Here's the story of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg were American citizens executed for conspiracy to commit espionage, relating to passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. A member of the Young Communist League in the early 1930s, it was through her activism with the Communist Party that she met Julius Rosenberg in 1936. She was viewed as a co-conspirator and never indicted. His research relies heavily on newly released KGB files. The project aimed to gather and decode messages sent by Soviet military intelligence (KGB and GRU) to the U.S. Venona would also help the government locate spy rings. When she married Julius Rosenberg in 1939, the year he earned a degree in electrical engineering, the two were already active members of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). Documents relating to the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg Case, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, 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, The Cold War International History Project (CWIHP), Rosenberg Son: "My Parents Were Executed Under the Unconstitutional Espionage Act", History on Trial: The Rosenberg Case in E.L. Doctorow's, Julius Rosenberg at court sentenced to death, The WSWS speaks to Julius and Ethel Rosenbergs son An interview with Robert Meeropol, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Julius_and_Ethel_Rosenberg&oldid=1142051620, American people convicted of spying for the Soviet Union, Pages containing links to subscription-only content, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles with unsourced statements from September 2021, Articles with failed verification from November 2022, Articles with French-language sources (fr), Wikipedia external links cleanup from October 2020, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, Images of the Rosenbergs are engraved on a memorial in, The execution is explored in great detail and serves as the premise of, Clune, Lori. As a result of this new testimony, all charges against Ruth Greenglass were dropped. Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. Their legal team worked to have the verdict overturned, but their efforts failed. By 1944, Julius had recruited him to spy for the Soviets. Sebba says the only lesson history offers is that there are no lessons to be learned. Their case against Ethel Rosenberg was resolved 10 days before the start of the trial, when David and Ruth Greenglass were interviewed a second time. "Thanks to information provided by their agents", Moynihan wrote in his book Secrecy, "they did it in four". And the newspapers reported that because she was tougher, she needed more of a jolt. He also named Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as contacts and denied that his wife, Ruth Greenglass, was involved with any espionage activities. Martin J. Manning and Clarence R. Wyatt, eds. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were American Communists who captured and maintained world attention after being accused and convicted of spying for the Soviet Union.. Greenglass secretly testified before a grand jury in August 1950. Julius became a leader in the Young Communist League USA while at City College of New York during the Great Depression. As a young attorney in 1951, Cohn pushed for the execution of Meeropol's grandparents Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on espionage charges. It was known that some communists, such as Fuchs, had spied for the Soviets. There was international outrage at her death. [11], Rosenberg provided thousands of classified reports from Emerson Radio, including a complete proximity fuse. In 2008, the National Archives of the United States published most of the grand jury testimony related to the prosecution of the Rosenbergs. 2006. [25], On August 11, Ethel Rosenberg testified before a grand jury. The storefront theater boasted 96 seats and charged each patron five cents. He left the Communist Party to avoid suspicions. [68], Numerous articles were published in 2008 related to the Rosenberg case. The debate over her involvement is ongoing. [42] Pope Pius XII appealed to President Dwight D. Eisenhower to spare the couple, but Eisenhower refused on February 11, 1953. Omissions? By 1945, the Soviets considered Rosenberg and his espionage network to be providing valuable information. [28][29] The prosecution's primary witness, David Greenglass, said that he turned over to Julius Rosenberg a sketch of the cross-section of an implosion-type atom bomb. He said the Soviets had developed their own bomb by trial and error. Getty Images. Case Summary. They married in 1939. There were protest marches held around the world at their sentence, including in Ireland. [26] Julius and Ethel were put under pressure to incriminate others involved in the spy ring. [65][63][64], The messages decoded by the Venona project were not made public during the Rosenbergs' trial, which relied instead on testimony from their collaborators. Her death was so barbaric. Or he could have thought, if I admit I am a spy, I will have to name names? Convicted of espionage in 1951, they were executed by the federal government of the United States in 1953 at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York, becoming the first American civilians to be executed for such charges and the first to receive that penalty during peacetime. Upon returning home later, Rojas claimed to have seen read more, The most successful and feared Confederate commerce raider of the war, the CSS Alabama, sinks after a spectacular battle off the coast of France with the USS Kearsarge. [62] Ethel did not have a codename,[24] however, KGB messages which were contained in the Venona project's Vassiliev files, and which were not made public until 2009,[63][64] revealed that both Ethel and Julius had regular contact with at least two KGB agents and were active in recruiting not only Ethel's brother David Greenglass, but also another Manhattan Project spy named Russell McNutt. Her mother disowned her. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, American communists, executed after having been found guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage. "My wife is more important to me than my sister. I believe your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb years before our best scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb has already caused, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000 and who knows but that millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason. [8], Ethel Greenglass was born on September 28, 1915, to a Jewish family in Manhattan, New York City. did not give her a code name, and evidently did not consider her a spy; and the prosecutions strategy was to use Ethel to coerce her husband to confession.. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. He stated that Julius asked him to help provide secrets about atomic weapons so that Julius could pass on the information to the USSR. Harvard Law professorAlan Dershowitzstated that the Rosenbergs were guilty and framed, suggesting that they were spies, but that evidence was still fabricated against them, causing them to have an unjust trial and punishment. He reportedly said, "She called our bluff", as she made no effort to push her husband to any action. [17], On June 15, 1950, David Greenglass was arrested by the FBI for espionage and soon confessed to having passed secret information on to the USSR through Gold. Despite some public outrage and failed appeals, the Rosenbergs were executed by electric chair at Sing Sing Prison on June 19, 1953. In the following year Julius obtained a job as a civilian engineer with the U.S. Army Signal Corps, and he and Ethel began working together to disclose U.S. military secrets to the Soviet Union. Or was he more likely to get off by pleading innocence for both of them? They could not be charged for treason since the U.S. was not at war with the USSR. Theodore Hallis one example. Her husband, Julius, had been executed a short time before her. T he case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, the young Jewish American couple executed in June 1953 at the height of the cold war for allegedly passing atomic secrets to the Russians, has weighed . Greenglass passed information to Julius, including information about the high explosive lenses being developed at Los Alamos for the implosion bomb. She had a brother, David Greenglass. The children say that their father did not deserve the death penalty and that their mother was wrongly convicted. 8/7/1950 David Greenglass witness testimony. Some people believed that the Rosenbergs were the victims of a surge of hysterical anti-communist feeling in the United States, and protested that the death sentence handed down was cruel and unusual punishment. What could he have said? J. After being interviewed this second time, he said that he had given this information to Julius in the living room of the Rosenbergs' New York apartment. I have spent ages agonising over that. The cable also makes clear that the sister's husband is involved enough in espionage to have his own codename ("Antenna" and later "Liberal"). Despite these fears, the trial of the Rosenbergs produced mixed reactions among the public. Opines that mccarthyism caused chaos in america. "[56], Boris V. Brokhovich, the engineer who later became director of Chelyabinsk-40, the plutonium production reactor and extraction facility that the Soviet Union used to create its first bomb material, alleged that Khrushchev was a "silly fool". (. The couple were the only two American civilians to be executed for the crime of espionage during the Cold War.. Their case has been at the center of the controversy over communism in the United States ever since, with supporters . Ethel Greenglass worked as a clerk for some years after her graduation from high school in 1931. Ruth statedin her witness testimony:Julius then took the info into the bathroom and read it and when he came out he called Ethel and told her she had to type this info immediately. They were executed in 1953. [16], In January 1950, the U.S. discovered that Klaus Fuchs, a German refugee theoretical physicist working for the British mission in the Manhattan Project, had given key documents to the Soviets throughout the war. Harris, Brian. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/ AFP via Getty. I ask Sebba how culpable she thinks Julius Rosenberg was in his wifes death sentence. Cohn would go on later to work for Senator Joseph McCarthy, appointed as chief counsel to the investigations subcommittee during McCarthy's tenure as chairman of the Senate Government Operations Committee. Ethel became the first woman executed by the U.S. government since Mary Surratt was hanged in 1865 for her alleged role in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He said Julius had passed secrets and thus linked him to the Soviet contact agent Anatoli Yakovlev. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, orig. By killing the Rosenbergs, you have quite simply tried to halt the progress of science by human sacrifice. Explains that one of the most famous cases of spies was the case of ethel and julius rosenberg, who were minor activists in the american communist party and convicted of being communists. At this time, Greenglass worked at Los Alamos. [65], The Rosenbergs' two sons, Michael and Robert, spent years trying to prove the innocence of their parents. Her children were shunted around and then went into care. He also claimed that his sister Ethel's husband Julius Rosenberg had convinced David's wife Ruth to recruit him while visiting him in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1944. The young journalist [Raman Pratsevich] arrested in Belarus with his girlfriend [Sofia Sapega]. There were no confessions, no names produced of other Americans spying for the Soviets, and no admission of guilt by either Rosenberg. Nickelodeons (named for a read more, Francesca Rojas two young children are killed in their home in the small town of Necochea, Argentina. [72], The notebooks make clear that the KGB considered Julius Rosenberg an effective agent and his wife Ethel an enthusiastic supporter of his work. Well yes, she replies. [10], According to a 2001 book by his former handler Alexander Feklisov, Rosenberg was originally recruited to spy for the interior ministry of the Soviet Union, NKVD, on Labor Day 1942 by former spymaster Semyon Semyonov. Due to Red Scare trials and newspaper headlines, Americans in the 1940s, and 1950s knew that Soviet espionage was serious. 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The three-year Rosenberg case culminated in their execution on Friday, 19 June, 1953, just minutes before the onset of the Jewish Sabbath. How. [9], Julius Rosenberg joined the Army Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, in 1940, where he worked as an engineer-inspector until 1945. [11] By this time, following the invasion by Nazi Germany in June 1941, the Soviet Union had become an ally of the Western powers, which included the United States after Pearl Harbor. [33], In imposing the death penalty, Kaufman noted that he held the Rosenbergs responsible not only for espionage but also for American deaths in the Korean War:[34]. They were convicted of Conspiracy to Commit Espionage in one of the most hotly-debated trials in U.S. history. Many hundreds of people filed past the biers. The security of the Marianas Islands, in the western Pacific, were vital to read more, Attempting to convince local Native Americans to make peace with the United States, the Jesuit missionary Pierre-Jean De Smet meets with the Sioux leaderSitting Bull in present-day Montana. The vault, which now has the capacity to hold read more, In what is nowknownas Juneteenth, on June 19, 1865, Union soldiers arrive in Galveston, Texas with news that the Civil War is over and slavery in the United States is abolished. [63][65][64] Though the public release of Vassiliev's notebooks did not occur until 2009, the notebooks had in fact been originally intercepted during the Venona decryptions. [74], Michael's daughter, Ivy Meeropol, directed a 2004 documentary about her grandparents, Heir to an Execution, which was featured at the Sundance Film Festival. The US government offered to spare the lives of both Julius and Ethel if Julius provided the names of other spies and they admitted their guilt. 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