On June 19, 1953, lThe electric chair execution of the married couple of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg -two New York communist militants accused of having been Soviet spies and stealing nuclear secrets- sealed one of the most tragic and archetypal stories of the Cold War. Innocent victims? Traitors to the country? Martyrs? Pawns in a power game? All that?
Manhattan, 1936. On New Year’s Eve, Julius Rosenberg, an 18-year-old engineering student, met Ethel Greenglass, 21, who was going to sing at a union event. It was instant love. Both were active in the Communist Youth, having as their enemy the fascism that was eating away at Europe. Although they were not particularly religious, They married under the Jewish rite in 1939. Her first child, Michael, was born in 1945. Robert arrived two years later.
Julius worked for the Army in engineering tasks from 1940 to 1945, when the military discovered his communist affiliation. In 1943, Julius had begun his career as a spy, recruited by Alexander Feklisov, one of the main men of the NKGB (later KGB) then operating on American soil. In turn, Julius set up his own network. At that time, both countries were fighting a common enemy, Nazi-fascism. But they knew that this alliance was not going to last long.
It was instant love. Both were active in the Communist Youth, having as their enemy the fascism that was eating away at Europe.
The anti-communist wave promoted by Senator Joseph McCarthy was in full swing when Julius was arrested on July 17, 1950. Ethel was arrested the following month, as was Morton Sobell, another member who had fled to Mexico and would be sentenced to eighteen years. of jail.
Julius had been betrayed by a recruit who was also a relative: Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, arrested in June. He had worked for a month and a half in the Los Alamos laboratory, one of the places where the “Manhattan Project” was being prepared; that is, the nuclear bomb.
His lawyer told him that the best thing for him and his wife Ruth was to turn someone over. And that someone was his brother-in-law. Other figures in Rosenberg’s circle had fled to places with Soviet protection after Greenglass’s arrest.
The evidence against Ethel was little more than nothing: the only certainty was that she had some knowledge of Julius and David’s activities. Once the trial began, Greenglass changed his testimony and included his sister as part of the conspiracy, in part to hide that the person who had transcribed the information had been Ruth. She supported her accusation against Ethel under oath.
Emanuel Bloch, the Rosenbergs’ defense lawyer, did his best but the complexity of the case overwhelmed him. In 1951, Judge Irving Kaufman, then with just over a year in that position, He sentenced them to the electric chair. Ironically, not only did the rest of Kaufman’s career have progressive overtones, but he was the only one of three justices to vote in favor of the Rosenbergs when appealing their conviction.
Not only did the Soviet Union ignore its fate, but it used the ordeal of marriage as a propaganda tool. Today, The SRV, the current version of the KGB, still does not recognize the Rosenbergs as spies.
Requests for clemency came from everywhere and from all kinds of figures. Pius XII. Pablo Picasso. Jean-Paul Sartre. In Latin America, the governments of Brazil and Uruguay, among others, also spoke out. At the beginning of 1953, Argentina raised its request for commutation of the death penalty. In an editorial, the Buenos Aires Herald considered “inconceivable and inconsistent with the high responsibility of the President, that the life or death of two human beings could be subject to political maneuvers.”
One of his sons, Michael, played hangman with his father Julius, even shortly before dying in the electric chair.
In February, the US embassy in Argentina, which during the year would receive more than a thousand letters protesting the conviction, sent the State Department a memo that said “The protests in the Rosenberg case do not even deserve to be dignified with a response.”
Actually, The trial had been a government poker play gone wrong: the authorities hoped that Julius would expose other spies in exchange for a few years in prison for him and Ethel. as Greenglass had done. He received fifteen years in prison, of which he only served nine.
Instead, the Rosenbergs released the following statement: “By asking us to repudiate the truth of our innocence, the Government admits its own doubts as to our guilt (…) we will not be coerced, even under the pain of death, to bear false witness”.
Robert and Michael enjoyed visiting their parents in Sing Sing prison: they chatted, sang; Michael even played hangman with his father. On June 18, at eight at night, Julius was the first to occupy the fatal chair. He received the three required shocks, and then a doctor confirmed his death. Instead, the standard voltage was not enough to kill Ethel. Two more charges were applied. Smoke began to come out of her head. Electrician Joseph Francel, New York state executioner, charged $150 (1,764 today) for each one.
Almost no Jewish cemetery wanted to grant the Rosenbergs a final resting place, until they were finally able to be buried in one located on Long Island. Michael and Robert bounced from house to house, including an orphanage, until they were adopted by the poet Abel Meeropo.l.
In 1995, Project Venona documents became publicly accessible: a United States initiative to intercept and then decrypt messages that the Soviet Union sent to its agents on American soil. Greenglass admitted to having betrayed Ethel so as not to contradict Ruth.. She died at 92 in 2014, six years after being widowed. At 91, Morton Sobell gave an interview to the New York Times in 2008 acknowledging his role. But he said that Julius had nothing to do with the atomic bomb and that Ethel was nothing but guilty of being his wife.
But Feklisov also recorded that Julius was collecting information on different technologies that the United States was working on, and some were more than useful for his rivals.
Julius Rosenberg was guilty of espionage, yes, but he had not stolen atomic secrets, as many of his compatriots who were clamoring to see him fried thought. Ethel was little more than human bait. The trial had more than one irregularity. But heThe Rosenbergs chose to claim complete innocence until the last moment, for a cause they considered superior, which sealed not only their lives but the fate of their children.
Michael and Robert, now elderly, say they understand their parents’ actions. They consider that the cause was worth more than giving up companions, and also sacrificing their childhood. But they continue trying to clean up their mother’s image. In one of their last acts of government, the outgoing presidents of the United States grant pardon and freedom to several convicts. But Obama did not exonerate Ethel.
Julius and Ethel’s children could not (and cannot) expect anything good from the Republican candidate ready to return, that is, Donald Trump. The recent movie The Apprentice shows Roy Cohn – who in his youth was an assistant prosecutor and McCarthy’s assistant – as one of those who most advocated for the execution of the Rosenbergs. He was Trump’s mentor – the one who taught him how dirty and cruel one can be through power.