These two "Stumbling Stones" commemorate Mathilde Rosenkranz, née Abramowicz, and her husband Fischel Rosenkranz. Both originally came from Poland and moved to Regensburg in 1910, they had resided at the Watmarkt since 1920. Mrs. Rosenkranz ran a small business, her husband traded with various raw products selling them to other companies – which clearly labelled them as ‘Enemies of the People’ ("Volksfeinde"), a term used in Nazi jargon. The first list of Jewish businesses in Regensburg to be boycotted was published in a NSDAP magazine from 1935: "Whoever buys from a Jew, is a traitor to his own people!"
As noted on the brass stones, both Rosenkranzes were arrested and locked up in the local prison called "Augustenburg" during the pogrom night of November 9, 1938. The text "interned in 1940 in the forced-labour camp Sosnowitz / murdered" means that the Rosenkranzes were sent to the labour camp for Jews in the town of Sosnowitz/Schrodula, which was one of more than 170 of such camps run by the "Organisation Schmelt". Albrecht Schmelt was the SS officer commissioned by Heinrich Himmler as "Special Envoy of the Reichsführer’s SS for labour camps for People of ‘Alien Ethnicity’ in Upper Silesia" in occupied Poland. It is estimated that about 200,000 people lost their lives in these camps that were designed for carrying out "extermination by labour", and the dividing line to the extermination camps with their systematic mass murder was very thin, even fluent. Their daily routines encompassed senseless chores, continuous degradation and humiliation, malnutrition, even starvation, and ultimately, led to their demise which went hand in hand with plain murder. When the Rosenkranzes "relocated" to Sosnowitz on November 18, 1940, they were 75 and 73 years of age. Without a doubt, their certain death was imminent.
