Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg
Born	September 28, 1915(1915-09-28) (Ethel) May 12, 1918(1918-05-12) (Julius) New York City, New York (both)
Died	June 19, 1953(1953-06-19) (aged 37) Ethel June 19, 1953(1953-06-19) (aged 35) Julius Sing Sing Prison (both)
Charge(s)	Conspiracy to commit espionage
Penalty	Capital punishment
Status	Executed
Occupation	Actress, Singer, Secretary (Ethel), Electrical engineer (Julius)
Parents	Lauren Dampier
Children	Michael Meeropol, Robert Meeropol

Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg (September 28, 1915 ' June 19, 1953) and Julius Rosenberg (May 12, 1918 ' June 19, 1953) were American communists who were executed in 1953 for conspiracy to commit espionage. The charges related to passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. This was the first execution of civilians for espionage in United States history.^[1]

Since the execution, decoded Soviet cables, codenamed VENONA 6, have supported courtroom testimony that Julius acted as a courier and recruiter for the Soviets, but doubts remain about the level of Ethel's involvement.^[2][3] The decision to execute the Rosenbergs was, and still is, controversial. The New York Times, in an editorial on the 50th anniversary of the execution (June 19, 2003) wrote, "The Rosenbergs case still haunts American history, reminding us of the injustice that can be done when a nation gets caught up in hysteria."^[4] The other atomic spies that were caught by the FBI offered confessions and were not executed. Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, who supplied documents to Julius from Los Alamos, served 10 years of his 15 year sentence.^[5] Harry Gold, who identified Greenglass, served 15 years in Federal prison as the courier for Greenglass and the British scientist, Klaus Fuchs.^[6] Morton Sobell, who was tried with the Rosenbergs, served 17 years and 9 months.^[7] In 2008, Sobell admitted he was a spy and confirmed Julius Rosenberg was "in a conspiracy that delivered to the Soviets classified military and industrial information and what the American government described as the secret to the atomic bomb."^[8]

[edit] Early life

Julius Rosenberg was born to a family of Jewish immigrants in New York City on May 12, 1918. Census records show that his family lived at 205 East 113th when he was two years old. The family moved to the Lower East Side by the time Julius was eleven.

His parents worked in the shops of the Lower East Side, as Julius attended Seward Park High School. Julius eventually became a leader in the Young Communist League, USA where, in 1936, he met Ethel Greenglass, whom he married three years later.

He graduated from the City College of New York with a degree in electrical engineering in 1939 and joined the Army Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey in 1940, where he worked as an engineer-inspector until 1945, at which time he was fired when the U.S. Army discovered his previous membership in the Communist Party. Important research on electronics, communications, radar and guided missile controls was undertaken at Fort Monmouth during World War II.^[9]

Ethel Greenglass was born on September 18, 1915, in New York City, also to a Jewish family. She was an aspiring actress and singer, but eventually took a secretarial job at a shipping company. She became involved in labor disputes and joined the Young Communist League, USA, where she met Julius. The Rosenbergs had two sons, Robert and Michael, who were adopted by teacher and songwriter Abel Meeropol (and took the Meeropol surname) after their parents' execution.^[10]

[edit] KGB spy

According to his former NKVD handler, Alexandre Feklisov, Julius Rosenberg was originally recruited by the KGB on Labor Day 1942 by former NKVD spymaster Semyon Semenov.^[11] Julius had been introduced to Semenov by Bernard Schuster, a high-ranking member of the Communist Party USA as well as Earl Browder's personal NKVD liaison, and after Semenov was recalled to Moscow in 1944, his duties were taken over by his apprentice, Feklisov.^[11]

According to Feklisov, Julius provided thousands of classified (top secret) reports from Emerson Radio, including a complete proximity fuze, the same design that was used to shoot down Gary Powers's U-2 in 1960. Under Feklisov's administration, Julius Rosenberg is said to have recruited sympathetic individuals into KGB service, including Joel Barr, Alfred Sarant, William Perl and Morton Sobell.^[12]

According to Feklisov's account, he was supplied by Perl, under Julius Rosenberg's direction, with thousands of documents from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, including a complete set of design and production drawings for the Lockheed's P-80 Shooting Star. Feklisov says he learned through Julius that his brother-in-law David Greenglass was working on the top-secret Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and used Julius to recruit him.^[11]

The USSR and the U.S. became allies during World War II, after Nazi Germany's surprise attack on the USSR in 1941, but the U.S. government was highly suspicious of Joseph Stalin's long-term intentions. Therefore the Americans did not share information or seek assistance from the Soviet Union for the Manhattan Project. However, the Soviets were aware of the project as a result of espionage penetration of the U.S. government and made a number of attempts to infiltrate its operations at the University of California, Berkeley. The FBI file CINRAD (Communist Infiltration of the Radiation Laboratory) led particularly to J. Robert Oppenheimer, a consultant at the Radiation Lab and later, the key figure at Los Alamos.^[13] A number of project members'some high-profile'voluntarily gave secret information to Soviet agents, many because they were sympathetic to Communism (or the Soviet Union's role in the war) and did not feel the U.S. should have a monopoly on atomic weapons.^[14]

After the war, the U.S. continued to protect its nuclear secrets, but the Soviet Union was able to produce its own atomic weapons by 1949. The West was shocked by the speed with which the Soviets were able to stage their first nuclear test, "Joe 1", on August 29, 1949.^[15] It was then discovered in January 1950 that a German refugee theoretical physicist working for the British mission in the Manhattan Project, Klaus Fuchs, had given key documents to the Soviets throughout the war. Fuchs' identified his courier as Harry Gold, who was arrested on May 23, 1950.^[16] Gold also confessed and identified Sergeant David Greenglass, a former machinist at Los Alamos, as an additional source.

Greenglass confessed to having passed secret information on to the USSR through Gold as well. Though he initially denied any involvement by his sister, Ethel Rosenberg, he claimed that her husband, Julius, had convinced Ruth Greenglass to recruit David while on a visit to him in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1944 and that Julius had also passed secrets, linking Julius and Ethel to Soviet contact agent Anatoli Yakovlev, which would be necessary as evidence if there was to be a conviction of espionage.^[17]

Another accused conspirator, Morton Sobell, was on vacation in Mexico City when both Rosenbergs were arrested. According to his story published in On Doing Time, he tried to figure out a way to reach Europe without a passport, but ultimately abandoned that effort and was back in Mexico City when he was allegedly kidnapped by members of the Mexican secret police and driven to the U.S. border where he was arrested.^[18] The government claimed he had been deported, but in 1956, the Mexican government officially declared that he had never been deported. Regardless of how he was returned to the U.S., he was arrested and stood trial with the Rosenbergs on one count of conspiracy to commit espionage. Sobell was arrested for bank robbery on August 16, 1950, by the Mexican police and extradited the next day to the United States in Laredo, Texas.^[19]

[edit] Trial and conviction

Mugshot of Ethel Rosenberg.

Police photograph of Julius Rosenberg after his arrest.

David Greenglass' sketch of an implosion-type nuclear weapon design, illustrating what he allegedly gave the Rosenbergs to pass on to the Soviet Union.

The trial of the Rosenbergs and Sobell began on March 6, 1951. The judge was Irving Kaufman and the attorney for the Rosenbergs was Emanuel Hirsch Bloch.^[20][21] The prosecution's primary witness, David Greenglass, stated that his sister Ethel typed notes containing U.S. nuclear secrets in the Rosenberg apartment in September 1945. He also testified that he turned over to Julius Rosenberg a sketch of the cross-section of an implosion-type atom bomb (the "Fat Man" bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, as opposed to a bomb with the "gun method" triggering device as used in the "Little Boy" bomb dropped on Hiroshima).^[22] The notes allegedly typed by Ethel apparently contained little that was relevant to the Soviet atomic bomb project and some suggest Ethel was indicted along with Julius so that the prosecution could use her to pressure Julius into giving up the names of others who were involved.^[23] However, neither Julius nor Ethel Rosenberg named anyone else and during testimony each asserted their right under the U.S. Constitution's Fifth Amendment to not incriminate themselves whenever asked about involvement in the Communist Party or with its members. Then-U.S. Deputy Attorney General William P. Rogers, when later asked about the failure of the indictment of Ethel to leverage a full confession by Julius, reportedly said, "She called our bluff."^[24]

The Rosenbergs were convicted on March 29, 1951, and on April 5 were sentenced to death by Judge Irving Kaufman under Section 2 of the Espionage Act of 1917, 50 U.S. Code 32 (now 18 U.S. Code 794), which prohibits transmitting or attempting to transmit to a foreign government information "relating to the national defense."^[25] The conviction helped to fuel Senator Joseph McCarthy's investigations into anti-American activities by U.S. citizens. While their devotion to the Communist cause was well-documented, the Rosenbergs denied the espionage charges even as they faced the electric chair.^[26]

The Rosenbergs were the only two American civilians to be executed for espionage-related activity during the Cold War.^[27] In imposing the death penalty, Kaufman noted that he held them responsible not only for espionage but also for the deaths of the Korean War:

After the publication of an investigative series in The National Guardian and the formation of the National Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case, some Americans came to believe both Rosenbergs were innocent or received too harsh a punishment, and a grassroots campaign was started to try to stop the couple's execution. Between the trial and the executions there were widespread protests and claims of anti-semitism; the charges of anti-semitism were widely believed abroad, but not among the vast majority in the United States, where the Rosenbergs did not receive any support from mainstream Jewish organizations nor from the American Civil Liberties Union as the case did not raise any civil liberties issues at all.^[29]

Marxist Nobel-Prize-winning existentialist philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre called the trial "a legal lynching which smears with blood a whole nation. By killing the Rosenbergs, you have quite simply tried to halt the progress of science by human sacrifice. Magic, witch-hunts, auto-da-fés, sacrifices ' we are here getting to the point: your country is sick with fear... you are afraid of the shadow of your own bomb."^[30] Others, including non-Communists such as Albert Einstein and Nobel-Prize-winning physical chemist Harold Urey,^[31] as well as Communists or left-leaning artists such as Nelson Algren, Bertolt Brecht, Jean Cocteau, Dashiell Hammett, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, protested the position of the American government in what the French termed America's Dreyfus Affair.^[32] In May 1951, Pablo Picasso wrote for the communist French newspaper L'Humanité, "The hours count. The minutes count. Do not let this crime against humanity take place."^[33] The all-black labor union International Longshoremen's Association Local 968 stopped working for a day in protest.^[34] Cinema artists such as Fritz Lang registered their protest.^[35] Pope Pius XII appealed to President Dwight D. Eisenhower to spare the couple, but Eisenhower refused on February 11, 1953, and all other appeals were also unsuccessful.^[36][37]

Their case has been at the center of the controversy over Communism in the United States ever since, with supporters steadfastly maintaining that their conviction was an egregious example of political persecution (see McCarthyism) and likening it to the witch hunts that marred Salem and Early Modern Europe (a comparison that provided the inspiration for Arthur Miller's critically acclaimed play, The Crucible).^[38]

On September 12, 2008, co-defendant Morton Sobell admitted that he and Julius Rosenberg were guilty of spying for the Soviet Union, but that any information about the atomic bomb that they had passed was of no value for the Soviets. He believed Ethel was aware of the espionage, but did not actively participate.^[8]

[edit] Execution

Sing Sing Correctional Facility, where the Rosenbergs were executed

Because the United States Federal Bureau of Prisons did not operate an electric chair at the time, the Rosenbergs were transferred to the New York State-run Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining for execution. The couple were executed at sundown in the electric chair on June 19, 1953.^[1][39] This was delayed from the originally scheduled date of June 18 because, on June 17, Supreme Court Associate Justice William O. Douglas had granted a stay of execution. That stay resulted from the intervention in the case of Fyke Farmer, a Tennessee lawyer whose efforts had previously met with scorn from the Rosenbergs' attorney.^[40]

On June 18, the Court was called back into special session to dispose of Douglas' stay rather than let the execution be delayed for months while the appeal that was the basis of the stay wended its way through the lower courts. The Court did not vacate Douglas' stay until noon on June 19. Thus, the execution then was scheduled for later in the evening after the start of the Jewish Sabbath.^[41] Desperately playing for more time, their lawyer, Emanuel Hirsch Bloch, filed a complaint that this offended their Jewish heritage, so the execution was scheduled before sunset, at 8pm on Friday instead of the regular time of execution at Sing-Sing of 11pm. which usually took place on Thursday.^[42]

Eyewitness testimony (as given by a newsreel report featured in the 1982 documentary film The Atomic Cafe) describes the circumstances of the Rosenbergs' death, noting that while Julius Rosenberg died after the first series of electrocutions, his wife did not. After the normal course of electrocutions, attendants removed the strapping and other equipment only to have doctors determine that Mrs. Rosenberg had not yet died (her heart was still beating). Three courses of electrocution were ultimately applied, and at conclusion eyewitnesses reported, Bob Considine among them, a grisly scene with smoke rising from her head in the chamber.^[43]

Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were buried at Wellwood Cemetery in Pinelawn, New York.^[41]

[edit] Post Soviet interviews

[edit] Boris V. Brokhovich

The engineer who later became director of the of Chelyabinsk-40, the plutonium production reactor and extraction facility which the Soviet Union used to create its first bomb material, denied any involvement by the Rosenbergs. In 1989, Boris V. Brokhovich told The New York Times in an interview that development of the bomb had been a matter of trial and error. "You sat the Rosenbergs in the electric chair for nothing", he said. "We got nothing from the Rosenbergs."^[44]

[edit] Alexandre Feklisov

According to Alexandre Feklisov, the former Soviet agent who was Julius' contact, he had not provided Russia with any useful material about the atomic bomb, "He didn't understand anything about the atomic bomb and he couldn't help us."^[3]

[edit] David Greenglass

David Greenglass, Ethel Rosenberg's brother and key prosecution witness, recanted his testimony about his sister's typed notes. He stated in an interview in 2001: "I don't know who typed it, frankly, and to this day I can't remember that the typing took place. I had no memory of that at all'none whatsoever."^[27] He said he gave false testimony to protect himself and his wife, Ruth, and that he was encouraged by the prosecution to do so; "I would not sacrifice my wife and my children for my sister."^[27] He refused to express any remorse for his decision to sacrifice his sister, saying only that he did not realize that the death penalty would be invoked.^[27]

[edit] The Rosenbergs' children

The Rosenbergs' two sons, Robert and Michael, spent years trying to prove the innocence of their parents, until 2008 when they said that their father had likely been involved after Sobell, at age 91, confessed.^[45] The Rosenberg children were orphaned by the executions and no relatives adopted them. They were finally adopted by the songwriter Abel Meeropol and his wife Anne, and they assumed the Meeropol surname. Abel Meeropol (under the pen name of Lewis Allan) wrote the classic anti-lynching anthem "Strange Fruit", made famous by singer Billie Holiday.^{[citation needed]} Robert and Michael co-wrote a book about the experience, We Are Your Sons: The Legacy of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (1975), and Robert wrote another book in 2003, An Execution in the Family: One Son's Journey.^{[citation needed]} In 1990, Robert founded the Rosenberg Fund for Children, a non-profit foundation that provides support for children of targeted progressive activists, and youth who are targeted activists themselves. Michael is recently retired as the Chair and Professor of Economics, School of Arts and Sciences, Economics at Western New England College in Springfield, Massachusetts.^{[citation needed]} Michael's daughter, Ivy Meeropol, directed a 2003 documentary about her grandparents, Heir to an Execution, which was featured at the Sundance Film Festival.^{[citation needed]}

Michael Meeropol and Robert Meeropol believe that "whatever atomic bomb information their father passed to the Russians was, at best, superfluous; the case was riddled with prosecutorial and judicial misconduct; their mother was convicted on flimsy evidence to place leverage on her husband; and neither deserved the death penalty."^[45]

[edit] 2008 document release

In a hearing, U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein decided to make public the grand jury testimony of 36 of the 46 witnesses but not that of Greenglass. Citing the objections of Greenglass and two other living witnesses, the judge claimed that their right to privacy "overrides the public's need to know."^[46] Georgetown University law professor David Vladeck argued on behalf of historical groups that because of recent interviews, Greenglass forfeited the privacy he now claims and that the testimony should be released. Hellerstein was not convinced. The testimony of the other seven witnesses will be released upon their consent, or confirmation that they are dead or impossible to find.^[46]

In September 2008, hundreds of pages of grand jury transcripts were released. With this release, it was revealed that Ruth Greenglass had irreconcilable differences in her grand jury testimony in August 1950 and the testimony she gave at trial. At the grand jury, Ruth Greenglass was asked, "Didn't you write [the information] down on a piece of paper?"^[47] She replied, "Yes, I wrote [the information] down a piece of paper and [Julius Rosenberg] took it with him."^[47] But, at the trial she testified that Ethel Rosenberg typed up notes about the atomic bomb.^[47]

[edit] Memoir of Nikita Khrushchev

It is possible that Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, wrote of the Rosenbergs in his memoir, published posthumously in 1990. He supposes that Khruschchev learned from Stalin and Vyacheslav M. Molotov that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg "had provided very significant help in accelerating the production of our atomic bomb." Khrushchev further wrote:

Morton Sobell (left), Marshall Perlin, Robert Meeropol, Franz Loeser, April 19, 1976.

[edit] Morton Sobell

In 2008, after many years of denial, Morton Sobell finally admitted he was a Soviet spy and confirmed Julius Rosenberg was "in a conspiracy that delivered to the Soviets classified military and industrial information ... [on] the atomic bomb."^[8] However, he stated that the hand-drawn diagrams and other atomic-bomb details that were acquired by David Greenglass and passed to Julius were of "little value" to the Soviet Union, and were used only to corroborate what they had already learned from the other atomic spies.^[8] He also stated that he believed Ethel Rosenberg was aware of her husband's deeds, but took no part in them.^[8] In a subsequent letter to the New York Times, Sobell denied that he knew anything about Julius Rosenberg's alleged atomic espionage activities ' that the only thing he knew for sure was what he (Sobell) did with Julius Rosenberg.^[49]

[edit] Fictional portrayals

The Rosenbergs have figured in several film, television and literary works:

• Ethel Rosenberg is a major supporting character in Tony Kushner's critically acclaimed play Angels in America, in which her ghost haunts a dying Roy Cohn. In the HBO 2003 miniseries adaptation of the play, she was portrayed by Meryl Streep. In the 1992 film Citizen Cohn, she is portrayed by Karen Ludwig.^[50]
• Faiz Ahmed Faiz, a celebrated revolutionary poet of Pakistan, praised Julius and Ethel Rosenberg's sacrifices in his poems, which are now classics of Urdu poetry.
• The E. L. Doctorow novel The Book of Daniel is based on the Rosenberg case as seen through the eyes of the (fictionalized) son. Doctorow wrote the screenplay of the Sidney Lumet film, Daniel, starring Timothy Hutton.
• Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are portrayed in the episode "Time Again and World" of the television show Sliders. The episode, which takes place in an alternate universe in which the United States Constitution was abridged in 1963 by President J. Edgar Hoover, has the Rosenbergs mentioned, not as 'A-Bomb spies', but as the ones who assassinated John F. Kennedy. After the Rosenbergs are executed, Hoover becomes President due to his popularity with the execution, abridges the Constitution, and places the country under martial law, which lasts well into the 90s.
• The other major novel dealing extensively with the case is Robert Coover's The Public Burning. Unlike Doctorow, Coover uses real names for most protagonists of the case, and uses a fictionalized Richard Nixon as his narrator for half of the chapters. This sparked a long delay in the publication of the novel, since publishing houses feared lawsuits from people appearing as characters in the book. Further fictional treatments of the case are Tema Nason's fictional autobiography Ethel and Millicent Dillon's fictional biography Harry Gold.^[51]
• Often referred to in Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar, including in the famous opening line, "It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York."'^[52]
• Julius Rosenberg is available in the computer game Civilization 4 as a Great Spy

[edit] See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Rosenberg trial

• Atom Spies
• Roy Cohn, member of the prosecution team
• Soviet atomic bomb project

[edit] Notes

[edit] Works cited

• Feklisov, Aleksandr, and Kostin, Sergei. The Man Behind the Rosenbergs. Enigma Books (2001). 978-929631-24-7.
• Roberts, Sam. The Brother: The Untold Story of the Rosenberg Case. Random House, 2001. ISBN 0-375-76124-1.
• Schneir, Walter. Invitation to an Inquest. Pantheon Books, 1983. ISBN 0-394-71496-2.
• Schrecker, Ellen. Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. Little, Brown and Company, 1998. ISBN 0-316-77470-7.

[edit] Further reading

• Nason, Tema. Ethel: The Fictional Autobiography of Ethel Rosenberg. Delacourt, 1990. ISBN 0-440-21110-7 and by Syracuse, 2002, ISBN 0-8156-0745-8.
• Meeropol, Robert and Michael. We Are Your Sons, The Legacy of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. University of Illinois Press, 1986. [chapter 15 is a detailed refutation of Radosh and Milton's scholarship.] ISBN 0-252-01263-1.
• Meeropol, Robert Meeropol. An Execution in the Family: One Son's Journey. St. Martin's Press, 2003. ISBN 0-312-30637-7.
• Radosh, Ronald and Joyce Milton. The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth. Henry Holt (1983). ISBN 0-03-049036-7.
• Wexley, John. The Judgment of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Ballantine Books, 1977. ISBN 0-345-24869-4.
• Trahair, Richard C.S. and Robert Miller. Encyclopedia of Cold War Espionage, Spies, and Secret Operations. Enigma Books, 2009. ISBN 978-1-929631-75-9.
• Yalkowsky, Stanley. The Murder of the Rosenbergs. Crucible Publications (July 1990). ISBN 978-0-9620984-2-0.
• Meeropol, Michael, ed. The Rosenberg Letters: A Complete Edition of the Prison Correspondence of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg NY, Garland Publishing, 1994 ISBN 0-8240-5948-4
• Zinn, A People's History of the United States, page 434
• Roberts, Sam. The Brother: The Untold Story of the Rosenberg Case, Random House, 2003, ISBN 0375761241.
• Schneir, Walter. Final Verdict: What Really Happened in the Rosenberg Case, Melville House, 2010. ISBN 1935554166.
• Hornblum, Allen M. The Invisible Harry Gold: The Man Who Gave the Soviets the Atom Bomb, Yale University Press 2010. ISBN 0300156766.

[edit] External links

• An Interactive Rosenberg Espionage Ring Timeline and Archive
• Timeline of Events Relating to the Rosenberg Trial.
• Rosenberg trial transcript (excerpts as HTML, and the entire 2,563 page transcript as a PDF file)
• Ethel's brother says he trumped up evidence.
• Documents relating to the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg Case, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library
• Project Venona messages.
• Rosenberg FBI files (summary only)
• Heir to an Execution ' An HBO documentary by Ivy Meeropol, the granddaughter of Ethel and Julius.
• A statement by the Rosenberg's sons in support of their exoneration
• An Interview with Robert Meeropol about the adoption
• National Committee to Reopen the Rosenberg Case
• Annotated bibliography for Ethel Rosenberg from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues
• Annotated bibliography for Julius Rosenberg from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues
• Ethel Rosenberg at Find a Grave
• Julius Rosenberg at Find a Grave
• The East Village history Project
• The Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) for Alexander Vassiliev's Notebooks, containing more information on Soviet espionage in the United States