Julius Rosenberg

The Depression radicalized him before engineering employed him. Julius Rosenberg's parents came out of the Russian Empire and worked the shops of the Lower East Side, where the family settled by the time he was 11. He went to Seward Park High School and then to City College of New York, tuition-free and full of students arguing about capitalism during its worst decade. He became a leader of the Young Communist League there. Through the League, in 1936, he met Ethel Greenglass, an aspiring singer three years his senior who had taken a secretarial job at a shipping company and been drawn into its labor disputes. They married in 1939, the year he took his degree in electrical engineering.

He inspected equipment for the Army Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth from 1940 until 1945, when the Army found his Communist Party membership and dismissed him. By then he had been working for Soviet intelligence since 1942. He recruited college friends and fellow engineers, moved classified military research to a Soviet handler, and in 1944 brought in his wife's brother, David Greenglass, an Army machinist at Los Alamos, so that material relating to the bomb project passed through his hands. BriefHistory tells the case as the country experienced it. This page is about the man inside it.

The government did not only want him convicted. It wanted names. Prosecutor Myles Lane conceded internally that the case against Ethel was "not too strong," and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover wrote that proceeding against the wife would "serve as a lever" to make Julius talk. The government pulled the lever and Julius did not move. Offered their lives in exchange for the names of others, the Rosenbergs answered publicly that they would not "be coerced, even under pain of death, to bear false witness." Judge Irving Kaufman sentenced them anyway, holding them responsible for "the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000." Julius went to the chair at 35 without naming anyone, and the executions orphaned their two sons.

The argument used to be about innocence. The Venona decrypts, released in 1995, largely settled it — the cables show Julius running a network under a Soviet codename. What stayed open was the value of what he passed and whether death was proportionate. His handler Aleksandr Feklisov said Julius understood nothing about the bomb. Leslie Groves testified in 1954 that the data was "of minor value" and asked that the remark be kept quiet, though he still thought them deserving of death. It stayed classified until 2014. Michael and Robert Meeropol have said their father was legally guilty of conspiracy though not of atomic spying, that he did not deserve to die, and they campaign for their mother's exoneration.

Julius Rosenberg's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Rosenberg network other
  Engineers he brought into Soviet intelligence, among them Joel Barr, Alfred Sarant, William Perl and Morton Sobell 1942
• Recruitment of David Greenglass other
  His wife's brother, an Army machinist assigned to Los Alamos 1944
• Recruitment of Russell McNutt other
  An engineer with access to the Oak Ridge plants. Moscow paid a 100-dollar bonus for it 1944
• United States v. Rosenberg case
  Tried in the Southern District of New York under the Espionage Act of 1917 1951

• May 12, 1918 aged 0 Born in New York City to Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire The family was living on the Lower East Side by the time he was 11.
• 1936 aged ~18 Leads the Young Communist League at City College and meets Ethel Greenglass
• 1939 aged ~21 Takes a degree in electrical engineering and marries Ethel
• 1940 aged ~22 Joins the Army Signal Corps laboratories at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey He worked there as an engineer-inspector for five years.
• 1945 aged ~27 Dismissed when the Army discovers his Communist Party membership
• July 17, 1950 aged 32 Arrested on suspicion of espionage The FBI acted on David Greenglass's confession, given after his own arrest on June 15. Harry Gold had been arrested on May 23.
• March 6, 1951 aged 32 Trial opens in the Southern District of New York Irving Kaufman presiding, Irving Saypol prosecuting, Emanuel Bloch for the defense. David and Ruth Greenglass were the key witnesses.
• April 5, 1951 aged 32 Sentenced to death under the Espionage Act of 1917 Convicted on March 29. Appeals failed, and Eisenhower refused clemency on February 11, 1953.
• June 19, 1953 aged 35 Executed at Sing Sing He died from the first electric shock, at 35. Ethel died minutes later.

• Ethel Rosenberg 1915–1953
  Executed in 1953 for conspiracy to commit espionage, on testimony her brother later recanted. married to
• J. Edgar Hoover 1895–1972
  Longtime FBI director who built a powerful national police institution while conducting extensive political surveillance and abuses. investigated by
• Roy Cohn 1927–1986
  Chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy and prosecutor of the Rosenbergs prosecuted by
• Dwight D. Eisenhower 1890–1969
  34th President and Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II. clemency refused by
• Alger Hiss 1904–1996
  State Department official whose perjury conviction made Richard Nixon's career and split American opinion for decades. tried in the same panic
• J. Robert Oppenheimer 1904–1967
  Theoretical physicist who led the Manhattan Project and became known as the father of the atomic bomb. named at the 1954 security hearing