Julius Rosenberg

Julius Rosenberg (May 12, 1918 – June 19, 1953) and Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg (September 28, 1915 – June 19, 1953) were American communists who were executed in 1953 after having been found guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage.  The charges were in relation to the passing of information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union.  Theirs was the first execution of civilians for espionage in United States history.

Since the execution, decoded Soviet cables have confirmed courtroom testimony that Julius acted as a courier and recruiter for the Soviets, but doubts remain about the level of Ethel’s active involvement.  The decision to execute the Rosenbergs was, and still is, controversial.  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.   Harry Gold, who identified Greenglass, served 15 years in Federal prison as the courier for him and the British scientist, Klaus Fuchs. Morton Sobell, who was tried with the Rosenbergs, served 17 years and 9 months.  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.”

Julius Rosenberg was born to a family of Jewish immigrants in New York City on May 12, 1918.  1920 census records show that his family lived at 205 East 113th Street when Julius was about 2 years old, but moved to the Lower East Side by the time he was 11 years old.

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 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 in 1940, where he worked on radar equipment.

Ethel Greenglass was born on September 28, 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.

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.  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.

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 to the KGB’s service, including Joel Barr, Alfred Sarant, William Perl and Morton Sobell.

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.

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.  A number of project members—some high-profile, others lower in rank—did voluntarily give 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.

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.”  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 Russians throughout the war.  Fuchs’ identified his courier as Harry Gold, who was arrested on May 23, 1950.  Harry Gold also confessed and identified Sergeant David Greenglass, a former machinist at Los Alamos, and the Rosenbergs as additional sources.  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 his wife to recruit him while on a visit to him in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1944 and that Julius had also passed secrets.  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 kidnapped by members of the Mexican secret police and driven to the U.S. border where he was arrested.  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.

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.