Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

• 1. Introduction

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  Julius and Ethel Rosenberg open Sylvia Plath's 1963 novel The Bell Jar, in a single sultry sentence. The line reads: "It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs..."

  The couple were a married pair from New York, convicted of spying for the Soviet Union. Prosecutors said they passed along top-secret information on radar, sonar, jet propulsion engines and nuclear weapon designs. They were executed in 1953. They were the first American civilians put to death on such charges, and the first executed in peacetime.

  For decades, many people insisted that both parents were innocent, and later that Ethel was. Among them were the couple's own sons.

  How did two young communists from the Lower East Side end up inside a spy ring? Why did government lawyers want Ethel convicted when one of them privately called the case against her weak? Did the secrets they passed really help Moscow build its bomb? Records opened in later decades, and a retraction from Ethel's own brother, have changed the answers.

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• 2. A Ring Takes Shape

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  Julius Rosenberg was born on the 12th of May 1918 in New York City, into a family of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. By the time he was 11, the family had settled on the Lower East Side, where his parents worked in local shops. He attended Seward Park High School. At City College of New York, during the Great Depression, he became a leader in the Young Communist League USA. In 1939 he graduated with a degree in electrical engineering.

  Ethel Greenglass was born on the 28th of September 1915 into a Jewish family in Manhattan. She dreamed of acting and singing, but she took a secretarial job at a shipping company. Labor disputes pulled her into politics, and she joined the Young Communist League. There, in 1936, she met Julius. They married in 1939. She also had a brother, David Greenglass.

  In 1940 Julius joined the Army Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. He worked there as an engineer-inspector until 1945. During World War II, the laboratory carried out important research on electronics, communications, radar and guided missile controls. The Army discharged him after it discovered his earlier membership in the Communist Party USA.

  Aleksandr Feklisov, Julius's former handler, wrote in a 2001 book that Julius was recruited on Labor Day 1942 for the NKVD, the Soviet interior ministry. The recruiter was a former spymaster named Semyon Semyonov. Bernard Schuster had introduced them. Schuster was a high-ranking Communist Party USA figure and the NKVD liaison for Earl Browder. When Semyonov was recalled to Moscow in 1944, Feklisov took over.

  From Emerson Radio, Julius supplied thousands of classified reports, including a complete proximity fuze. Under Feklisov's supervision, he recruited sympathizers into Soviet service. They included Joel Barr, Alfred Sarant, William Perl and Morton Sobell, who was also an engineer. Working under Julius's direction, Perl gave Feklisov thousands of documents from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. These included full design and production drawings for Lockheed's P-80 Shooting Star, the first operational American jet fighter.

  In February 1944, Julius brought in a second Manhattan Project source, an engineer named Russell McNutt. McNutt worked on designs for the plants at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. His job gave him access to secrets about manufacturing weapons-grade uranium. For the recruitment, Julius received a $100 bonus.

  Feklisov then learned through Julius that Ethel's brother David was working on the top-secret Manhattan Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He told Julius to recruit him.

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• 3. Closing In

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  In January 1950, American investigators learned that Klaus Fuchs had given key documents to the Soviets throughout the war. Fuchs was a German refugee and theoretical physicist on the British mission to the Manhattan Project. He named his courier as an American, Harry Gold, who was arrested on the 23rd of May 1950. Fuchs himself was convicted in the United Kingdom.

  David Greenglass was arrested by the FBI on the 15th of June 1950 and soon confessed to passing secret information to the USSR through Gold. He said Julius had persuaded David's wife Ruth to recruit him, during a 1944 visit to Albuquerque, New Mexico. He also said Julius had passed on secrets. That claim tied Julius to the Soviet contact agent Anatoli Yakovlev, a link prosecutors would need as evidence for an espionage conviction.

  Julius was arrested on the 17th of July 1950, on the strength of David's confession. Morton Sobell had already fled to Mexico City with his family. They took assumed names, and he looked for a way to reach Europe without a passport. When that failed, he returned to Mexico City. Sobell later claimed that Mexican secret police kidnapped him and drove him to the U.S. border. The government said Mexican police arrested him for bank robbery on the 16th of August 1950 and that he was extradited the next day at Laredo, Texas.

  Gordon Dean, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, was blunt at a secret meeting of twenty senior government officials. He called Julius "the kingpin of a very large ring" and wanted "the shadow of a death penalty" hanging over him. Myles Lane, a member of the prosecution team, said the case against Ethel was "not too strong." Yet he thought it "very important that she be convicted too, and given a stiff sentence." FBI director J. Edgar Hoover wrote that "proceeding against the wife will serve as a lever" to make Julius talk.

  On the 11th of August 1950, Ethel appeared before a grand jury. To every question she answered by invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. FBI agents took her into custody as she left the courthouse. Her attorney asked the U.S. commissioner to release her to his care over the weekend, so she could arrange things for her two young children. The request was denied. Both Rosenbergs were pressed to name others in the ring, and neither offered anything. On the 17th of August, the grand jury returned an indictment alleging 11 overt acts. It named Julius, Ethel, David Greenglass and Yakovlev.

  Ten days before the trial, David and Ruth Greenglass were interviewed a second time, and both changed their stories. David had first said he handed the atomic data to Julius on a New York street corner. Now he said it happened in the living room of the Rosenbergs' apartment. He added that Ethel, at Julius's request, had typed up the notes. Ruth went further, saying that Ethel "sat down at the typewriter which she placed on a bridge table in the living room." After this new testimony, all charges against Ruth were dropped.

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• 4. Trial and Sentence

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  The trial of the Rosenbergs and Sobell began on the 6th of March 1951 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Judge Irving Kaufman presided. Assistant U.S. Attorney Irving Saypol led the prosecution, and the defense lawyer Emmanuel Bloch represented the Rosenbergs. The star witness was David Greenglass. He said he gave Julius a sketch of the cross-section of an implosion-type atom bomb. That was the design of "Fat Man," dropped on Nagasaki, rather than the "gun method" device used in "Little Boy" at Hiroshima.

  On the 29th of March 1951, the Rosenbergs were convicted of espionage. They were sentenced to death on the 5th of April. The sentence rested on Section 2 of the Espionage Act of 1917. That section allows prison for life or death for anyone who transmits, or tries to transmit, "information relating to the national defense" to a foreign government.

  Prosecutor Roy Cohn later claimed that his influence got both Kaufman and Saypol assigned to the case. He also claimed that Kaufman imposed the death penalty on his personal recommendation. Cohn went on to serve as chief counsel to the investigations subcommittee under Senator Joseph McCarthy.

  Kaufman's own explanation reached far beyond espionage. He held the couple responsible for "the Communist aggression in Korea," with "casualties exceeding 50,000." He told them that "by your betrayal you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country."

  The government offered to spare both lives if Julius named other spies and the couple admitted their guilt. The Rosenbergs answered with a public statement: "By asking us to repudiate the truth of our innocence, the government admits its own doubts concerning our guilt... we will not be coerced, even under pain of death, to bear false witness."

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• 5. The World Protests

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  An investigative series in the National Guardian, and the formation of the National Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case, turned doubt into a campaign. Some Americans came to believe both Rosenbergs were innocent, or that the sentence was too harsh, especially for Ethel. Protests spread, and so did claims of antisemitism. Yet in a time of intense fear of communism, mainstream Jewish organizations did not back the couple. The American Civil Liberties Union found no civil liberties violations in the case.

  Abroad, especially in Western European capitals, crowds picketed and demonstrated for the Rosenbergs. Editorials appeared in otherwise pro-American newspapers. The philosopher and Nobel laureate Jean-Paul Sartre called the trial "a legal lynching." The French named the affair the American Dreyfus affair. Non-communists such as Jean Cocteau and the Nobel-winning chemist Harold Urey joined in. So did left-leaning figures, some of them communists, including Nelson Algren, Bertolt Brecht, Albert Einstein, Dashiell Hammett, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.

  Einstein and Urey pleaded with President Harry S. Truman to pardon the couple. In May 1951, Pablo Picasso wrote in the communist French newspaper L'Humanité: "The hours count. The minutes count. Do not let this crime against humanity take place." Local 968 of the International Longshoremen's Association, an all-black union, stopped work for a day in protest. The film director Fritz Lang also registered his objection.

  The push for the Rosenbergs surged in November and December 1952. KGB documents obtained by Alexander Vassiliev and published in 2011 confirmed that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union organized it. Supporters presented the pair as innocent Jewish peace activists. The historian Ronald Radosh argues that Moscow wanted to pull the world's attention away from the Slánský trial in Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia, where Jewish defendants were executed.

  President Dwight D. Eisenhower, backed by public opinion and the press at home, ignored the overseas demands. Pope Pius XII appealed to him to spare the couple, and Eisenhower refused on the 11th of February 1953. Every other appeal also failed. Only a last-minute court intervention would still delay the date.

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• 6. The Last Day

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  On the 17th of June 1953, Supreme Court Associate Justice William O. Douglas granted a stay that pushed the execution back from the 18th of June. The stay came from Fyke Farmer, a Tennessee lawyer whose efforts Emmanuel Bloch had scorned. The new time was 11 p.m. on the 19th of June, during the Sabbath, which begins and ends around sunset.

  Bloch complained that an execution on the Sabbath offended the defendants' Jewish heritage, and he asked for more time. Rhoda Laks, another attorney on the defense team, made the same argument before Judge Kaufman. The strategy backfired. Kaufman said he shared the concern about the Sabbath, and he moved the execution to 8 p.m., before sunset. That was the regular hour for executions at Sing Sing in Ossining, New York, where the couple were held.

  On the 19th of June 1953, Julius died from the first electric shock. Ethel's execution did not go smoothly. She received the normal course of three shocks. Attendants then removed the straps and equipment, and doctors found her heart still beating. Two more shocks were applied, and eyewitnesses reported smoke rising from her head.

  Funeral services were held in Brooklyn on the 21st of June. The bodies had been brought from Sing Sing by the national Rosenberg committee, which held an all-night vigil in one of the borough's largest mortuary chapels. The Times reported that 500 people attended and about 10,000 stood outside in burning heat. Bloch gave one of the main orations. He called the couple "Sweet. Tender. And Intelligent," and declared that America was "living under the heel of a military dictator garbed in civilian attire." The Rosenbergs are buried at Wellwood Cemetery, a Jewish cemetery in Pinelawn, New York.

  That same year, the historian W. E. B. Du Bois wrote a poem called "The Rosenbergs." It began, "Crucify us, Vengeance of God, as we crucify two more Jews." It ended with a question: "Red Resurrection? Or Black Despair?" Whether the secrets they had passed really mattered to the Soviet bomb became a separate argument.

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• 7. The Bomb Question

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  On the 29th of August 1949, the Soviet Union staged its first nuclear test, code-named "Joe 1," and the West was shocked by the speed. The United States had neither shared information with Moscow about the Manhattan Project nor asked its help. Lavrentiy Beria, head of the Soviet nuclear project, used foreign intelligence only as a third-party check. He did not clear the design teams to know about the espionage, and the bomb itself was homegrown. The pace was set mostly by how much uranium the Soviets could obtain. For that reason, scholars find it hard to say how much time was saved, if any.

  Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, vice-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, investigated what the spy ring gave the USSR. He found that in 1945 the physicist Hans Bethe had estimated the Soviets would need five years to build a bomb. Moynihan wrote in his book Secrecy: "Thanks to information provided by their agents, they did it in four."

  Nikita Khrushchev, who led the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, addressed the matter in his posthumously published memoir. He said he "cannot specifically say what kind of help the Rosenbergs provided us." But he had learned from Joseph Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov that they "had provided very significant help in accelerating the production of our atomic bomb."

  Boris V. Brokhovich saw it differently. He was the engineer who later directed Chelyabinsk-40, the plutonium production reactor and extraction facility behind the first Soviet bomb material. He alleged that Khrushchev was a "silly fool" and said the Soviets had reached the bomb by trial and error. His verdict: "You sat the Rosenbergs in the electric chair for nothing. We got nothing from the Rosenbergs."

  The notes allegedly typed by Ethel apparently held little that the Soviet atomic project used directly. Feklisov, Julius's contact, said the Rosenbergs gave the Soviets nothing useful about the atomic bomb. About Julius, he said: "He didn't understand anything about the atomic bomb and he couldn't help us."

  General Leslie Groves, who ran the American nuclear program as part of the Manhattan Project, testified at the Atomic Energy Commission hearing on Robert Oppenheimer. He said the data in the Rosenbergs' case was "of minor value" and that the effects were "greatly exaggerated." Yet he still believed the couple deserved to die, and he asked that his remarks "be kept very quiet." That part of his testimony was cut from the public 1954 transcript and stayed classified until 2014.

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• 8. Afterlives

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  In 1995, the U.S. government released many documents decoded by Venona, a counterintelligence program that decrypted messages from Soviet intelligence agencies. Venona began while the Soviet Union was an American ally. Its messages were absent from the trial, which relied on the couple's collaborators. A 1944 cable gives Ruth Greenglass's name in clear text and says her husband David is being recruited by his sister and her husband. That husband had a codename, "Antenna" and later "Liberal." Ethel had none. Vassiliev's KGB notebooks, public in 2009 in the book Spies by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Vassiliev, add more. They show that both Rosenbergs had regular contact with at least two KGB agents, codenamed Twain and Callistratus. They also show that the KGB saw Julius as an effective agent and Ethel as a supporter of his work.

  In 2001, David Greenglass recanted his testimony that his sister typed the notes. "I frankly think my wife did the typing, but I don't remember," he said. He admitted giving false testimony to protect himself and his wife, and said the prosecution encouraged him. "I would not sacrifice my wife and my children for my sister," he said. He did not express remorse, saying only that he had not realized the prosecution would push for the death penalty.

  In 2008, the National Archives published most of the grand jury testimony. There, Ruth Greenglass said she wrote the information on a piece of paper and Julius took it with him. At trial, she had testified that Ethel typed notes about the atomic bomb. William P. Rogers, a prosecutor on the case who later became Deputy Attorney General, said they pushed for Ethel's death sentence to extract a full confession from Julius. He reportedly said, "she called our bluff." In September 2008, Morton Sobell told The New York Times that he had passed documents on defensive radar and weaponry. He also confirmed that Julius was in a conspiracy that delivered classified military information to the Soviets. A week later, he wrote a follow-up letter denying that he knew anything about Julius's atomic espionage.

  Bob Dylan wrote a song about the case, "Julius and Ethel," in 1983. A memorial in Havana, Cuba, carries the couple's images and a caption saying they were murdered. The Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz and the Turkish poet Melih Cevdet Anday each dedicated a poem to them. E. L. Doctorow's novel The Book of Daniel is loosely based on the case. Robert Coover's 1977 novel The Public Burning imagines a public execution in Times Square, narrated by Richard Nixon. In the play and film Angels in America, Ethel's ghost visits Roy Cohn. Billy Joel names the couple in We Didn't Start the Fire.

  Michael and Robert, the Rosenbergs' two sons, were orphaned by the executions. Their aunts and uncles did not adopt them. They stayed first with their grandmothers and in a children's home, then were adopted by the communist activist Abel Meeropol and his wife Anne, and took the Meeropol surname. The brothers co-wrote We Are Your Sons in 1975, and Robert published the memoir An Execution in the Family in 2003. Pablo Picasso gave them a pen and ink drawing of their parents. In 1990, Robert founded the Rosenberg Fund for Children. Michael's daughter Ivy Meeropol directed the 2004 documentary Heir to an Execution, shown at the Sundance Film Festival.

  After Sobell's 2008 account, the sons acknowledged that their father had been involved in espionage. They still say the case was riddled with prosecutorial and judicial misconduct, and that neither parent deserved death. Their position now is that Julius was legally guilty of conspiracy but not of atomic spying. They hold that Ethel was only generally aware of his activities and was convicted to put pressure on her husband. In 2015, they asked the Obama administration to declare Ethel's conviction wrongful, though her innocence is still not proven. A petition followed in March 2016, and Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote to Obama in January 2017. In 2021 they renewed the campaign, hoping President Joe Biden would act. They also asked Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines to release records on the case.

  In 2024, the Meeropols received a copy of a handwritten memo by Meredith Gardner, a linguist and codebreaker at what later became the NSA. Based on Russian decrypts, it said Ethel knew about Julius's espionage work but, "due to ill health," she "did not engage in the work herself."

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