and moved to the Jewish theological seminary in Breslau/Wroclaw as a teacher in 1864.

Education and Places of Work

Rosin studied medicine in Breslau and Freiburg im Breisgau, where he passed the state (board) examination in 1887. He was awarded his doctorate the same year at the University of Freiburg with the thesis “Über das idiopathische multiple pigmentlose Hautsarkom”.

Following   his studies, Rosin worked as an intern at the municipal Allerheiligen-Hospital in Breslau until 1892. During this period, he spent some time in England to study tuberculosis. He worked at the III Medical Clinic of the Charité in Berlin under Hermann Senator from 1892 to 1902, at the same time as Hermann Strauss, Paul Friedrich Richter, and Theodor Rosenheim. He habilitated in internal medicine at the University of Berlin in 1896 and was appointed professor (extraordinarius) in 1921. He had already been appointed “Titularprofessor” in 1902.

In March 1906, Rosin married Anna Babette Büchenbacher, who was from Fürth. She was born on October 5, 1884, into a Jewish family of factory owners. Their daughter Eva Esther was born in 1908 and their son Hans David in 1910.

Rosin’s scientific work focused on physiological-chemical issues, on the central nervous system, on blood diseases including haemophilia, as well as anaemia and chlorosis. The Rosin-Trousseau test for the detection of bilirubin in urine with the aid of an iodine solution is co-named after him. (Berliner Klinische Wochenschrift 1893; 30: 106 – 108).

Heinrich Rosin was one of the co-founders of the “Jüdische Blindenanstalt für Deutschland” (Jewish Institution for the Blind in Germany) and was chairman of the institution’s sponsor “Verein Jüdische Blindenanstalt” (Association of the Jewish Institution for the Blind) from 1910.

Rosin worked together with Paul Hirsch-Mamroth in the latter’s private clinic for gastrointestinal diseases from 1924.

In addition to his medical work, Rosin was interested in cultural history. In 1926, he gave a lecture on the role of Jews in medicine at the Association for Jewish History and Literature in Berlin. The lecture was published in the same year.

1933

Heinrich Rosin’s licence to teach at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin was revoked by the NS-administration on 14 September 1933 because of his “non-Aryan descent” (§ 3 of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service of 7 April 1933).

Heinrich Rosin died in Berlin on 23 October 1934. His grave is located at the Jewish Cemetery Berlin-Weissensee.

Rosin’s wife, Anna Babette Rosin, fled to the Netherlands via Switzerland in 1939 together with her mother Emilie Büchenbacher, born in 1864. There, Anna Rosin was imprisoned in the Westerbork camp in 1943 and deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February 1944. On April 10, 1945, Anna Rosin was among the inmates of the “lost train” that left Bergen-Belsen for the east under catastrophic hygienic conditions and had to stop 12 days later in Tröbitz, Brandenburg, in front of a destroyed bridge. The prisoners were found and liberated by Soviet soldiers on April 23, 1945. Anna Rosin died on May 28, 1945, in Riesa of paratyphoid fever, pneumonia, and heart and circulatory failure. She was buried in Riesa. A memorial stone at the local Trinity Cemetery commemorates her.

On January 13, 1949, her body was exhumed and reburied in the large Jewish cemetery in Muiderberg in the Netherlands (information from the Bergen-Belsen Memorial, August 12, 2022).

The reburial was arranged by Dr. Konrad Wilhelm Prager, a Jewish lawyer from Fürth, and his wife Barbara Prager-Grossmann (see compensation file for Anna Babette Rosin, Berlin Compensation Authority, C6 / 7). Prager fled Germany in 1935, first to Prague and then to Amsterdam in 1936. He survived the Holocaust in the Netherlands because of his “mixed marriage” to his non-Jewish wife.

Anna Rosin’s mother, Emilie Büchenbacher, was imprisoned in Westerbork in April 1943 and deported to the Sobibor extermination camp on May 4, 1943. She was murdered there upon arrival at the age of 78.

The Rosins’ son, Hans David, fled to the Netherlands in 1939 and married Betje Minco there in May 1942. She was the older sister of Dutch writer Marga Minco (1920–2023), who survived the Nazi regime and described the persecution of Jews in the Netherlands in her literary work after 1945 (Het bittere kruid. Een kleine kroniek, 1957; Das bitte Kraut – Eine kleine Chronik, 1995 and 2020).

Hans David Rosin and Betje Minco-Rosin were murdered in Auschwitz in September 1942 at the ages of 32 and 23.

Their daughter Eva Esther Rosin was interested in art and worked as a portrait painter. She painted an impressive portrait of the social reformer Alice Salomon. Eva Rosin left Germany in May 1933 because, as a “full Jew,” she saw no professional prospects for herself under the Nazi dictatorship.

She lived in Paris from then on. After the German Wehrmacht invaded France in June 1940, she was able to find refuge in two small towns near Lake Geneva and later in Saint-Michel-de-Chabrillanoux in the Ardèche department with the help of locals, where she survived the Holocaust in hiding until liberation. Eva Rosin emigrated to the USA in 1946, initially living with relatives in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and later in Houston, Texas, and Glyndon, Maryland. She earned her living as a private tutor. Eva Esther Rosin died in March 1997 in Santa Barbara, California.