Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of conspiring to pass atomic secrets to the Soviet Union during and after World War II and were sentenced to death.[1, 2]
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At 8:00 p.m. on June 19, 1953, Julius Rosenberg walked into the execution chamber at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York. Minutes later, his wife Ethel followed. Within the hour, both were dead — the first American civilians executed for espionage during peacetime, killed on the charge that they had delivered the secrets of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union.
The path to that execution chamber had begun three years earlier, in a cascade of confessions triggered by Klaus Fuchs, a German-born physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project and who told British authorities in 1950 that he had passed atomic research to Soviet handlers. Fuchs led investigators to David Greenglass, a U.S. Army sergeant who had worked on atomic research at Los Alamos and who implicated his brother-in-law Julius Rosenberg. Julius — an engineer who had worked for the U.S. Army Signal Corps — was arrested on July 17, 1950. Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg, David's sister and Julius's wife since 1939, was arrested shortly after.
Their trial opened in March 1951 before Judge Irving R. Kaufman in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Federal prosecutors Irving H. Saypol and Roy Cohn built their case primarily on Greenglass's testimony. He claimed, among other things, that Ethel had typed notes containing classified atomic information — a detail that placed her squarely in the conspiracy, but one that Greenglass himself would later dispute. He received a reduced sentence in exchange for his cooperation. On March 29, 1951, the jury convicted both Rosenbergs of conspiring to commit espionage under the Espionage Act of 1917. Judge Kaufman sentenced them to death on April 5, 1951, declaring from the bench that their conduct had contributed to the Korean War — a contention that went considerably beyond the evidence presented at trial.
