Rosenberg Case

Rosenberg, Julius (1918-53) spy. Rosenberg was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family on New York's Lower East Side. At City College, he studied electrical engineering and was active in leftwing activities. In 1945 Julius was removed from his position with the Army Signal Corps on grounds that he was a Communist, which he denied. He opened his own machine shop in partnership with his wife Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, who during World War II had worked on the atomic bomb at the Los Alamos, New Mexico, laboratory. In 1950, the Rosenbergs were arrested and charged with spying for the Soviet Union; the government alleged that they had passed secrets on the design of the atomic bomb to a confederate who then passed them on to the Soviets. The Rosenbergs denied the charges but were convicted on April 5, 1951, and sentenced to death. Efforts across the world to have the sentences commuted failed, given the raging anti-Communism that prevailed and the less open anti-Semitism, and the two were executed on June 19, 1953. In the decades since, information released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and by the Russian government have tended to confirm Julius's guilt, although there is less certainty about Ethel's; the Rosenbergs' sons have challenged the authenticity of these documents.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed for World War II atomic espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union, were first exposed as spies after an investigation into security leaks from Los Alamos, New Mexico. As a result of this investigation, Klaus Fuchs, a German-born British scientist; Harry Gold, a courier; and David Greenglass, an army machinist, had all confessed to espionage. The latter implicated his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg. Although the evidence against Ethel was thinner, the FBI arrested her in the hope that Julius would also confess. Tried along with Morton So-bell, who was sentenced to thirty years' imprisonment, the Rosenbergs were convicted in April 1951 and sentenced to die. The most damning testimony came from Green-glass, who received a fifteen-year sentence, and his wife, Ruth.

A worldwide campaign to save the Rosenbergs emphasized the fate of their two young children and charged that the evidence was manufactured and the trial and sentence tainted by anti-Semitism. Nonetheless, they were executed at Sing Sing Prison on 19 June 1953. The release of FBI files on the case in the late 1970s confirmed that Julius had headed a large ring of industrial spies and that Ethel was aware of his activities but had played only a minor role in the espionage, conclusions reinforced by decrypted Soviet cables released in 1995 and by revelations from Julius's KGB controller, Alexander Feklisov.

Bibliography

Radosh, Ronald, and Joyce Milton. The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth. 2d. ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997. Contains revelations from National Security Agency and Soviet sources.

A court case involving Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, an American couple who were executed in 1953 as spies for the Soviet Union. Some have argued that the Rosenbergs were innocent victims of McCarthy-era hysteria against communists or of anti-Semitism (they were Jewish). Others contend that they were indeed Soviet spies.