The Rosenberg Trial

As the Cold War set in during the late 1940s, the United States found itself entangled in an atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion. The successful nuclear tests performed by the Soviets in 1949 made the Americans extremely fearful of the immense scientific strides the Soviet Union had been taking. Americans started eyeing those around them, believing that the only way the Soviet Union could have developed their technologies so fast was that Soviet spies were responsible for passing atomic secrets to Russia. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg happened to be convicted at the pinnacle of this paranoia, which allowed their case to dominate American headlines.

In the early 1930s, Ethel became a member of the Young Communist League, and through the group, she met Julius in 1936. In 1940, Julius entered the U.S. Army Signal Corps as a civilian engineer and left the Communist Party to avoid suspicion. However, he was still heavily involved with espionage activities for the Soviet Union, as he led an espionage network within the Manhattan Project (the research and development undertaking that produced the first atomic weapons), and entered a Soviet spy ring that included other spies such as Harry Gold, David Greenglass, and Karl Fuchs. They would pass down highly classified secrets like the type of highly explosive lenses that were being developed at Los Alamos for the nuclear bomb. Even though Julius had been discharged by the army for having lied about his membership in the Communist Party in 1945, he wasn’t caught for espionage (yet).

All was going smoothly for the spy ring until 1949 when the Verona Project, a counterintelligence program that decrypted Soviet intelligence agency messages, discovered that Karl Fuchs was a Soviet spy and arrested him in the UK. As a result of his arrest, a chain of investigations started, which ultimately led to the discovery that the Rosenbergs were Soviet spies as well. On July 17th 1950, Julius Rosenberg was arrested for allegedly passing atomic secrets to Russia, and a month later, his wife Ethel Rosenberg was also arrested for allegedly assisting Julius in his illicit activities.

On March 6th, 1951, their first trial began with David Greenglass, Ethel’s brother and Julius’s partner as a spy in the Manhattan Project, as the chief accuser. The Rosenberg case rested on highly classified documents that could not be revealed in court. Despite the little evidence the court had against the Rosenbergs, the court still ruled that the Rosenbergs were involved in espionage, and on April 5th, 1953, Julius and Ethel were sentenced to death under the Espionage Act of 1917. Finally, on June 19th of that year, the Rosenbergs were the first Americans executed for espionage by electric chair at Sing Sing Prison.

Ever since their first trial, the Rosenberg case had travelled through various courts and had been discussed worldwide. Their attempts for receiving a less harsh sentence all failed: their nine appeals to the Supreme Court were denied, pleas for executive clemency were dismissed by both President Truman in 1952 and President Eisenhower in 1953, and a worldwide campaign for mercy failed. The courts even made it clear that if either of the Rosenbergs admitted to their espionage, they could avoid execution. However, the couple were so loyal to their cause that they adamantly stated their innocence until the day they died.

At the end of the Cold War and the disclosure of Soviet intelligence in the 1990s, new information confirmed Julius’s espionage activities; however, the role of Ethel as a spy still remains dubious. Due to the lack of information against Ethel we have today, many believe that Ethel was innocent and was only convicted so that she could coerce her husband to confess. In fact, Greenglass actually admitted that he had lied in some of his testimony about her. In the end, the Rosenbergs were the only two American citizens to be executed for espionage-related activity during the Cold War.


http://www.atomicheritage.org/history/rosenberg-trial
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julius-Rosenberg-and-Ethel-Rosenberg
http://www.coldwar.org/articles/50s/TheRosenbergTrial.asp