Biography
Julius Rosenberg was an American electrical engineer and member of the Communist Party USA who, with his wife Ethel Rosenberg, was convicted in 1951 of conspiracy to commit espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union, and executed at Sing Sing Prison on June 19, 1953. The case was the most prominent capital prosecution of American Communists in U.S. history and remains one of the defining political trials of the early Cold War.
The government alleged that Julius Rosenberg had recruited his brother-in-law David Greenglass, a U.S. Army machinist at Los Alamos, to pass technical information about the atomic bomb to Soviet intelligence. Greenglass and his wife Ruth received immunity in exchange for his testimony, in which he claimed his sister Ethel had typed up his notes — testimony Greenglass admitted in 2001 he had fabricated to protect his wife. The trial was presided over by Judge Irving Kaufman, who imposed the death sentence over the recommendation of the prosecution and the FBI. The Supreme Court refused to hear the case after multiple stays and appeals. Pope Pius XII, Albert Einstein, Jean-Paul Sartre, and millions of demonstrators around the world appealed for clemency; President Eisenhower refused.
They left two young sons, Michael and Robert, who were adopted and raised under the surname Meeropol and have spent their adult lives advocating for their parents posthumous exoneration.
