His Jewish parents, Michael and Mircia, (maiden name Kesten), and his grandparents had immigrated from Eastern Europe.
There he taught at grammar schools until 1955, when he started to work as an archivist at the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem.
Herbert Rosenkranz supported the Holocaust Memorial Service of young Austrians in Israel from the very beginning.
In the 1980s Herbert Rosenkranz worked as a guest lecturer at the Academy for Jewish Studies in Heidelberg and also at several Austrian universities.
His Brother, Kurt Rosenkranz founded the Jewish Institute for Adult Education in Vienna in 1993, and his daughter, Orna Langer, is a music critic at Haaretz.