Background
Julius Rosenberg was born to a family of Jewish immigrants in New York City on May 12, 1918. His parents worked in the sweat shops of the Lower East Side. Julius became a leader in the Young Communist League where, in 1936, he met Ethel, 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 named 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.

 

Rosenberg Gave The Soviet Jews A Proximity Fuse

According to Feklisov, Julius provided thousands of classified 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.[8]

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 US Government Is Shocked At Russian Atom Bomb Technology

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. Through Fuchs' confession, U.S. and United Kingdom intelligence agents were able to make a case against his alleged courier, Harry Gold, who was arrested on May 23, 1950. A former machinist at Los Alamos, Sergeant David 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 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.


Trial and conviction

The trial of the Rosenbergs and Sobell began on March 6, 1951. The judge was Irving Kaufman. The attorney for the Rosenbergs was Emanuel Hirsch Bloch.[10] The prosecution's primary witness, David Greenglass, stated that his sister Ethel typed notes containing U.S. nuclear secrets in the Rosenberg apartment in September 1945. He also asserted that a sketch he made of a cross-section of the implosion-type atom bomb (the one dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, as opposed to the "gun method" triggering device that was in the one dropped on Hiroshima) was also turned over to Julius Rosenberg at that meeting.

From the beginning, the trial attracted a high amount of media attention, like the trial of Alger Hiss. Aside from the Rosenbergs' own defense during the trial, there was not one single public expression of doubt as to their guilt in any media (even the left-wing and Communist press) before and during the trial. 

Hollywood Trash Back The Rosenbergs However, between the trial and the executions there were widespread protests and claims of anti-Semitism. Jean-Paul Sartre called the case "a legal lynching which smears with blood a whole nation. By killing the Rosenbergs, you have quite simply tried to halt the progress of science by human sacrifice. Magic, witch-hunts, auto-da-fés, sacrifices — we are here getting to the point: your country is sick with fear... you are afraid of the shadow of your own bomb."[11] Others, including non-Communists such as Albert Einstein (at that time, a socialist) and Nobel-Prize-winning atomic scientist and chemist Harold Urey,[citation needed] as well as Communists or left-leaning artists such as Nelson Algren, Dashiell Hammett, Jean Cocteau, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, protested the position of the American government in what some termed America's Dreyfus Affair. Pablo Picasso wrote for a French magazine, "The hours count. The minutes count. Do not let this crime against humanity take place."[12] Pope Pius XII also condemned the execution.[13] The all-black International Longshoremen’s Association Local 968 stopped working for a day in protest.[14] Cinema artists such as Fritz Lang and Bertolt Brecht registered their protest.[15]

It is believed that part of the reason Ethel was indicted along with Julius was so that the prosecution could use her as a 'lever' to pressure Julius into giving up the names of others who were involved.[16] If that was the case, it did not work. On the witness stand, Julius asserted his right under the U.S. Constitution's Fifth Amendment to not incriminate himself whenever asked about his involvement in the Communist Party or with its members. Ethel did similarly. Neither defendant was viewed sympathetically by the jury.

 

Jews Wanted The Death Penalty So Rosenberg Wouldn't Talk

The role played by Assistant U.S. Attorney Roy Cohn, the prosecutor in the case, is controversial. Cohn stated in his autobiography that he influenced the selection of the judge, and pushed him to impose the death penalty on both Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.
 
The Rosenbergs were convicted on March 29, 1951, and on April 5 were sentenced to death by Judge Irving Kaufman under Section 2 of the Espionage Act of 1917, 50 U.S. Code 32 (now 18 U.S. Code 794), which prohibits transmitting or attempting to transmit to a foreign government information "relating to the national defense." 'The conviction helped to fuel Senator Joseph McCarthy's investigations into anti-American activities by U.S. citizens. While their devotion to the Communist cause was well-documented, the Rosenbergs denied the espionage charges even as they faced the electric chair.

The couple were the only two American civilians to be executed for espionage-related activity during the Cold War.[18] In imposing the death penalty, Kaufman noted that he held them responsible not only for espionage but also for the deaths of the Korean War:
 

Execution

The couple were executed at sundown in the electric chair at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York, on June 19, 1953.[1][22] This was delayed from the originally scheduled date of June 18 because, on June 17, Supreme Court Associate Justice William O. Douglas had granted a stay of execution. That stay resulted from the intervention in the case of Fyke Farmer, a Tennessee lawyer whose efforts had previously met with scorn from the Rosenbergs' attorney.[23]
 
 

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