What They Did

In 177 years of U.S. history, the Rosenbergs were the first native-born Americans to be executed by order of a civilian court for espionage. Sentencing them in April 1951, Federal Judge Irving Kaufman stigmatized their crime as "worse than murder."

The crime had ideological roots. Children of East European immigrants who settled in Manhattan's lower East Side, both Julius Rosenberg and his future wife Ethel Greenglass took to Communism in their adolescent years. In so doing, they rejected the Jewish faith of their parents (a sore blow to Julius' father, a garment worker who yearned for his son to be a rabbi). So ardent was 19-year-old Ethel's devotion to the cause that she began indoctrinating her 13-year-old brother David. Then she found a comrade and a beau in Julius, two years her junior and an electrical engineering student at City College of New York.

They were married; World War II was under way, and Julius was working as a civilian engineer for the Army's Signal Corps (a good spot for spying on East Coast defense plants) when his Communist Party membership came to the attention of Army authorities. He was dropped from the Signal Corps. But he became more valuable than ever to Moscow. He went underground. He became part-owner and operator of a Manhattan machine shop. But secretly he ran an apparatus of spies and informants who passed scientific and technical data to Russian agents, including Anatoli Yakovlev, a clerk in the Russian consulate at New York.

The most precious, and most damning, piece of information came in 1945 from Ethel's younger brother David Greenglass, then employed as a machinist in the supersecret atomic bomb laboratory at Los Alamos, N. Mex. Ethel had used older-sister cajolery, and Julius had given money ("Money is no object," Julius had said, explaining that it came from "friends") to persuade David and his confused wife Ruth to join the treasonable conspiracy. Later, Yakovlev conveyed the commendation of his masters in Moscow for Greenglass' sketches: "Extremely excellent and very valuable." At the Rosenberg trial, a U.S, atomic expert, examining a duplicate sketch drawn by Greenglass, testified that it showed the atom bomb substantially as perfected. And he meant the improved wartime Abomb, the implosion type used at Nagasaki.

The Greenglasses finally confessed their part in the treachery. So did Harry Gold, the courier who transmitted to Yakovlev the Greenglass A-bomb data (he also passed on information from Britain's Klaus Fuchs). There were other corroboratory witnesses. But the Rosenbergs denied all, though confession might have won them a lesser sentence, through the three weeks of their 1951 trial and through two subsequent years of appeal and judicial review. In prison, Ethel sang folk songs, and such melodies as the aria One Fine Day from Madame Butterfly and John Brown's Body (also the tune of Solidarity Forever).

Fanatic to the end, the Rosenbergs lent themselves to Communist hate propaganda against the U.S. Though apostates from Judaism and sentenced by a Jewish judge, they helped to portray themselves as victims of antiSemitism. They called David Greenglass a liar who implicated them to save himself. Ethel Rosenberg, who pleaded for compassion, had none for the brother she had led into her crime: "I once loved my brother," she said, "but I'd be pretty unnatural if I hadn't changed."

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