Not answering questions proved to be problematic for the Rosenbergs because during theera of McCarthyism, many believed that the refusal to answer questions was an admission of guilt and involvement with the Communist Party. Many individuals still question whether or not there was enough valid evidence used during the trial to convict and execute the Rosenbergs. Here's the story of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. On July 17, 1950 the FBI arrested Julius, and one month later Ethel was arrested. Julius Rosenbergwas a key Soviet spy who passed along information to the Soviet Union and recruited Manhattan Project spies. Judge Irving Kaufman presided over the trial, with Assistant U.S. Attorney Irving Saypol leading the prosecution and criminal defense lawyer Emmanuel Bloch representing the Rosenbergs. But even graver is the thought of the millions of dead whose deaths may be directly attributable to what these spies have done.. How. But at the trial, she testified that Ethel Rosenberg typed up notes about the atomic bomb. It was there, working in a cubicle with a piano, staff paper and tape recorder that read more, On June 19, 1905, some 450 people attend the opening day of the worlds first nickelodeon, located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and developed by the showman Harry Davis. Sobell and Julius Rosenberg, classmates together in college, dedicated themselves to the cause of Communism. He was a physicist at Los Alamos, and a valuable source to the Soviets. The Greenglasses never withdrew their new testimony. Due to the recent evidence provided by Sobells interview, witness testimonies, and the Venona documents, calls have been made for Ethels exoneration. They were persuaded to change their original stories. [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. The trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg was certainly dramatic. [75], Their sons' current position is that Julius was legally guilty of the conspiracy charge, though not of atomic spying, while Ethel was only generally aware of his activities. [21][22] The U.S. government claimed Sobell was arrested by the Mexican police for bank robbery on August 16, 1950, and extradited the next day to the United States in Laredo, Texas. He then claimed that he passed this information to Julius on a New York street corner, and that Ethel was not involved. They also defendedSobell, who was put on trial with the Rosenbergs. In the United States of the late 1940s and 1950s, Fear was the overriding motif of the age, and fear breeds hysteria, Sebba says. On June 19, 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of conspiring to pass U.S. atomic secrets to the Soviets, are executed at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York. He also stated that he believed Ethel was only guilty of being Julius wife and was not an active participant in the espionage ring. [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. [78] In October 2016, both Michael and Robert Meeropol spoke with Anderson Cooper in an interview which aired on 60 Minutes. In 1951, Julius and his wife Ethel were tried and convicted of espionage for providing the Soviet Union with classified information. In 1990, he founded the Rosenberg Fund for Children, a nonprofit foundation that provides support for children of targeted liberal activists, and youth who are targeted as activists. "You sat the Rosenbergs in the electric chair for nothing", he said. Initiated when the Soviet Union was an ally of the U.S., the program continued during the Cold War when it was considered an enemy. The documents suggest his involvement was with military and industrial espionage, rather than atomic espionage, as previously believed. [46] The Times reported that 500 people attended, while some 10,000 stood outside:[50], The bodies had been brought from Sing Sing prison by the national "Rosenberg committee" which undertook the funeral arrangements, and an all-night vigil was held in one of the largest mortuary chapels in Brooklyn. On March 29, 1951, the court convicted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg of conspiracy to commit espionage. He opened thetrial by stating: The evidence will show that the loyalty and alliance of the Rosenbergs and Sobell were not to our country, but that it was to Communism. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. "[59], The Venona project was a United States counterintelligence program to decrypt messages transmitted by the intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union. John Philip Jenkins; 3 1952, -, , ) , This love of Communism and the Soviet Union soon led them into a Soviet espionage ring.. [43][44], The execution was delayed from the originally scheduled date of June 18, because Supreme Court Associate Justice William O. Douglas had granted a stay of execution on the previous day. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, orig. National Museum of Nuclear Science & History. Rhoda Laks, another attorney on the Rosenbergs' defense team, also made this argument before Judge Kaufman. [52][53][54], Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, vice-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, investigated how much the Soviet spy ring helped the USSR to build their bomb. Between the trial and the executions, there were widespread protests and claims of antisemitism; the charges of antisemitism were widely believed abroad[citation needed], but not among the vast majority in the United States. Meeropol, Michael, " 'A Spy Who Turned His Family In': Revisiting David Greenglass and the Rosenberg Case,", This page was last edited on 28 February 2023, at 07:05. [69], In 2008, Morton Sobell was interviewed after the revelations from grand jury testimony. Fuchs was charged with violating the Official Secrets Act, and he confessed to spying for the Soviet Union. ", Deborah Friedell, "How Utterly Depreaved!" David originally had said that he had passed the atomic data he had collected to Julius on a New York street corner. 2023 A&E Television Networks, LLC. Ethel Greenglass worked as a clerk for some years after her graduation from high school in 1931. All rights reserved. Dwight Eisenhower in 1953. A worldwide campaign for mercy failed, and the Rosenbergs were executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York. On August 17, the grand jury returned an indictment alleging 11 overt acts. [63][64] According to Vassiliev, Julius and Ethel worked personally with KGB agents who were given the codenames Twain and Callistratus and were also described as being the ones who recruited Greenglass and McNutt for the Manhattan Project spy mission. Her attorney asked the U.S. commissioner to parole her in his custody over the weekend, so that she could make arrangements for her two young children. [71], In 2009, extensive notes collected from KGB archives were made public in a book published by Yale University Press: Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, written by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev; Vassiliev's notebooks included KGB comments concerning Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. [80][81] Ethel's brother says he trumped up evidence. Both Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were indicted, as were David Greenglass and Anatoli Yakovlev. She replied, "Yes, I wrote [the information] down on a piece of paper and [Julius Rosenberg] took it with him." Okay, I am a spy, but my wife isnt? The engineers worked at top electronic firms, and they passed on confidential and useful information to the Soviet Union. Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, installed as emperor of Mexico by French Emperor Napoleon III in 1864, is executed on the orders of Benito Juarez, the president of the Mexican Republic. The couple met as members of the Young Communist League, married in 1939 and had two sons. There were no confessions, no names produced of other Americans spying for the Soviets, and no admission of guilt by either Rosenberg. They married in 1939. Opines that mccarthyism caused chaos in america. [66], In 2001, David Greenglass recanted his testimony about his sister having typed the notes. Julius Rosenberg was an engineer for the U.S. Army Signal Corps who was born in New York on May 12, 1918. Ethel Rosenberg: A Cold War Tragedy by Anne Sebba was published by Orion Books on 24 June 2021.[24][82]. Julius Rosenberg was an engineer for the U.S. Army Signal Corps who was born in New York on May 12, 1918. The documents were not declassified until 1995. Ethel Rosenberg was 37 and the mother of two small sons when she was executed in New York in 1953. read more, When the clock struck midnight on June 19, 2014, King Juan Carlos I of Spains nearly 40-year reign came to an end. The storefront theater boasted 96 seats and charged each patron five cents. Description Following World War II, tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States . [73][24], After Morton Sobell's 2008 confession, they acknowledged their father had been involved in espionage, but said that whatever atomic bomb information he passed to the Russians was, at best, superfluous, that the case was riddled with prosecutorial and judicial misconduct, that their mother was convicted on flimsy evidence to place leverage on her husband, and that neither deserved the death penalty. Ruth joined the Young Communist League (YCL) after graduating high school. 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 . 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. She and David met in the YCL, and married in 1942. He said the Soviets had developed their own bomb by trial and error. The Rosenbergs turned over this information to Harry Gold, a Swiss-born courier for the espionage ring, who then passed it to Anatoly A. Yakovlev, the Soviet Unions vice-consul in New York City. He affirmed: I said before, and say it again, honestly, this is a fact: I never spoke to my sister about this at all.. [79] In January 2017 Senator Elizabeth Warren sent Obama a letter requesting consideration of the exoneration request. They claimed that David gave a sketch and description of an atomic bomb to Julius in September 1945. 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. Photograph: Craig F Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty. She had a brother, David Greenglass. They were accused of sending a rough sketch of the atomic bomb to Russia. [46] Bloch asked for more time, filing a complaint that execution on the Sabbath offended the defendants' Jewish heritage. Ethel's execution did not go smoothly. On March 6, 1951 their trial began in New Yorks Southern District federal court. In 2015 an independent lawsuit secured the release of grand jury testimony in 1950 by Greenglass, which indicated that he might have lied at trial by exaggerating his sisters role in the espionage ring in order to obscure the more extensive involvement of his wife Ruth, who was not prosecuted. In February 1950, Fuchs was arrested in the United Kingdom. There was a fear of communism.. For two years the Rosenberg case was appealed through the courts and before world opinion. Venona documentsproved that Julius Rosenberg helped lead a productive ring of Soviet spies. A letter from Michael and Robert Rosenberg pleading for the life of their parents. Trial and Execution. By 1944, Julius had recruited him to spy for the Soviets. The constitutionality and applicability of the Espionage Act of 1917, under which the Rosenbergs were tried, as well as the impartiality of the trial judge, Irving R. Kaufmanwho in pronouncing sentence had accused them of a crime worse than murderwere key issues during the appeals process. [30], On March 29, 1951, the Rosenbergs were convicted of espionage. Kaufman, who also stated his concerns about executing the Rosenbergs on the Sabbath, rescheduled the execution for 8p.m.before sunset and the Sabbaththe regular time for executions at Sing Sing. On April 5, Judge Kaufman sentenced them to death, and sentenced Sobell to 30 years in prison. He claimed that he was kidnapped by members of the Mexican secret police and driven to the U.S. border, where he was arrested by U.S. Or my mother or my father, OK? He reportedly said, "She called our bluff", as she made no effort to push her husband to any action. She knew what he was doing She was complicit merely by knowing, so thats why they charged them with conspiracy to commit espionage.. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were American Communists who captured and maintained world attention after being accused and convicted of spying for the Soviet Union.. They claim:The Greenglasses lies were necessary to obtain Ethels conviction; the K.G.B. 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. The Rosenbergs were the first U.S. citizens to be convicted and executed for espionage during peacetime and their case remains controversial to this day. Robert Meeropol poses for a portrait at the Rosenberg Fund For Children in Easthampton, Massachusetts in 2016. Feklisov learned through Rosenberg that Ethel's brother David Greenglass was working on the top-secret Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory; he directed Julius to recruit Greenglass. 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. She became involved in labor disputes and joined the Young Communist League, where she met Julius in 1936. Venona Documents from the National Security Archive. Many hundreds of people filed past the biers. Would they have believed him? For this success Rosenberg received a $100 bonus. The children say that their father did not deserve the death penalty and that their mother was wrongly convicted. (The former was released as the motion picture Daniel in 1983.) "[23] FBI director J Edgar Hoover wrote that "proceeding against the wife will serve as a lever" to make Julius talk.[24]. Key to the prosecution's case was testimony by Ethel's . [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. "[67] He said he gave false testimony to protect himself and his wife, Ruth, and that he was encouraged by the prosecution to do so. McNutt was an engineer who worked at theKellexdesign bureau in New York City. Themajority of newspapersat the time in the U.S. did, however, support the death sentence, arguing that the punishment was fair. Omissions? In contrast to the American media, European newspapers did not support the ruling, and there were some protests against it throughout Europe. In this testimony he named Julius and claimed he was recruited to join the Soviet spy ring by him. Judge Irving R. Kaufman presided over the trial. He admitted that he had given documents to the Soviet contact, but said these had to do with defensive radar and weaponry. Harris, Brian. Documents cover, among many other topics, US intelligence activities, including FBI-CIA cooperation; USSR intelligence activities; the Rosenberg espionage network's collection against the US atomic energy program; their attempts to protect the network as US . In 1949, the U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Service (SIS) discovered that Fuchs was a Soviet spy. Both refused to admit any wrongdoing and proclaimed their innocence right up to the time of their deaths, by the electric chair. Myles Lane, a member of the prosecution team, said that the case against Ethel Rosenberg was "not too strong", but that it was "very important that she be convicted too, and given a stiff sentence. 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. Greenglass passed information to Julius, including information about the high explosive lenses being developed at Los Alamos for the implosion bomb. "[70], He said that he thought the hand-drawn diagrams and other atomic-bomb details that were acquired by David Greenglass and passed to Julius were of "little value" to the Soviet Union, and were used only to corroborate what they had already learned from the other atomic spies. Both Rosenbergs were sensationally sentenced to death by electrocution. He said they had urged the death sentence for Ethel in an effort to extract a full confession from Julius. 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. The minutes count. [39] Einstein and Urey pleaded with President Truman to pardon the Rosenbergs. Photograph: Kypros/ Getty. They were orphaned by the executions and were not adopted by their many aunts or uncles, although they initially spent time under the care of their grandmothers and in a children's home. In exchange for this new testimony, Ruth was permitted to remain with their children and care for them. 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). Julius Rosenberg (May 12, 1918 June 19, 1953) and Ethel Rosenberg (ne Greenglass; September 28, 1915 June 19, 1953) were an American couple who spied for the Soviet Union. Later, Ethels brother, Sgt. Files Show About Ethel Rosenberg", "The New York Times Gets Greenglass Wrong", "Greenglass, in Prison, Vows to Kin He Told Truth about Rosenbergs", "National Archives of the United States of America", "Rosenberg Atomic Espionage Spy Case Chronology", "The Rosenbergs were executed for spying in 1953. Online Documents. That stay resulted from intervention in the case by Fyke Farmer, a Tennessee lawyer whose efforts had previously been scorned by the Rosenbergs' attorney, Emanuel Hirsch Bloch. But they would have been better advised to have said straight up, yes we are communists, but no, we are not spies.. Their trial remains controversial today. The request was denied. There was no compassion.. The Rosenbergs were charged with conspiracy to commit espionage and brought to trial on March 6, 1951; Greenglass was the chief witness for the prosecution. Built in an English shipyard and sold to the Confederates in 1861, the Alabama was a state-of-the-art ship220 read more, After 14 Formula One race car drivers withdraw due to safety concerns over the Michelin-made tires on their vehicles, German driver Michael Schumacher wins a less-than-satisfying victory at the United States Grand Prix on June 19, 2005. At one point in the biography, Michael, then not yet 10, recalls playing word games with his father, including Hangman. 2009 Vassiliev notebooks based on KGB archives. "Great Importance World-Wide: Presidential Decision-Making and the Executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Ethels execution was botched. They hoped merely by arresting her on these trumped-up charges, surely Julius would talk, because thats what everyone else had done.. On March 29 they were found guilty, and on April 5 the couple was sentenced to death. The network included: engineers (Julius Rosenberg, Nathan Sussman, Joel Barr, Alfred Sarant,Morton Sobell), a military aviation scientist (William Perl), a civil design engineer (McNutt), and a machinist (Greenglass), among others. The trial continues to be controversial today. Some reports claim that the Rosenbergs were offered a plea deal, where admittance of their guilt would grant them a prison sentence. I have spent ages agonising over that. To this day, historians and scientists debate how much espionage sped up the progress of the Soviet Unions nuclear weapons program. Many people around the world believed them. A campaign was started to try to prevent the couple's execution. The Venona project documents were still highly classified at the time of the trial and therefore could not be used as evidence. [32], Prosecutor Roy Cohn later claimed that his influence led to both Kaufman and Saypol being appointed to the Rosenberg case, and that Kaufman imposed the death penalty based on Cohn's personal recommendation. They were sentenced to death on April 5 under Section 2 of the Espionage Act of 1917,[31] which provides that anyone convicted of transmitting or attempting to transmit to a foreign government "information relating to the national defense" may be imprisoned for life or put to death. In 1861, the liberal Mexican Benito Juarez became president of a country in financial read more, In Music Fund Hall in Philadelphia, the first national convention of the Republican Party, founded two years before, comes to its conclusion. 32), executed by the federal government of the United States, National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Deputy Attorney General of the United States, Capital punishment by the United States federal government, List of people executed by the United States federal government, "What the K.G.B. Indeed, by your betrayal you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country. [24] They were adopted by the social activist Abel Meeropol and his wife Anne, and assumed the Meeropol surname. The cable also makes clear that the sister's husband is involved enough in espionage to have his own codename ("Antenna" and later "Liberal"). Nickelodeons (named for a read more, Francesca Rojas two young children are killed in their home in the small town of Necochea, Argentina. Case Summary. The case against Ethel in particular was rather . Timeline of Events Relating to the Rosenberg Trial. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. She didnt cry in public, and the media gleefully judged her unfeeling and, by implication, guilty of the accused crime, as a result. J. Edgar Hooverpublicly opposed the trial. On June 19, 1968, a long-term anti-poverty demonstration known as Resurrection City reaches its high-water mark. The American pair were . Julius (1918-1953) and Ethel (1915-1953) Rosenberg were a nondescript couple accused in 1950 by the United States government of operating a Soviet spy network and giving the Soviet Union plans for the atomic bomb. Highly sympathetic portraits of the Rosenbergs were offered in major novels, including E.L. Doctorows The Book of Daniel (1971) and Robert Coovers The Public Burning (1977). Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). An American Tragedy By Anne Sebba. Ruth may have been the individual to type notes, due to her past involvement with the Communist Party. 2006. Ethel Greenglass met Julius Rosenberg in New York City in 1936, when she was 21 and he was 18. Theodore Hallis one example. His wife, born Ethel Greenglass, also in New York, on September 28, 1915, worked as a secretary. 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. It was known that some communists, such as Fuchs, had spied for the Soviets. Many Americans who were politically left-wing believed the Rosenbergs were persecuted solely for their past involvement with the Communist Party. I think she was clearly innocent of the charges but, on the other hand, I think she was supportive of Julius. Some scholars believe thatRuth may have been the individual to type notes, due to her past involvement with the Communist Party, and conflicting statements made by David. Under Feklisov's supervision, Rosenberg recruited sympathetic individuals into NKVD service, including Joel Barr, Alfred Sarant, William Perl, and Morton Sobell, also an engineer. President Eisenhower, supported by public opinion and the media at home, ignored the overseas demands. Soviet cables were deciphered, revealing Julius codename to be LIBERAL. LIBERAL was mentioned in numerous documents. Julius became a leader in the Young Communist League USA while at City College of New York during the Great Depression. HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, following their arrest by the FBI in New York city for espionage, 1950. The two were frequently regarded as victims of cynical and vindictive officials of the FBI. Members of the communist party, the Rosenbergs were convicted of passing secret information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union in 1945. In early 1953, he wrote a letter to President Eisenhower, requesting that Ethel and Julius sentences be commuted to prison. Follow Russia Beyond on Telegram. [61] For example, a 1944 cable (which gives the name of Ruth Greenglass in clear text) says that Ruth's husband David is being recruited as a spy by his sister (that is, Ethel Rosenberg) and her husband. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. Despite massive, worldwide protest, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed on June 19, 1953, at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, NY. Fuchs identified his courier as American Harry Gold, who was arrested on May 23, 1950. I find innocence quite a difficult word to use with Ethel, she says. Nevertheless, these decryptions formed the background of U.S. government investigation and prosecutions of American communists during the Cold War period. He was U.S. citizen and electrical engineer. And, in fact, the Rosenbergs themselves essentially believed that they had done nothing wrong in the grand scheme of things. She had the unhappy distinction of being the first woman in the US to be executed for a crime other than murder. Espionage was a major concern for the United States government during the Manhattan Project. it is believed that he made his accusations out of challenges to his authority. Or Black Despair? Abandoning that effort, he returned to Mexico City. "[51], The Rosenbergs were the only American civilians executed for espionage during the Cold War. Spy for the Soviets many Americans who were politically left-wing believed the Rosenbergs themselves believed. Individual to type notes, due to her past involvement with the Communist Party on May,! 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