The Rosenbergs: A different telling of a 70-year-old story
A young married couple was executed in the electric chair. One of them was guilty.
The story of the Rosenberg executions is rooted in the 1930s, almost a century ago. It has been on my mind recently because of its linkage to two newsletters I wrote last month about McCarthyism and America’s anti-Communist witch hunt of the early 1950s. Also, I remember the executions clearly from my childhood. I was 12 and the dominant thought in my mind that day was, “Why did they have to be Jewish?” As a Jew, I was embarrassed and wanted the story to go away. I wondered what would happen to their two sons, both a few years younger than I. I could not understand why Jews would embrace Communism. It turns out that all of this is central to the larger Rosenberg story, which I have created here in a different way than I have seen it done before. Readers will not enjoy the story; I hope there are things that some can learn from it.
The only people in the U.S. executed for espionage-related activity in connection with the development of nuclear weapons are Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
The punishment for at least one of them was wrong.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a married couple with two small children, were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage in 1951 and executed two years later. Julius was deeply involved in the crime. His wife, Ethel, may have been a player in the scheme, but at a much lesser level than her husband. Some believe she played no role at all. Either way, her death sentence and messy execution seem unwarranted.
All of the others involved with the Rosenbergs were spared from execution. One was let go without being charged in return for providing testimony against Ethel that was later said to be incorrect.
J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, which investigated and arrested the Rosenbergs, did not think Ethel should be executed. He recommended a 30-year prison sentence for her. The sentencing decision – execution – was made by the judge who presided at the trial, who later was found to have been in collusion with the government in its case against the Rosenbergs.
The judge said God told him to sentence Ethel and Julius to execution, thus sparking substantial controversy regarding how a death sentence should be decided.
If you are getting a sense that the Rosenberg case is complicated, you are on the right track.
The case has been examined and re-examined countless times, although controversy remains at several levels.
The Rosenbergs were executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison in New York on the evening of June 19, 1953, one day after their 14th wedding anniversary. Both walked quietly to their fates, maintaining their years-long adamant refusal to admit guilt or identify others who may have been involved.
Julius, 35, went to his death first, the electrical charge producing a grotesque smile on his face and a lifeless body within a few seconds – which is the way the electric chair is supposed to work. Ethel, 37, had to be electrocuted twice. She didn’t die the first time, so they did it again until smoke rose from her head – five full minutes in the electric chair as its voltage raged through her body.
The Rosenbergs’ two sons, Michael, 10, and Robert, 6, when their parents were executed, have been trying to obtain a presidential exoneration for their mother for more than a decade. Both Barack Obama and Joe Biden ignored or rejected their pleas.
No such effort was made during Donald Trump’s first term, probably because Trump greatly admired Roy Cohn, who was a member of the Rosenberg prosecution team, and later served as lawyer for Senator Joseph McCarthy in McCarthy’s campaign to destroy the lives of Americans who had been Communist Party members. Cohn also acknowledged later that he privately urged the judge in the Rosenberg trial to execute both Julius and Ethel.
The boys had no relatives willing to take them in after their parents were executed, likely due to a fear of antisemitism surrounding this case. The family that finally did take them in was Jewish, however, and also was connected to one of the most controversial and powerful pieces of popular music ever written and recorded in America, a piece of music lamenting wrongful death. More to come about both of these situations.
The Rosenberg story begins on New York’s Lower East Side, where both Julius and Ethel were born and reared in immigrant Jewish families residing in tenements. They were among more than one-half million immigrant and first-generation Jews crammed into substandard apartments in an area of New York City about one-half square mile in size.
Among the first-generation members of these households, most were looking for a way out and up, and most ultimately would realize their goal. They founded retail stores, banks and financial institutions, manufacturing establishments, wholesale firms, and small businesses that became a major force in the commerce of the U.S. Or, they went to work for these firms, many of which disproportionately employed Jews in well-paying jobs. The Jews of the Lower East Side also found niches of celebrity and wealth in the entertainment industry and the arts.
As they moved along these roads, Jews tended to feel sympathetic to others who had a harder time finding paths out of prejudice and poverty – especially racial and religious minorities, and underpaid and exploited workers. Many, thus, were attracted to the Communist Party of America, which at that time was ideologically opposed to fascism, racism, and antisemitism, while also being pro-union.
Julius Rosenberg, who had studied engineering at City College of New York, was among the Jews of America who found what seemed like a good fit in the Communist Party. The Party would attract a peak membership of about 75,000 in the U.S. by 1947. Jews may have constituted somewhere between 20 to 40 percent of that number, based on conflicting information from various sources.
Although a sizeable representation of the Party, these Jews were a small fraction, just 1.5 percent, of the estimated 5 million Jews then residing in America. The Party’s total U.S. membership was an even smaller fraction of the 145 million people in the U.S.
Julius’s work within the Party began with him reaching out among friends and acquaintances to attract new members, especially people who had access through their work to government information of interest to the Soviets. It was not long before he had a Soviet handler. Ethel, meanwhile, became consumed with family responsibilities connected to the rearing of the two Rosenberg boys. She studied parenting and read a lot about it.
Ethel, also a member of the Communist Party, almost certainly knew what her husband was doing, although some believe she did not participate with him in any meaningful role, and perhaps not at all. Others believe that she actively assisted her husband’s work for the Russians, citing alleged activities such as concealing money received from the Soviets and espionage equipment.
One of her sharpest critics, however, Mark Kramer, a Harvard historian, has said that she did not deserve anything more than a 10- to 15-year prison term.
Ethel Rosenberg’s younger brother, David Greenglass, was a principal figure in the Rosenberg story.
Greenglass, a trained machinist, joined the Communist Party in early 1943 and enlisted in the U.S. Army later that year. In 1944, he was promoted to the rank of sergeant and assigned to the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb. His work included researching various powerful explosives based on verbal instructions or sketches provided by Manhattan Project scientists.
Soon, Greenglass’s brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg, suggested to his Soviet handler that Greenglass might be a valuable recruit. Greenglass and his wife, Ruth, met with the Rosenbergs and Julius’s handler on September 21, 1944. The Greenglasses ultimately became key figures in providing information from the Manhattan Project to the Russians through a chain of contacts, including Julius Rosenberg.
Meanwhile, Klaus Fuchs, a German-born physicist and mathematician who had fled the country for England in 1933, had become a Russian spy. He worked in an atomic energy laboratory at Birmingham University in the early 1940s. The research program, in which the Russians were deeply involved, was moved to New York City in 1943, and Fuchs moved with it.
Fuchs eventually returned to England, where he was arrested in 1949 by Scotland Yard as a Russian spy. The FBI became involved and obtained what J. Edgar Hoover later described to President Harry Truman as a “full confession” regarding how Greenglass had provided atomic know-how to the Soviets through Julius Rosenberg and a man named Harry Gold, who functioned in the U.S. as a courier for the Soviets.
Greenglass was arrested in June 1950 and indicted by a Grand Jury in New Mexico, where the Manhattan Project was based, on a charge of conspiring to commit espionage.
Greenglass and Gold ultimately told investigators everything they knew about the transfer of American atomic secrets to the Russians, including Julius Rosenberg’s involvement.
As a means of pressuring Julius to name names, Hoover began an investigation of Ethel Rosenberg. David and Ruth Greenglass soon came under this pressure. Ruth, who had assisted her husband, was offered a deal. She would not be charged with any crime if she provided information against the Rosenbergs.
David Greenglass’ story about the Rosenbergs flip-flopped all over the place.
Originally, he said the handover of information to Julius had taken place on a New York street corner. Now, in a new interview, Greenglass said the exchange took place in the living room at Rosenberg’s New York apartment. In a separate interview with the FBI, Ruth added, “Julius then took the information into the bathroom and read it. When he came out, he told (Ethel) she had to type this info immediately. Ethel then sat down at the typewriter... and proceeded to type the info which David had given to Julius.”
David had told a grand jury that Ethel had nothing to do with his and Julius’s activities. At the trial, he changed his story on the witness stand.
And still, this was not the final version of his story. In a 2001 interview with a New York Times reporter, Greenglass, years after his release from prison, returned to the question of what happened when he handed over key atomic secrets to Julius. “Julius asked me to write up some stuff, which I did, and then he had it typed. I don’t know who typed it, frankly. And to this day, I can’t even remember that the typing took place. But somebody typed it. Now, I'm not sure who it was, and I don’t even think it was done while we were there.”
Another man, a college friend of Julius’s, also became implicated in the FBI investigation regarding the passing of atomic secrets through Julius Rosenberg to the Russians. Morton Sobell, an electrical engineer, had been a college classmate of Julius’s at City College. Sobell, who did military work for an instrument company in Manhattan in the late 1940s, allegedly delivered information of value to Julius.
Sobell and the Rosenbergs were tried together. All three were found guilty.
Sobell was sentenced to 30 years and served 17 years and 9 months.
Harry Gold was convicted under the Espionage Act of 1917 and sentenced to 30 years, serving 16 years.
Klaus Fuchs was convicted of passing secrets to the Soviets during and after World War II. He was sentenced to 14 years and served 9 years.
David Greenglass pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 15 years, serving 9 ½ years.
The Rosenbergs alone were sentenced to death, while also declining to admit their guilt and taking the names of American collaborators, if any, to their executions.
Judge Irving Kaufman, who presided at the trial of the Rosenbergs and Sobell and later became the Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, appeared to many to be something less than neutral in the Rosenberg case.
At the sentencing, the death penalty for the Rosenbergs was Kaufman’s decision alone. The jury did not play any role in the sentencing.
In opening remarks before his sentencing, Kaufman characterized the Rosenbergs’ actions as “worse than murder.” He accused the Rosenbergs of giving the Russians the atomic bomb “years before our best scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb.” He also alleged that their actions had caused the Korean War with 50,000 U.S. casualties, and “who knows but that millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason.” None of these comments or observations were supported by the evidence produced at the trial.
President Dwight Eisenhower was even more specific in defending his decision not to commute their sentences, saying that they immeasurably increased “the chances of atomic war” and “may have condemned to death tens of millions of innocent people all over the world.” Again, there was no evidence or testimony in the trial regarding such possibilities.
Judge Kaufman, a Jew, said he had gone alone to a synagogue in Washington to pray for divine guidance before deciding to impose the death penalty. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, also a Jew, sounded angry after hearing this story. “I despise a judge who feels God told him to impose a death sentence,” Frankfurter said.
Ultimately, years after the trial, the Rosenbergs’ sons obtained the release of records showing that Kaufman had engaged in improper ex parte discussions with the government prosecutors before and during the trial. “Whatever their substance, backstage meetings with prosecutors would have placed Kaufman firmly on the government’s team despite his fundamental obligation to remain neutral,” his biographer, Martin J. Siegel, also one of Kaufman’s last law clerks, wrote.
The role of antisemitism in the Rosenberg case seems undeniable, although it did play out in an unusual way.
Many of those involved in the case were Jews, including those charged, the defense team, the prosecution team, and the judge. There were no Jews on the jury, but that may not have been a factor in the end. Many American Jews were deeply embarrassed by what the Rosenbergs were alleged to have done, while others were afraid to show any support for them, thanks to McCarthyism.
Meanwhile, Ethel’s emotional detachment and refusal to admit any involvement probably worked against any possibility of building public support for lenience in her sentencing.
Many Jews simply wanted to be detached from the Rosenberg case as the investigation, trial, and execution progressed. It was, thus, no surprise that Rosenberg family members were not willing to assume care of the Rosenberg children.
Amid this environment, however, the young Rosenberg boys did become objects of great sympathy in some circles. One of those circles included W. E. B. DuBois, the widely known African American historian and sociologist with strong Socialist leanings. The boys somehow ended up at a Christmas Party at the DuBois home. Other attendees included Abel and Anne Meeropol, a childless Jewish couple, parents of two stillborn infant sons. The Meeropols felt an instant attraction to the Rosenberg boys and their plight.
Abel Meeropol had been a high school English teacher, poet, and musician. He also had been a member of the Communist Party and was greatly troubled by the racism of America in the late 1930s.
J. Thomas Shipp and Abraham S. Smith, both African American teenagers accused of a rape and a murder, were dragged out of jail and lynched in Marion, Indiana, in 1930. The lynching scene was famously photographed, and the horrifying image was widely circulated.*
*For those who wish to see the photo, click here.
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Abel Meeropol saw the photo on a postcard in 1936. He was shocked, deeply moved, and haunted for days.
He wrote a poem about what he saw. It was extraordinarily powerful. Eventually, he set the poem to music. He and his wife participated in performances of the song at protest rallies and meetings in New York. At some point, the song made its way to Billie Holiday, a noted African American singer.
The song was hated by many in America, but it became Holiday’s trademark. Time magazine named it the Song of the Century in 1999.
It was the Meeropols who took in and adopted Robert and Michael Rosenberg. The boys changed their surnames to Meeropol and ultimately became college professors, both fighting for the exoneration of their mother.
Abel Meeropol’s song, Strange Fruit, although pointed sharply at the American South, became a metaphor for racism at its worst, racism turned to horrifying violence, wrongful death at the hands of others, wrongful execution . . .
Southern trees bear a strange fruit,Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.Pastoral scene of the gallant South,The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,And the sudden smell of burning flesh!Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,Here is a strange and bitter crop.
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