Background
Ethel Rosenberg was born in Manhattan, New York City, of Jewish immigrants. She was the daughter of Barnet and Tessie Greenglass. Her father was a sewing machine repairman.
(Washington June 7, 1952. 2 Volumes. Large octavos, 1715pp...)
Washington June 7, 1952. 2 Volumes. Large octavos, 1715pp., wraps. Title neatly printed in ink on spines. Good, wraps a bit worn and soiled, small closed tear along front cover. 2 volume set.
https://www.amazon.com/SUPREME-UNITED-ROSENBERG-PETITIONERS-AMERICA/dp/B005XRGBD0?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B005XRGBD0
https://www.amazon.com/Death-House-Letters-Julius-Rosenberg/dp/B0007DY0RY?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B0007DY0RY
(This greatly enlarged and revised edition of Death House ...)
This greatly enlarged and revised edition of Death House Letters of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg contains all of the important letters written after, and therefore not included in, the first edition. This new version also contains the full text of the First and Second Clemency Appeals, the Rosenbergs' own eloquent claims of innocence and their powerful assaults on the charges made against them. Last but not least, The Testament presents many letters, now published for the first time, which show how the man and the woman grew to such heroic stature that their words have already become world classics of democratic eloquence and inspiration.
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https://www.amazon.com/Rosenberg-letters-foreword-COLLINS-ROSENBERG/dp/B0000CIOAZ?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B0000CIOAZ
Ethel Rosenberg was born in Manhattan, New York City, of Jewish immigrants. She was the daughter of Barnet and Tessie Greenglass. Her father was a sewing machine repairman.
She graduated from Seward Park High School in 1931. Ethel studied singing but did not pursue a musical career.
After her marriage, Ethel worked as a clerk for several years but then settled into life as a housewife and mother.
Between 1945 and 1950 her husband, Julius Rosenberg, helped to organize three separate small businesses, the last two of which were machine shops with two of his wife's brothers, Bernard and David Greenglass.
Julius moved abruptly from a life of obscurity to one of notoriety on July 17, 1950, when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover personally announced his arrest on charges that he had been a leading figure in a wartime espionage ring that stole secret information on American atomic research. The arrest occurred at a time of growing fear of internal subversion in the United States. Beginning in 1947, President Harry S. Truman's loyalty program had screened the political activities of millions of government employees. Such Congressional Red-hunting groups as the House Committee on Un-American Activities also roused fears of widespread subversion.
In September 1949 the Soviet Union exploded an atomic device, thereby terminating the West's monopoly on atomic weapons. In January 1950 Alger Hiss, a former high State Department official, was convicted on perjury charges for denying involvement in espionage. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin began his anti-Communist campaign the following month. And, on June 25, 1950, the United States was plunged into military confrontation with Communist North Korea.
Thus the arrest of Julius Rosenberg on charges related to atomic espionage may have shocked Americans but did not necessarily surprise them. There existed the widespread belief that the Russians could have become an atomic power so quickly only through such espionage. A chain of earlier arrests had led to that of Rosenberg.
In February 1950, Klaus Fuchs, a leading, German-born British physicist who had worked during World War II at Los Alamos, N. M. , and elsewhere on the atomic bomb project was arrested. Fuchs confessed almost immediately to having served as a Soviet agent, and in March 1950 was sentenced to fourteen years in prison. Two months later, on May 23, the FBI took into custody Harry Gold, a Philadelphia chemist, who admitted having served as Fuchs's courier in the spy ring and named a wartime Russian vice-consul in New York as the chief contact with Soviet intelligence. He also recalled having received information at one point in 1945 from a young soldier employed as a machinist at Los Alamos.
The description fit David Greenglass, Ethel Rosenberg's brother and Julius' business partner; the FBI arrested him on June 15, 1950. Greenglass admitted complicity in the spy ring from its inception, and named Julius Rosenberg as the person who recruited him for espionage in 1944. The FBI questioned Julius Rosenberg on June 16 and, the following month, arrested him on a charge of conspiracy to commit espionage with Greenglass and Gold during 1944-1945. Other alleged members of the ring were taken into custody during the following weeks, including Ethel Rosenberg (on August 11) and Morton Sobell (on August 18), a friend and former college classmate of Julius. Sobell, who like the Rosenbergs avowed his innocence, had fled to Mexico with his family but was delivered by Mexican police to the FBI at the Texas border. He and Ethel were also charged with conspiracy to commit espionage in what, by then, had become known as the "Rosenberg spy ring. "
The trial began before Judge Irving R. Kaufman in New York in March 1951. The chief witnesses against Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were David Greenglass, who pleaded guilty in October 1950, and his wife, Ruth. According to Greenglass, he gave Harry Gold (once) and the Rosenbergs (several times) diagrams and other information concerning the lens mold, firing mechanism, and internal structure of the atomic bomb. Gold, who had pleaded guilty at a separate trial in December 1950 and had been sentenced to thirty years in prison, corroborated Greenglass' statements about their meeting but testified that he had never met the Rosenbergs.
The government's case against Ethel and Julius Rosenberg thus relied largely upon the testimony of David and Ruth Greenglass. Similarly, the case against Morton Sobell, who came to trial along with the Rosenbergs and Greenglass, depended almost entirely upon the testimony of another alleged co-conspirator. A former friend and fellow-Communist named Max Elitcher charged that Sobell had tried to recruit him into the espionage ring. Defense lawyers ridiculed the evidence provided by confessed co-conspirators but dealt in their cross-examination only ineffectually with the testimony of Greenglass and Elitcher. (Gold was not cross-examined at all. ) The Rosenbergs' decision to testify on their own behalf also proved unhelpful. Ethel Rosenberg, under cross-examination, chose to plead self-incrimination when questioned about her Communist affiliations. On March 29, 1951, all four defendants (the Rosenbergs, Sobell, and Greenglass) were found guilty. The following month, Judge Kaufman sentenced David Greenglass to fifteen years in prison and Morton Sobell to a thirty-year term. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg received death sentences. Judge Kaufman set execution for the week of May 21, 1951, but a series of legal appeals delayed carrying out the sentence for more than two years.
Meanwhile a campaign to obtain clemency for the pair was mounted both in the United States and abroad. The movement was spearheaded by Communist-dominated "defense committees" but included many non-Communists. The U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld conviction of the Rosenbergs and Sobell on February 25, 1952, and, between 1951 and mid-1953, Judge Kaufman and other federal court judges denied a variety of motions by defense lawyers for a new trial or a reduction in sentence. Highly emotional letters exchanged by Ethel and Julius Rosenberg while in prison awaiting execution began appearing in newspapers and magazines in the United States and abroad by mid-1952.
By the year's end these "death house letters, " as they became known, were published in book form and were selling throughout the world. Rosenberg defense committees sponsored rallies and other public events in the United States and throughout Europe demanding commutation of the death sentences. Among leading non-Communists who joined in clemency appeals for the Rosenbergs were Pope Pius XII, President Vincent Auriol of France, and the scientists Albert Einstein and Harold C. Urey. President Truman left office without responding to the requests for commutation, and his successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, twice refused to grant clemency for the couple. The Supreme Court refused on three separate occasions to review the case and, on June 19, 1953, the full high court, in a 6-3 decision, vacated the stay of execution that Justice William O. Douglas had granted the couple two days earlier. Later that same day, the Rosenbergs were executed at Sing Sing prison, Ossining, N. Y.
Ten thousand mourners had gathered in Union Square in New York City and many thousands had massed in similar deathwatches elsewhere that evening, but public agitation subsided quickly after the Rosenbergs' execution. During the 1950's and 1960's several books appeared arguing the couple's innocence on a variety of grounds: perjured testimony by the Greenglasses and Elitcher; FBI chicanery in faking a crucial piece of evidence, an Albuquerque hotel registration card signed by Harry Gold during his alleged visit to the Greenglasses; and the crudeness of David Greenglass' sketches of the A-bomb lens mold (which argument, however, speaks to the importance of Greenglass' espionage and not its genuineness).
During the mid-1970's the Rosenbergs' sons, Michael and Robert Meeropol (the name of their foster parents), undertook a public campaign to reopen the case. Public interest revived. The Meeropols and some independent scholars successfully sued under the Freedom of Information Act for release of FBI files and those of other goverment agencies linked to the case (including the Atomic Energy Commission, the Central Intelligence Agency, and Army Intelligence). Deep public suspicion of past governmental abuses, real or alleged, especially in the aftermath of the Watergate scandals, contributed to a broad measure of sympathy for the Meeropols' efforts and, although less widespread, to some support for their contention that the Rosenbergs and Sobell had been victimized by an FBI-sponsored frameup. However, almost no new evidence emerged to support this charge. The government files contained testimony (possibly unreliable) of two informants, cell mates of Julius Rosenberg, who told the FBI that Rosenberg acknowledged his complicity in espionage to them. The files also suggested that Ethel Rosenberg appeared to be far less involved in spying than Julius, that the Rosenberg defense lawyers correctly charged David Greenglass with having stolen a chunk of uranium from Los Alamos after the war (suggesting greater complicity on his part in espionage than Greenglass admitted at the trial), that the government's "deal" with Greenglass included an implicit agreement not to prosecute his wife, and that the government prosecutors initially opposed asking for the death penalty but were pressured into doing so by Atomic Energy Commission officials.
One surprising revelation in the FBI files was that J. Edgar Hoover and other high government officials had recommended clemency for Ethel (but not Julius) Rosenberg. The Rosenbergs may not have been the master spies painted by the prosecution, and whatever they received from David Greenglass may not have helped the Russians significantly in their atomic research. But those who argue the Rosenbergs' innocence have not yet produced a persuasive case that the couple was convicted on the strength of phony evidence and perjured testimony. Yet the passage of time had led to at least one basic convergence of opinion. In a less frantic and less fear-ridden political atmosphere, the couple would almost certainly have been granted either executive clemency or some form of judicial relief from execution.
Their deaths stand as a monument, even for many who accept their guilt, of the degree to which anti-Communist hysteria at the height of the Cold War prevented Americans from tempering the demands of justice with an equally full measure of mercy.
(This greatly enlarged and revised edition of Death House ...)
(Washington June 7, 1952. 2 Volumes. Large octavos, 1715pp...)
Ethel married Julius Rosenberg on June 18, 1939. They had two sons, Michael Allen and Robert Harry.
