Rosenberg, Ethel Greenglass

(1915-1953) and Rosenberg, Julius (1918-1953)

   Both Ethel Greenglass and Julius Rosenberg were born to Jewish families in New York City. They met as members of the Young Communist League in the 1930s and married in 1939. Julius graduated from City College of New York in 1939 in electrical engineering. Ethel worked as a secretary. In 1940, Julius Rosenberg joined the Army Signal Corps and worked on radar equipment. He was dismissed in 1945 after being accused of being a communist, and together with Ethel and her brother, David Greenglass, they established a machine shop in Manhattan. When David Greenglass, who had worked in Los Alamos, New Mexico, on the atomic bomb, was charged with spying in 1950, he named his sister and brother-in-law as spies who had passed secrets to the Soviet Union. Greenglass was the chief witness against the Rosenberg’s in their trial, which began on 6 March 1951 and which was aggressively prosecuted by the assistant U.S. attorney, Roy Cohn. Neither of the Rosenbergs would answer questions about their links with the Communist Party of the United States of America. They were convicted on 29 March 1951 and executed by electrocution on 19 June 1951, despite international appeals on their behalf. The Rosenbergs were the only U.S. spies executed. In the 1990s, material from the Soviet archives suggested that Julius Rosenberg was guilty but cast doubt on the conviction of Ethel.