The arrest, trial, and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg was one of the most notorious examples of the American government’s Cold War commitment to routing out communism—even at the expense of truth and justice.
Ethel Greenglass met Julius Rosenberg in their Young Communist League activities, and the two married in 1939. He became a civilian engineer with the U.S. Army Signal Corps. By 1942 he began working with Soviet intermediaries to send military secrets to the U.S.S.R. One of the other men associated with the espionage ring was David Greenglass, Ethel’s brother; Greenglass was involved in the Manhattan Project. In 1950 the arrest of Soviet spies Klaus Fuchs and Harry Gold eventually led to Greenglass, who then pointed to Julius and Ethel, the latter brought up on charges of conspiracy. The two were arrested and their trial was arranged to be held at the Southern District Federal Court of New York.
The trial began March 6th, 1951. Greenglass’s testimony, which was changed from his original statement, was damning, especially when he created an almost nonexistent case against his sister. Julius and Ethel denied the charges but plead the 5th Amendment; this may have hurt their case with the jury. On March 29th, the jury found them guilty and Judge Kaufman told them their crimes were “worse than murder” and gave them the death penalty. They were told that if they cooperated their sentences would be commuted, but both refused.
The Rosenbergs’ lawyers appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court nine times but it chose not to review the record. There were also numerous calls for clemency, including from Albert Einstein, Pope Pius XII, and J. Edgar Hoover for Ethel since she was a mother of two, but none of them came to fruition. The case caught the attention of millions around the world, spurring protest and outrage at the shoddiness of the trial and the severity of the sentence. On June 19th, 1953, the couple was electrocuted at Sing Sing prison—the first American civilians to be executed for espionage during peacetime.
The profoundly divisive execution resulted in decades of research and revelation. Julius’s guilt was more or less confirmed in 1995 through decrypted Soviet messages, but Ethel was found to have been guilty of little, if anything. Julius’s supporters still claim he was only a minor spy and that he was not involved in atomic espionage. An article from the Atomic Heritage Foundation on the trial sums up the current thinking: “The trial continues to be controversial today. Many individuals still question whether or not there was enough valid evidence used during the trial to convict and execute the Rosenbergs. Others question if the punishment was just for their crimes. Some atomic scientists have claimed that the information David and Julius passed along would not have been of great importance to the USSR because it was incomplete and not very detailed. Due to the recent evidence provided by Sobell’s interview, witness testimonies, and the Venona documents, calls have been made for Ethel’s exoneration. The debate over her involvement is ongoing. Julius and Ethel's children, Michael and Robert, maintain that their mother was innocent and have created an online petition to exonerate her. Because of the Venona documents, they now believe that Julius was a Soviet spy. They claim: ‘The Greenglasses’ lies were necessary to obtain Ethel’s conviction; the K.G.B. did not give her a code name, and evidently did not consider her a spy; and the prosecution’s strategy was to use Ethel to coerce her husband to confession.’”
