Rosenberg, << ROH zuhn burg, >> Julius and Ethel, were American citizens, husband and wife, who were executed for spying for the Soviet Union during World War II (1939-1945). They became the first United States civilians ever put to death for wartime spying.
Julius Rosenberg (1918-1953) and Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg (1915-1953) were born and raised on the Lower East Side of New York City. Ethel was born on May 12, 1915, and Julius was born on Sept. 29, 1918. They were married in 1939. By then, both had been involved in radical political activities. In 1940, Julius began working for the United States Army Signal Corps as a civilian junior engineer. Early in 1945, the Army fired him for being a Communist. Between 1946 and late 1949, Julius worked with Ethel’s brother David Greenglass in a small machine shop they owned in New York City. In 1944 and 1945, Greenglass had worked as a machinist at Los Alamos, New Mexico, on the U.S. project to make an atomic bomb.
In 1950, Greenglass was arrested for spying for the Soviet Union while working at Los Alamos. The U.S. government charged that the information he supplied was used to build the first Soviet atomic bomb. Greenglass claimed Julius had recruited him to collect the information. As a result, the Rosenbergs were arrested and accused of passing secret atomic-bomb information to the Soviet Union. The Rosenbergs pleaded innocent.
In 1951, a jury found the Rosenbergs guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage. Judge Irving Kaufman sentenced the Rosenbergs to die in the electric chair. Protests against the conviction and sentence were organized in the United States and Europe. Numerous people felt that the Rosenbergs did not get a fair trial or that their sentence was too harsh. Many respected people, including the great scientist Albert Einstein and Pope Pius XII, urged clemency. The case was appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, but the court denied all appeals. President Dwight D. Eisenhower twice rejected pleas for clemency. The Rosenbergs were executed on June 19, 1953, at Sing Sing prison in Ossining, New York. Greenglass was sentenced to 15 years in prison. He was released in 1960.
