[49], The funeral services were held in Brooklyn on June 21. "[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. He admitted that he had given documents to the Soviet contact, but said these had to do with defensive radar and weaponry. On August 17, the grand jury returned an indictment alleging 11 overt acts. In 2008, the National Archives of the United States published most of the grand jury testimony related to the prosecution of the Rosenbergs. In 2014, five historians concluded thatSoviet documents show Ethel was actively involved and attended meetings with Julius and his sources, but that there is no evidence to suggest she typed specific notes. Copyright 2022 by the Atomic Heritage Foundation. He also worked withKlaus Fuchs, a physicist at Los Alamos and Soviet spy, to pass on atomic research secrets. The Rosenbergs supported communism Ethel Greenglass was born to a Jewish family in 1915 in New York. At this time, Greenglass worked at Los Alamos. Michael and Robby Rosenberg were 10 and six respectively when their parents were executed. Browse pg9767.kgb resources on Teachers Pay Teachers, a marketplace trusted by millions of teachers for original educational resources. Three years after the trial, on June 19th, 1953 the Rosenbergs were executed. A letter from Michael and Robert Rosenberg pleading for the life of their parents. Du Bois wrote a poem titled "The Rosenbergs", which began "Crucify us, Vengeance of God, as we crucify two more Jews" and ended "Who has been crowned on yonder stair? Or was he more likely to get off by pleading innocence for both of them? Do not let this crime against humanity take place. [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. Nickelodeons (named for a read more, Francesca Rojas two young children are killed in their home in the small town of Necochea, Argentina. The US government offered to spare the lives of both Julius and Ethel if Julius provided the names of other spies and they admitted their guilt. Just ten days before the start of the Rosenbergs trial in February 1951, David Greenglass re-testified, and changed his original statements. Updates? 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. Some scholars argue that if it would have been possible to use Venona documents in court, both Hall and McNutt would have been revealed as spies and prosecuted, along with Greenglass and Fuchs. 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. In the United States of the late 1940s and 1950s, Fear was the overriding motif of the age, and fear breeds hysteria, Sebba says. There was no compassion.. Getty Images. David originally had said that he had passed the atomic data he had collected to Julius on a New York street corner. She became involved in labor disputes and joined the Young Communist League, where she met Julius in 1936. "[59], The Venona project was a United States counterintelligence program to decrypt messages transmitted by the intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union. He was 51. They continue to campaign for Ethel to be posthumously legally exonerated. They hoped merely by arresting her on these trumped-up charges, surely Julius would talk, because thats what everyone else had done.. He wrote Strange Fruit, a song made famous by Billie Holiday, and the royalties from that and other songs kept the family comfortable. [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. She knew what he was doing She was complicit merely by knowing, so thats why they charged them with conspiracy to commit espionage.. Will there ever be a pardon for Ethel Rosenberg? Deputy Attorney General of the United States William P. Rogers, who had been part of the prosecution of the Rosenbergs, discussed their strategy at the time in relation to seeking the death sentence for Ethel. The son of working-class read more. Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. [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. 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. During the trial, both Ethel and Julius pleaded the Fifth Amendment when asked repeated questions related to espionage, and when questioned about being members of the Communist Party. 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, W&N 20, 304 pages/St Martin's Press $28.99, 304 pages Rebecca Abrams is the author of 'The Jewish Journey: 4,000 Years in 22 Objects . While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. On March 29 they were found guilty, and on April 5 the couple was sentenced to death. Some people believed that the Rosenbergs were the victims of a surge of hysterical anti-communist feeling in the United States, and protested that the death sentence handed down was cruel and unusual punishment. The case was intensely controversial, touching nerves throughout American society, and debates about the Rosenbergs continue to the present day. [8], Ethel Greenglass was born on September 28, 1915, to a Jewish family in Manhattan, New York City. Ronald Radoshconcludes, after Sobells 2008 confessions, that the Rosenbergs were Soviet spies. Venona Documents from the National Security Archive. "use strict";(function(){var insertion=document.getElementById("citation-access-date");var date=new Date().toLocaleDateString(undefined,{month:"long",day:"numeric",year:"numeric"});insertion.parentElement.replaceChild(document.createTextNode(date),insertion)})(); FACT CHECK: We strive for accuracy and fairness. In May 1951, Pablo Picasso wrote for the communist French newspaper L'Humanit, "The hours count. The subsequent trial of the Rosenbergs made news all over the world. He confirmed that Julius Rosenberg was "in a conspiracy that delivered to the Soviets classified military and industrial information [on] the atomic bomb," and "He never told me about anything else that he was engaged in. [17], On June 15, 1950, David Greenglass was arrested by the FBI for espionage and soon confessed to having passed secret information on to the USSR through Gold. He also explains that Rosenberg was fired from the Army Corps of Engineers in January of 1945, and that KGB files state his espionage activities ended by 1945, so the meeting David Greenglass mentioned could neverhave occurred. 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. A country prepared to flout the law, to instil fear, and to also arrest his girlfriend: does that not strike you as terrifying?, She was removed from the electric chair after three charges, only for it to be discovered her heart was still beating. There was a fear of communism.. ", Deborah Friedell, "How Utterly Depreaved!" In 2008, the transcripts of 43 out of 46 witness testimonies before the grand jury were released, including Ruths testimony. This was the "Fat Man" bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, as opposed to a bomb with the "gun method" triggering device used in the "Little Boy" bomb dropped on Hiroshima. On June 19, 1968, a long-term anti-poverty demonstration known as Resurrection City reaches its high-water mark. This April 5, 1951, Universal Newsreel reports on the death penalty for Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg devoted a great deal of time in prison to crafting eloquent protestations of their complete innocence. At age 23, he was a prosecutor on the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were convicted of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union in 1951 and executed by electric chair two years. A worldwide campaign for mercy failed, and the Rosenbergs were executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York. [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. (. Ethel's execution did not go smoothly. They provided top-secret information about American radar, sonar, jet propulsion engines, and valuable nuclear weapon designs. They provided top-secret information about American radar, sonar, jet propulsion engines, and valuable nuclear weapon designs. [5][6], For decades many people including the Rosenbergs' sons (Michael and Robert Meeropol) maintained that Julius and Ethel were innocent of spying on their country and were victims of Cold War paranoia. 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). There are some conflicting assessments among historians regarding the outcome of the Rosenberg trial. Soviet cables were deciphered, revealing Julius codename to be LIBERAL. LIBERAL was mentioned in numerous documents. There was international outrage at her death. Klaus Fuchs, a German scientist working in Los Alamos, was convicted in the United Kingdom. She originally was an aspiring actress and singer, but eventually took a secretarial job at a shipping company. Gold paidGreenglass $500 in exchange for information about the implosion lens in the atomic bomb. The family moved to the Lower East Side by the time Julius was 11. I think it is the most horrific story, Sebba says. It was never in doubt that Julius Rosenberg had conducted acts of espionage. She describes Julius Rosenberg as a naive idealist. Okay, I am a spy, but my wife isnt? The boys went on to make successful careers in economics and law, and have families of their own. 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. Ethel Rosenberg: A Cold War Tragedy by Anne Sebba was published by Orion Books on 24 June 2021.[24][82]. During the next two years, the couple became the subject of both national and international debate. Ethel and Julius denied all allegations of espionage, and refused to provide any names. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! He stated that he and Julius passed military and industrial information to the Soviet Union, hoping it would help them defeat the Nazis in World War II. Author of. The debate over her involvement is ongoing. In the intervening decades, it has since been conclusively proved that David Greenglass committed perjury against his own sister. But even graver is the thought of the millions of dead whose deaths may be directly attributable to what these spies have done.. 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 Greenglasses never withdrew their new testimony. 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. Ethel then sat down at the typewriter which she placed on a bridge table in the living room and proceeded to type the info which David had given to Julius. After this new testimony, the charges against Ruth were dropped. All 119 References in We Didnt Start the Fire, Explained, Spies Like Us: 10 Famous Names in the Espionage Game, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julius-Rosenberg-and-Ethel-Rosenberg, Atomic Heritage Foundation - The Rosenberg Trial, Spartacus Educational - The Trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Famous Trials - Trial Of The Rosenbergs: An Account, Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up), Communist Party of the United States of America. During the 1940s, the U. S. Army Signal Intelligence Service (SIS) conducted the Venona project. The trial lasted for nearly one month. 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). [30], On March 29, 1951, the Rosenbergs were convicted of espionage. On April 5, Judge Kaufman sentenced them to death, and sentenced Sobell to 30 years in prison. The trial continues to be controversial today. Upon returning home later, Rojas claimed to have seen read more, The most successful and feared Confederate commerce raider of the war, the CSS Alabama, sinks after a spectacular battle off the coast of France with the USS Kearsarge. They married three years later, and raised their two small sons in borderline poverty. Ethel Greenglass and Julius Rosenberg were both born into immigrant Jewish families in New York City during World War I. I have spent ages agonising over that. They could not be charged for treason since the U.S. was not at war with the USSR. Ethel, at Julius's request, had taken his notes and "typed them up." I ask if she can think of a modern equivalent of Ethels predicament: incarceration by association. In exchange for this new testimony, Ruth was permitted to remain with their children and care for them. The Rosenberg Case. [41] Cinema artists such as Fritz Lang registered their protest. 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