Hildegard (Hilde) Laubhardt taught at Jewish schools in Berlin before having to perform forced labor. Around 1939, she married the Jewish businessman Friedrich (Fritz) Rosenthal. She received food ration coupons and money from a former schoolfriend, Eva Hermann, a Quaker who supported persecuted Jews. The Rosenthals fled Berlin on December 11, 1942. They stayed with Eva Hermann and her husband Carl in Mannheim from mid-January 1943. After around four weeks, another Quaker, Elisabeth Mann, took them in. When a further helper, the Caritas employee Gertrud Luckner, was arrested in March 1943, the Gestapo also located the Rosenthals.
On their arrest in Saarbrücken on April 12, 1943, Fritz Rosenthal committed suicide using cyanide. After interrogations in Berlin, Hilde Rosenthal was taken to the Theresienstadt ghetto on June 29, 1943, and on October 12, 1944 to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was presumably murdered immediately on arrival.