Rosenbergs Executed: Cold War Fears Peak

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York, on June 19, 1953, the only American civilians put to death for espionage during the Cold War. Julius died after the first set of electric shocks. Ethel required three rounds of electrocution before being pronounced dead, a detail that horrified witnesses and anti-execution campaigners worldwide. The case remains one of the most contested criminal proceedings in American history. The Rosenbergs were arrested in 1950 after the FBI traced a chain of atomic espionage from Klaus Fuchs, a German-born British physicist who had worked at Los Alamos, through courier Harry Gold, to machinist David Greenglass, who was Ethel's brother. Greenglass testified that Julius had recruited him to pass sketches and descriptions of the implosion lens used in the plutonium bomb to Soviet agents. Greenglass also testified that Ethel had typed up his handwritten notes, a claim he later admitted fabricating to protect his wife. Judge Irving Kaufman sentenced both Rosenbergs to death, declaring that their espionage had caused the Korean War and the deaths of thousands of American soldiers by enabling Soviet atomic capability. The sentence was extraordinary: neither defendant was convicted of treason, which requires wartime acts against one's own country, and the espionage charge typically carried prison terms. The severity reflected Cold War hysteria more than legal precedent. Appeals reached the Supreme Court, which declined to intervene despite last-minute arguments. Declassified Soviet intelligence cables, the Venona decrypts, confirmed in the 1990s that Julius Rosenberg ran an espionage network that passed valuable technical information to the Soviets. Ethel's direct participation appears to have been minimal. Their sons, Michael and Robert Meeropol, spent decades advocating for their parents' vindication and in 2016 petitioned the Obama administration to formally exonerate their mother.