[7] On 13 July 1941, his parents emigrated to the United States on the Villa de Madrid, an overcrowded ocean-liner that left Barcelona on 20 June.

[8] His father, Erich Joseph Rothenberg, was an importer, and both his parents spoke English, Hebrew, French, and German.

[9] At the age of 57, his father registered for the fourth draft in 1942, listing his residence as New York City, and his next of kin as his wife, Lotte.

[14] To be with her in New York City,[7] Rothenberg journeyed to Canada, arriving in Halifax, Nova Scotia; traveling from there to Toronto, he lived for a while at Wycliffe College, where he worked briefly as a construction laborer.

[7] After military service in the United States Air Force, he graduated from the University of Illinois with an undergraduate degree.

He retired from Purdue University, was appointed Professor Emeritus, and lived in Canberra, Australia, where he continued to write about the Napoleonic Wars.

Although he had never finished high school, with the help of the GI Bill, Rothenberg completed a bachelor's degree from the University of Illinois[7] in 1954.

In 1962, Rothenberg joined the faculty of the University of New Mexico; over the following ten years, he rose to the position of full professor.

After his retirement, he moved to Melbourne, Australia, and then to Canberra, where his third wife, Eleanor Hancock, taught at the Australian Defence Force Academy.

[6] He wrote indignantly to a friend in the United States that he regretted moving to Australia when the authorities confiscated his muzzle loaders, which were prohibited "Down Under.

"[6] In 2004, he returned to the United States to present the keynote address at the 34th Annual Conference of the Consortium on Revolutionary Europe.

He had recently completed The Emperor's Last Victory: Napoleon and the Battle of Wagram, which was published posthumously in November 2004.

[7] Rothenberg's legacy is not only the generations of scholars he prepared, but also his vast historiographical contribution to understanding the Revolutionary era.

In 1969, Rothenberg married Ruth Gillah Smith, a widow with three daughters (Judith Goris, Laura Allman, Georgia Jones (all born Herron)), whom he helped to raise; she died in 1992.

[1][7] She is now a senior lecturer in history at the Australian Defence Force Academy at the University of New South Wales, and has written the first biography of Ernst Julius Röhm.