Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

Born in 1918 to a family of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire, Julius Rosenberg became a leader in the Young Communist League USA while at City College of New York during the Great Depression. In 1939, he graduated with a degree in electrical engineering.

Ethel Greenglass was born on 28 September 1915 to a Jewish family in Manhattan. She had a brother, David Greenglass, and was originally an aspiring actress and singer.

Taking a secretarial job at a shipping company, she became involved in labour disputes and joined the Young Communist League, where she met Julius in 1936. They married in 1939.

Julius joined the US Army Signal Corps in 1940, but was discharged a few years later when his membership of the Communist Party became known.

In 1950, Ethel Rosenberg’s brother, David Greenglass – who had been an Army machinist stationed at the atomic bomb facility in Los Alamos, New Mexico –  was arrested by the FBI for espionage.

He confessed to having passed secret information on to the USSR and also claimed that Julius Rosenberg had convinced David’s wife, Ruth and that Julius had passed secrets to the Soviets.

Rosenberg was allegedly recruited by Soviet intelligence, passing thousands of pages of documents to his handler, Alexander Feklisov, and recruiting sympathetic individuals into service for the Soviets.

On 17 July 1950, Julius was arrested on suspicion of espionage based on Greenglass’s confession. On 11 August 1950, Ethel was arrested after testifying before a grand jury.

After a month-long trial, the Rosenbergs were found guilty, and on 5 April 1951, Judge Irving Kaufman sentenced them both to death in the electric chair, calling their crime “worse than murder” and blaming them for 50,000 American deaths in Korea.

The testimony of Ethel’s brother (who supplied the stolen documents to Julius) condemned her. He later confessed he had lied to protect his wife, Ruth, the actual typist of the documents.

The two-year-long battle to save the Rosenbergs’ lives that followed was the most dramatic chapter of the case. Albert Einstein spoke out, as did Jean-Paul Sartre, Dashiell Hammett and Frida Kahlo. Pope Pius XII appealed for clemency. Ethel Rosenberg herself wrote a desperate plea to President Eisenhower from her cell. All to no avail.

Ethel and Julius Rosenberg died in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison in New York on 19 June 1953. They were the first civilians in American history to be executed for espionage.

Julius was executed first. He died after the first electric shock. Ethel’s execution did not go smoothly. After she was given the normal course of three electric shocks, attendants removed the strapping and other equipment only to have doctors determine that Ethel’s heart was still beating.

Two more electric shocks were applied, and at the conclusion, eyewitnesses reported that smoke rose from her head.

Julius and Ethel died without ever admitting guilt, and at the time, many supporters believed they’d been victims of overzealous prosecutors and Cold War fear-mongering and paranoia.

For decades, the Rosenbergs’ sons, Michael and Robert Meeropol and many other defenders maintained that Julius and Ethel were innocent.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, much information concerning them was declassified, including a trove of decoded Soviet cables, codenamed VENONA, which detailed Julius’s role as a courier and recruiter for the Soviets and Ethel’s role as an accessory.

There is a consensus among historians that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were guilty, but their trial was marred by clear judicial and legal improprieties, and they should not have been executed.

The Rosenberg children say that their father did not deserve the death penalty and that their mother was wrongly convicted. They continue to campaign for Ethel to be posthumously and legally exonerated.