Rosenbergs Sentenced: Cold War Espionage Reaches Climax

Judge Irving Kaufman told Julius and Ethel Rosenberg that their crime was "worse than murder" before sentencing them to death on April 5, 1951, for conspiring to transmit atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union. Kaufman said their espionage had altered the course of history to the disadvantage of the United States and had directly contributed to communist aggression in Korea. The sentence was controversial at the time and has become more so as subsequent evidence revealed that the case against Ethel was substantially weaker than prosecutors claimed. Julius Rosenberg had been recruited by Soviet intelligence in 1942 and operated a small espionage network that included his brother-in-law David Greenglass, a machinist at the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory. Greenglass provided sketches and descriptions of implosion lens components used in the plutonium bomb. Harry Gold served as the courier between Greenglass and his Soviet handler. The network was exposed after the 1950 arrest of Klaus Fuchs, a German-born physicist who had provided far more valuable atomic intelligence to the Soviets and received only 14 years in a British prison. The case against Ethel Rosenberg rested primarily on Greenglass's testimony that she had typed up his handwritten notes for transmission to the Soviets. Decades later, Greenglass admitted he had lied. In a 2001 interview, he stated that his wife Ruth had actually done the typing but that he had named Ethel instead to protect Ruth and keep her out of prison so she could care for their children. Prosecutors had apparently encouraged this substitution. The government's strategy was to use the threat against Ethel as leverage to make Julius confess and name other members of his network. Julius refused. The Rosenbergs were executed at Sing Sing prison on June 19, 1953, maintaining their innocence to the end. Ethel required three applications of electric current before she was pronounced dead. Declassified Soviet cables from the VENONA project, released in 1995, confirmed that Julius was indeed a Soviet agent but provided no definitive evidence of Ethel's involvement beyond awareness of her husband's activities. Their two sons, Michael and Robert Meeropol, spent decades campaigning to clear their parents' names.