Spy / Typist
Date Of Birth:
May 12, 1918 Julius and September 28, 1915 Ethel
Date Of Death:
19 June 1953
execution by electric chair
Best Known As:
The New Yorkers executed as Soviet spies in 1953
American communists Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in 1953 after being convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage. Arrested in 1950, the Rosenberg’s trial came in the post-World War II frenzy over the threat of communism -- that is, Americans’ fear of the Soviet Union. The Rosenbergs were accused of passing U.S. military secrets to Soviet agents, secrets they’d obtained from Ethel Rosenberg’s brother, David Greenglass, during World War II. Greenglass was an Army machinist who was stationed at the atomic bomb facility in Los Alamos, New Mexico (1944-46). Julius and Ethel died without admitting guilt, and at the time many supporters believed they’d been railroaded, victims of overzealous prosecutors and Cold War fear-mongering. As it turns out, documents made public after the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s showed that indeed, Julius Rosenberg and David Greenglass (and his wife, Ruth) had been Soviet agents working in the United States. Ethel Rosenberg’s involvement is less clear, but it is now generally agreed that she had much less to do with her husband’s espionage activity, but did help recruit her brother and his wife. During their trial in 1951, her brother testified that Ethel was involved. (Specifially, that she had typed a report for Julius and David.) Fifty years later, David Greenglass told a television reporter that he’d lied on the stand to protect his wife, Ruth (who also testified that Ethel had typed a message). The Greenglass testimony was apparently enough to convict Ethel as part of the conspiracy and send her to the electric chair along with her husband. Despite protests in the U.S. and Europe and pleas for clemency, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case and the Rosenbergs were executed on June 19, 1953, their 14th wedding anniversary. In sentencing them to death, Judge Irving Kaufman said he considered their crime “worse than murder,” and he blamed the Rosenbergs for “putting into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb.” Now it is known that Rosenberg and Greenglass passed on secrets about radar and artillery, and that the Soviets did not obtain useful atomic secrets from them.