The Rosenberg case was the 1951 federal trial in New York of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage and executed by electric chair on June 19, 1953. They were the only American civilians executed for espionage during peacetime. The consensus of historians, based on the declassified Venona decrypts (released in 1995) and the post-1991 releases of Soviet files, is that Julius was an active Soviet agent who passed information about American military and nuclear-weapons work, that the specific atomic-bomb information he provided was less significant than the prosecution claimed, and that Ethel’s role was at most peripheral and the death sentence for either Rosenbergs was excessive. The case remains politically charged. For more on the famous-spies article; the Soviet side of the network is covered in the KGB article.
Julius Rosenberg (1918–1953) was a graduate of the Cooper Union engineering program who had joined the Communist Party USA in the late 1930s. He worked as a civilian engineer for the Army Signal Corps during the Second World War. He was recruited to Soviet intelligence in 1942, in the New York network run by Anatoly Yatskov, an NKVD officer operating under cover as an interpreter at the Soviet government purchasing commission. Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg (1915–1953), Julius’s wife, was a singer and an actress before her marriage; she is, in the declassified record, a far more peripheral figure. The third member of the network most discussed is David Greenglass, Ethel’s brother, a machinist at Los Alamos during the war who provided the network with limited information about the implosion lens of the Nagasaki bomb and who later became the prosecution’s key witness.
The trial
The Rosenbergs were arrested on July 17, 1950, after the Federal Bureau of Investigation had, in February 1950, broken the Soviet network that included Klaus Fuchs, David Greenglass, and Harry Gold. The trial began on March 6, 1951, in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, before Judge Irving R. Kaufman. The chief prosecutor was Irving H. Saypol. The defense was led by Emanuel Bloch.
The case for the prosecution rested on three witnesses: David Greenglass, his wife Ruth, and Max Elitcher, a former college classmate of Julius’s. Greenglass testified that Julius had recruited him into the Soviet network and that the Rosenbergs had passed him money, including a lamp and a Jello mold on a New York park bench, in the well-known “hollowed-out” routine later dramatized in the courtroom. The defense pointed to the lack of documentary evidence, the lack of any direct proof of the alleged atomic-espionage — the inconsistencies in Greenglass’s testimony. The defense’s request for a continuance, to take the deposition of Greenglass’s Los Alamos colleagues, was denied.
The jury deliberated for less than a day and returned guilty verdicts on March 29, 1951. Judge Kaufman sentenced the Rosenbergs to death on April 5, 1951, and, in a passage that has become the most-cited judicial statement of the case, expressed his belief that the atomic bomb was a “greater qualitative threat” to American security than any weapon developed “in the long history of warfare” and that the espionage had contributed to the Soviet decision to develop its own bomb. Co-defendant Morton Sobell received a thirty-year sentence.
The execution and the campaign for clemency
The case became a worldwide cause. The Rosenbergs denied guilt and refused to cooperate with the government; their appeal process ran for two years, with motions before the Supreme Court, the Court of Appeals, and a clemency application to President Truman in 1952 and to President Eisenhower in 1953. The clemency appeals were signed by Albert Einstein, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, the writer Jean Cocteau, the British Aneurin Bevan, the French prime minister, Pope. They were rejected.
The execution took place at Sing Sing prison in Ossining, New York, on the evening of June 19, 1953. The executioner was the Sing Sing electrician, Edwin Davis. The couple’s sons, Michael and Robert Meeropol, were six and ten years old; the older was given a small American flag by the warden. The Soviet government, the French Communist Party, and other foreign organizations declared days of mourning. In the United States, the case became a rallying point for the American left and a symbol of the excesses of McCarthyism.
The post-1995 re-evaluation
The declassification of the Venona decrypts in 1995 transformed the scholarship. The decrypts identified Julius Rosenberg as “Liberal” and “Antenna,” a member of a Soviet network in New York that included Klaus Fuchs and David Greenglass. The documents did not, however, support the prosecution’s claim that Julius had passed any specific atomic secret; the material he provided, in the assessment of historians including John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, was less significant than the prosecutors asserted, and Greenglass’s account of the hollowed-out Jello mold was a fabrication by Greenglass, who was attempting to establish his own importance in the network. Ethel’s role, in particular, looks thin: the documents show her at most as an accessory, and Greenglass’s testimony that she had typed up his notes was contradicted by both the technical evidence and the recollection of other witnesses.
The execution of the Rosenbergs remains, for many historians, the single most troubling judicial outcome of the early Cold War. Even on the post-1995 understanding — that Julius was a Soviet agent — the death sentence was, in the assessment of legal scholars including William K. Klingaman in The Darkest Year (2010), disproportionate to the offense. The case is, however, no longer a serious candidate for the historical claim that the Rosenbergs were innocent of any espionage; that case has been substantially undermined by the documents.