Were the Rosenbergs guilty?

The case the jury heard

Julius Rosenberg, an electrical engineer, was arrested in New York on July 17, 1950, and his wife, Ethel, less than a month later. They were charged with conspiracy to commit espionage, not treason, with a friend, Morton Sobell. The trial opened on March 6, 1951, in Manhattan’s federal courthouse at Foley Square.

The star witness was Ethel’s younger brother, David Greenglass, an Army machinist who had worked at Los Alamos and had already confessed. He testified that in January 1945 Julius cut the side of a raspberry Jell-O box in two, so that a courier could prove who he was by bringing the matching half. In June 1945 that courier, Harry Gold, came to Albuquerque with it. Greenglass reproduced from memory his drawing of a lens mold for the bomb, and then told the jury that his sister had typed his notes for Moscow.

On March 29, 1951, the jury convicted all three. A week later Judge Irving Kaufman sentenced the couple to death:

I consider your crime worse than murder. Plain deliberate contemplated murder is dwarfed in magnitude by comparison with the crime you have committed.

Kaufman held them responsible for the war in Korea; historians reject that link. Sobell got thirty years and Greenglass fifteen; Greenglass’s wife, Ruth, who had helped him, was never charged. After President Eisenhower twice refused clemency, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed at Sing Sing prison on June 19, 1953.

What the Venona cables added

In July 1995 the US government released the Venona decrypts, Soviet cables of the 1940s read by Army codebreakers. Julius is in them, first as Antenna and later as Liberal, at the head of a network of engineers passing military secrets to Moscow. David and Ruth Greenglass appear under cover names of their own, Kalibr and Osa. Ethel has none. One cable mentions her:

Knows about her husband’s work and the role of METR and NIL. In view of delicate health does not work.

Both sides cite that line. It shows she knew what her husband was doing. It gives her no task of her own.

The brother takes it back

The words that sank Ethel were her brother’s. In 2001 David Greenglass told the reporter Sam Roberts, and CBS television, that he could not say who had typed his notes: “I don’t know who typed it, frankly,” he said. He said he had pointed at his sister to protect his wife, Ruth, who may have done the typing herself.

An FBI memo written the day Julius was arrested had described charging Ethel as a way to make her husband talk. On June 2, 1953, the director of the federal prisons, James V. Bennett, came to Sing Sing to offer the couple their lives in exchange for cooperation. Neither accepted.

Two Soviet witnesses and a co-defendant

Moscow’s own witnesses do not agree. In memoirs he dictated on tape, published in 1990, Nikita Khrushchev recalled Stalin saying the Rosenbergs had given very significant help on the bomb. Alexander Feklisov, the KGB officer who handled Julius, said in 1997 that Ethel was probably aware of the work but never took part. In 2008 Morton Sobell, then ninety-one, admitted for the first time that he and Julius had passed military secrets to the Soviets, and said Ethel knew but was not a spy herself.

Where historians stand

Historians agree that Julius Rosenberg ran a Soviet spy ring, part of the real wartime networks that Venona exposed. Most add that the bomb design that mattered most to Moscow came from Klaus Fuchs, not from Greenglass. What is still argued is the rest: whether Ethel did more than know, whether the case against her would have stood without her brother’s testimony, and whether either of them should have died. No other American civilians were put to death for spying in the Cold War. Their sons were ten and six.