Ethel Rosenberg: The Price of Loyalty in America’s Red Scare

At a few minutes past 8 p.m. on 19 June 1953, the heart of one of the most famous American spies of the 20th century stopped beating after three massive electrical charges. The body of Julius Rosenberg was taken off the electric chair, placed on a gurney, covered with a sheet and immediately taken from the execution cell, ready for the next victim of the grim spectacle. Ethel, Julius’s devoted, loyal and determined wife, entered with her head held high and her step firm, wearing a green and white patterned sleeveless dress. She had promised her husband that she would go to her death with dignity and pride, and although she had been trembling from head to toe for weeks at the thought of death, she had kept complete control of herself in front of witnesses and journalists until the very last moment.

Before sitting down in her chair, she hugged and kissed the guard who had cut short her difficult and long last months. She left the room in tears of emotion, unable to witness the devastating scene. Like Julius, Ethel was fitted with black braces across her chest, electrodes on her right leg and a black helmet on her head, at which she twitched imperceptibly.

When the morbid ritual of installing the murderous equipment was over, she closed her eyes and waited for the first volley of electricity. After three, she too was placed on the table, but the surprised doctors realised to their horror that her heart was still beating. They put her back in the chair and fired two more bullets. Ethel Rosenberg‘s terrifying death throes lasted almost five minutes.

Just before their deaths, the couple had been allowed to spend more than an hour with each other behind the bars of New York’s notorious maximum-security Sing Sing prison, which still stands today on a steep hill overlooking the Hudson River north of New York City. Together, yet apart. Separated by a chain-link fence, they could not touch, hug or kiss. It was the day after their fourteenth wedding anniversary, three of which they had spent behind bars.

Their last moments together were spent writing a will and a heart-breaking letter to their two young children, ten-year-old Michael and seven-year-old Robby. They added a note of innocence to the advice that would guide them in a future without their parents. The sons have coped with this difficult legacy throughout their lives, faithful to their parents’ memories and convictions.

The Rosenbergs were the only Americans executed for espionage and passing military secrets to the enemy in peacetime, and Ethel was the only woman executed for a crime other than murder. The most damning part of the indictment concerned their alleged theft of the secrets of the composition of the atomic bomb and the passing of this information to the Soviet Union.

The Rosenberg affair took place at the height of the Cold War, when America was filled with paranoia about Communist terror threatening its hard-won free and open way of life. The authorities did not even have to convince the vast majority of Americans that World War III was at hand and that, in the event of an apocalyptic confrontation, the Soviet atomic bomb would fall on New York first.

Since their arrest, the Rosenbergs have defiantly maintained their innocence, even though a guilty plea could have saved their lives. Soon after their deaths, it became clear that Julius was indeed a spy, but Ethel’s involvement in the infamous pro-Soviet and anti-American espionage network for which she was convicted was not only dubious, but also completely unprovable.

Caught up in one of the biggest Cold War scandals, Ethel Rosenberg, a seemingly strong and determined woman, but internally torn and emotionally unstable, paid with her life for an unfortunate mix of personal choices and collective social hysteria in post-war America.

Ethel Rosenberg was never average. She emerged from the impoverished and unloving family background of a typical Eastern European Jewish immigrant family, barely making it from day to day in New York’s Jewish Quarter, with determination, talent and dedication to her work.

First she escaped to the stage, where, slightly plump and ordinary-looking, she conjured up a fantasy world for herself and her audience with her velvet soprano, then she committed herself to activism and the struggle for workers’ and women’s rights, which brought her closer to American communist and leftist sympathisers, met the love of her life, and, after the birth of her children, gave herself up completely to motherhood.

She was more absorbed by this than ever before and had no time to devote to other activities, let alone the espionage for which she was convicted. She undoubtedly knew what her husband, with whom she had a close loving and trusting relationship, was doing at work, but no one could credibly accuse her of more than that.

But she was too proud to pretend to be a helpless and ignorant woman, and since she did not care what those around her thought of her, she did not arouse sympathy or sympathy. And that was disastrous, because she acted in a callous and cold-blooded way and was therefore guilty in the eyes of the Americans.

The only ‘evidence’ against her was the perjury of her brother, David Greenglass, who pushed his sister to her death to save himself and his wife. For from David, Julius Rosenberg, when he was a technician working on the secret Manhattan Project to build nuclear weapons, obtained classified information which he then passed on to Soviet agents.

When David was tracked down, he immediately betrayed Julius, while also spreading a pack of lies about the alleged involvement of his sister Ethel. When the US authorities arrested Julius and, shortly afterwards, Ethel, it quickly became clear to everyone that she was not guilty. But in the era of the Red Scare, Ethel’s conviction served as a convenient means of intimidating potential spies, communist sympathisers and subversives. No one thought that she would end up in the electric chair.

The tragedy of Ethel Rosenberg is also the tragedy of the USA. From the euphoria of victory at the end of the Second World War, she immediately slipped into cold-war paranoia, and she had no compunction about turning two children into orphans just to prove to the world how far she was prepared to go in the fight against communism. Or as the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who was distinctly averse to post-war America, wrote: “/…/ witch-hunts and sacrifices /…/ your country is sick with fear.”

A gifted Jewish girl

Ethel was born in September 1915 in Manhattan, New York, to an expatriate Jewish family, her father Barney and his second wife Tessie. Eastern European Jews left behind poverty and persecution on the old continent, bringing with them to the Promised Land a leftist ideology and radical politics to which they resorted because of impossible living conditions and constant discrimination.

Ethel’s ancestors were nurtured in a progressive and secular Jewish organisation called the Bund, which advocated cultural and civil rights for Jews and drew on the lessons of 19th century socialism. For the Jewish left, women’s social activism was commonplace, and although Ethel’s immediate family was not well-read and informed, she found intellectual satisfaction among friends, acquaintances and the wider Jewish community of vibrant New York.

She had a difficult and strained relationship with her mother, Tessie, from the very beginning. Despite being the only girl, she was neglected and scorned by her mother, who chose Ethel’s younger brother David, born after Tessie’s four miscarriages, as her pet.

Ethel was also in love with the round-faced and curly-haired toddler, who also admired his seven-year-old sister and took her as his role model for many years. It was not surprising that Ethel could be a role model for everyone, as she was an excellent and above-average student, and had a wonderful voice and acting talent.

The family lived in a rented flat, in damp and cold rooms with no windows and no bathroom, behind her father’s technical goods shop. Despite this, the father was a warm, contented and calm man, while the mother was the opposite – a domineering, bitter and cold person who devoted what little affection she had exclusively to the male members of the family. Favouritism towards sons, like in many other socio-cultural environments, was typical of Jewish families, and Tessie took it to the extreme.

In her youth, Ethel dreamt of a singing and acting career, even though she was not supported at home and never attended her many performances. She was branded a snob “more interested in Italian arias and Russian peasants than in her own family”. She was not particularly attracted to boys and was shy in society, although she could be witty.

She never gave much away in appearance and cared little for her clothes, but her smile was charming and warm. Her indifference to her own appearance cost her a great deal later on, and may even have contributed to her tragic end, but it certainly did not endear her to the public, who gave even more to the appearance of women than she does today.

What meant most to her was emotional balance and well-being, not only her own but also that of society. That is why, from a young age, she was interested in equality and the rights of the most exploited sections of society.

But it was on the stage where she really blossomed, transforming herself from an average and chubby little girl into a magical creature who took the audience into a world without worries and troubles. During the day, she stuffed newsprint into her holey shoes and did her homework in the warmth of her friends’ homes, and her scoliosis also caused her constant back problems, but she put all that behind her on stage in the evenings.

After the American stock market crash and the onset of the global economic crisis in the late 1920s, she had to find work in a hurry to support her family financially. She trained as a secretary and also acquired basic accounting skills, and instead of going to college, she took a job as an office worker.

She continued to live two parallel lives, working during the day and having time for spiritual and intellectual rebirth in the evenings. She even won a scholarship to join a local amateur drama group, and her artistic pursuits reached their peak when she auditioned for the prestigious Schola Cantorum singing school at Carnegie Hall for the second time.

At the age of just 19, she was one of the youngest singers in the choir, and in all likelihood was involved in many of the world-famous performances, such as in Brahms’ German Requiem, conducted by Toscanini. In such a cosmopolitan environment, she broadened her horizons and experienced the world beyond the narrow confines of Jewish emigration.

So it was not unusual when she became the most active woman in organising a strike in the company where she was employed. The image of a shy girl was replaced by that of a determined fighter for workers’ rights, explaining to them the importance of the struggle for rights and equality. She lay down on her coat in front of the factory door, blocking the entry of shipments and non-strikers. She began to make friends with like-minded people from left-wing and communist circles and her life became more and more meaningful.

Love at first sight

During a New Year celebration, when she was overcome with trepidation before a singing performance, she was approached by a tall and handsome engineering student, three years her junior, who had noticed her several times in the neighbourhood. The trembling instantly subsided, the young man walked her home and they became inseparable.

Julius Rosenberg, or Julie as his friends called him, was the youngest of five children of a Jewish couple with Polish roots. Smooth and smart, but above all madly in love, he was an emotional and intellectual lifeline to a girl driven by an immense zest for life. As a teenager, he too became enthusiastic about politics. He got a place at a college for children from poor immigrant and working-class families, and left-leaning political activism was part of the daily routine of most students there.

Membership of the Young Communist League was only a matter of time, and he joined with fellow student Morton Sobell, with whom he became lifelong friends. In the turbulent 1930s, the Young Communists, who were not persecuted by anyone at the time, were mainly concerned with the growing fascism in Europe and the great divide between the rich elites and the faceless and precarious masses.

The sympathy for communism among intellectuals, progressive liberals and the working poor of New York was not only widespread but also accepted and understood. Communism was supposed to be the way to a world free of poverty, inequality and racism, but fascism and Nazism were the real problem. That is why there were a disproportionate number of communists among the Jews, and few imagined that it would degenerate into murderous totalitarianism.

Stalin’s propaganda apparatus was also well oiled and prominent journalists, such as Walter Duranty of the New York Times, reported from Moscow that there was nothing but honey and milk being churned out. Ethel and Julius also believed in the Bolshevik miracle.

Their meeting that wonderful evening in 1936 changed Ethel’s life. She was finally able to adopt a pattern of life that suited her. In Julius she found a kindred spirit with the same interests and world views, and there was an instant magnetic physical attraction between them.

From the moment they met, Julius never let her out of his sight. She charmed him with her dedication to everything she undertook, from singing to standing up for left-wing ideals. And she had a man of her worldview, a man of her outlook and interest, who had led her out of the stuffy Jewish ghetto. They talked for hours and she became even more alienated from her family, where no one went to university.

She typed study notes for Julius, who was occasionally overcome by laziness, and helped him to successfully complete his college studies. In the meantime, she went to work and continued both singing and playing the piano and acting.

Her family cared little for her, except for David, then a 14-year-old boy, who was fascinated by his sister’s clever boyfriend. Julius lent the young man books and pamphlets, encouraged him to read leftist classics, and often accompanied the couple to watch propaganda films about the Soviet Union or to evening talks at the Young Communist League. So he himself joined it at the age of 16.

Julius and Ethel’s marriage in 1939 was very modest, as they were as poor as church mice, and they were not interested in the religious side and traditions of Judaism. Ethel, in particular, continued her community service and helped to raise money for children orphaned during the Spanish Civil War.

Then, suddenly, all the communists and their sympathisers were faced with a great dilemma. The Soviets and the Germans had signed the Ribbentrop-Molotov non-aggression pact. It included a secret protocol by which Germany pledged not to attack the Soviet Union, while promising Stalin eastern Poland, the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and Stalin pledged not to intervene militarily if Hitler attacked Poland. This, of course, happened on 1 September 1939, and Britain and France finally declared war on Germany.

The contradictory relations between the USA and the Soviet Union

Deeply disillusioned by the Soviet friendship with their ideological opponent, Nazi Germany, many American Communists left the Party. But many unconditionally loyal supporters blindly accepted the Soviet turn, and among them were Julius and Ethel, who never made a secret of their sympathies with communism.

In any case, in the early years of their marriage they were preoccupied with much more mundane matters. Julius had difficulty finding a job and it was up to Ethel to provide for them. When he finally got a job in the US Army as a young engineer, however, Ethel, in keeping with the times, gave up her lower-paid job and devoted herself entirely to looking after the home. The dream of a singing and acting career remained just that – a dream.

After the Second World War, most women gave up any thought of a career, as it was thought that men returning from the front needed jobs more. Society expected women to devote themselves to the household, since the success of a husband depended on how well his wife took care of the home.

But Ethel was happy for the first time in her life. Despite living in a humble and untidy tenement room without a bathroom, she and Julius were head over heels in love. In the evenings, they would invite friends over and often there was not an empty corner at the Rosenbergs’ house overnight.

When Hitler broke the infamous agreement with the Soviet Union and invaded it in June 1941 with Operation Barbarossa, Stalin suddenly became an ally of the West. This temporarily eased the pressure on the Communists, and with the entry of the USA into the war in December of that year, it became acceptable to openly praise the Soviet Union as a key partner in the fight against the then worst enemies of humanity, Nazism and fascism.

Suffering from asthma and poor eyesight, there was no danger of Julius being conscripted into the army. However, this was the period when he began to engage in suspicious activities connected with military secrets. In all probability, he was recruited by Semyon Semyonov, who was considered one of the main organisers of Soviet intelligence activities in the USA.

In fact, Julius was employed in a special department of the US army, where he had access to a number of secret documents. He was sometimes handsomely rewarded for his work, and Ethel, and later his son, occasionally received a gift. It was also at this time that the FBI’s first dossier on the Rosenbergs was created.

While Julius was sinking deeper and deeper into the traps of illegal activities, Ethel, on the other hand, was becoming more and more an everyday American. In 1943, they had a son, Michael, a very demanding, restless and nervous child who demanded a lot of attention. Ethel was an incredibly patient mother, never punishing her son and attending to his every whim. Subconsciously, therefore, she was doing the opposite of her mother. But without help, and with Julius often absent, caring for the child and looking after the home brought her to the brink of exhaustion.

She even enrolled in motherhood education classes, avidly read parenting magazines and was enthusiastic about the new methods then being promoted by the progressive and still world-famous paediatrician Benjamin Spock. He encouraged the self-confidence of young mothers. “Know more than you think you know”, he taught, changing deep-rooted patterns of traditional education.

But despite all his efforts, Michael remained a difficult child, and she was convinced that parenthood had failed her. But Ethel would not have been Ethel if she had not persevered and delved deeper and deeper into child psychology. At the same time, she admitted to herself that she needed help herself, not only in terms of childcare, but because of her own deep emotional wounds caused by the lack of warmth and love in her childhood. She began to see a psychiatrist regularly and, after her death, the psychiatrist thought that Ethel herself would have become a therapist if her life had not ended too hastily.

While Ethel was coming to terms with motherhood and her own sensual world, the end of the war was approaching.

Her brother David, a junior technician in 1944, despite his strong and often clearly expressed communist views, had by a strange coincidence ended up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the secret Manhattan nuclear programme was under way. David, who was not even close to his sister in talent and hard work, and who had only a very basic education, was nevertheless the perfect bait for the spy network of which Julius was a part. The latter recruited his brother-in-law and, in exchange for a fee, got him to copy confidential documents and pass them on to Soviet informers.

He and his young and attractive wife Ruth initially looked at the older couple with admiration and wanted to be as much like them as possible. The surviving written correspondence also shows that both were also fervent communists, convinced of the final victory of Marxism.

After the end of the war, the geopolitical cards were again mixed up. Until recently allies against Hitler, the USA and the Soviet Union became mortal enemies overnight. Before that, at Yalta and Potsdam, they were able to divide up their territorial spheres of interest, shake hands suspiciously with the other allies and set about rebuilding the post-war world according to their ideological playbook.

Truman, who replaced Roosevelt in the presidency, was much more suspicious of the Soviets, and a period was ushered in in which the US redefined itself politically, culturally and socially.

The following decade was marked, on the one hand, by economic progress, an open and liberal society, and, on the other, by total anti-communist hysteria, the pursuit of imaginary and less imaginary enemies, anti-Semitism and misogyny, hatred of women.

The beginning of the slow end

The FBI already had a well-established network of agents who had infiltrated the Communist Party during the war, and Julius soon lost his job as a result. His Soviet contacts advised him to temporarily lay low and stop his espionage activities. By then it was clear that the Soviet Union was getting details of secret atomic weapons development somewhere in the lonely desert of New Mexico.

Julius was disappointed, but he was much more aware of the dangers of exposure than his brother-in-law David. He liked to make himself wide and unnecessarily exposed.

Julius set up shop with Ethel’s brothers Bernie and David, but the project was quickly doomed to failure. No one had the entrepreneurial spirit and they soon fell into debt. David in particular borrowed money from Julius very often, especially when his wife Ruth became pregnant.

Relations between the couple began to fray. Ethel was by then completely dependent on her husband and the days when they had been equal partners were long gone. They were once again struggling with poverty, which Ethel, who cared little for material goods, could bear more easily than her husband. However, despite all the hardships, they strengthened their still fervent love with another baby.

Robby was born in 1947 and, much to everyone’s relief, it immediately became clear that he was a calm and undemanding child. For the first time, Ethel truly enjoyed motherhood, although first-born Michael remained difficult and overly jealous. Music was always part of the family’s daily routine, Ethel sang and played the piano for the children and encouraged them to express their feelings through music and art.

Julius had come across important information that suggested that the noose around the spy network was slowly tightening. He warned David that he and Ruth were among the main suspects and advised him to flee the country as soon as possible and head for communist Eastern Europe via France. But neither he nor the pregnant Ruth were prepared to give up their homeland.

In January 1950, David was questioned by the FBI in connection with the theft of some uranium samples from Los Alamos, and he lied that he had spotted the golf ball-shaped samples, but that was all. In reality, he still kept one at home and dumped it in the river immediately after the hearing. When he described the incident to Julius, Julius again encouraged him to leave the country already.

But by then it was too late, because just a week later Klaus Fuchs, a German-born anti-Nazi communist scientist with a British passport working in Los Alamos, was arrested in the UK. He immediately confessed to being a Soviet spy, described the flow of information and the workings of the spy network, and revealed the names of other associates, which soon led to David Greenglass and, subsequently, Julius Rosenberg.

It was at this time that anti-communist paranoia in America was at its height, mainly because of one of the most notorious phenomena of the 20th century, McCarthyism, so named after Senator Joe McCarthy.

McCarthy was the mastermind behind the modern inquisition and witch-hunts, only reincarnated as communists. Most notorious, of course, was his pursuit of Hollywood, which destroyed many a promising career. At his side was FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who bizarrely confronted his own homosexuality by attacking and branding homosexuals as communists and enemies of the state. In their inflammatory and incendiary speeches, they warned that there were communists around every bend.

Both of them, and McCarthy in particular, as it turned out later, lied extensively about the number of alleged communists and their sympathisers. Many of them were said to have infiltrated government departments, as was shown by the case of Alger Hiss, a well-mannered and well-educated Soviet spy who, as a lawyer, worked in the inner circle of the Foreign Minister and even took part in the founding of the United Nations.

There were dark forces at work, McCarthy warned, 55,000 communists in the US and at least half a million more of their followers, and all of them were working to undermine the foundations of American society. It was not unusual, of course, for people to be frightened.

At the same time, the Soviets had already detonated their first atomic bomb and America had lost its monopoly on this important military invention. Then, in June 1950, North Korea, with the help of the Soviet Union, attacked the South, and the USA found itself in a new hot conflict where, at first, it fared very badly. And even mighty China, where Mao Tse-tung had triumphantly ended years of civil war, was turning red.

The fear that the march of communism around the world would continue and reach even America was suddenly no longer an irrational fantasy. Many believed that this would not have happened if the Soviet Union had not got hold of nuclear weapons.

Enemy number one

David Greenglass was arrested on 16 June 1950. He immediately confessed his guilt and did not hesitate to cooperate fully with the authorities in identifying the other suspects. Julius was naively convinced that there was no evidence against him and that it would be difficult to prove him guilty, so he decided to deny everything in case of arrest. He did not even think that his wife might also find herself in the hands of justice.

Julius Rosenberg was arrested on 17 July 1950. FBI agents turned the Rosenbergs’ modest apartment upside down and took everything they could carry. This included Ethel’s typewriter, later one of the main pieces of evidence against her.

A drama began to unfold before the public eye, which lasted for the next three years. It starred Ruth and David Greenglass on the one hand, who chose the winning tactic, and Ethel and Julius Rosenberg on the other, whose tactics led them to the electric chair.

The beginning was already significant. Ethel called an unfortunate press conference in her apartment after Julius’s arrest. She tried to appear as a very ordinary housewife and welcomed the journalists with a kitchen cloth in her hands while preparing chicken for Michael and Robby’s dinner.

As she carved the chicken, she explained passionately that she did not understand how her husband could be involved in any illegal and anti-American activities. She convinced no one and it would have been much better if she had not exposed herself. Since then, the public has followed the Rosenbergs’ every move, and they have been more and more unfortunate by the moment.

Ruth and David also had to face the media, but they did much better. The younger couple presented themselves as victims who had been led astray by the experienced Rosenbergs. It was only in 2015 that it came to light that, although David had claimed in one of his first interrogations that his sister had nothing to do with the spying activities, she probably had no knowledge of them. In his old age, he also admitted that he had been induced to lie during the trial of Ethel and Julius by his wife Ruth and that he could not give up his wife for his sister.

Ruth, who already hated Ethel, described her sister-in-law as a domineering person whom the younger man blindly followed. Thus was born the myth of Ethel Rosenberg, the cunning spy who pulled from behind the scenes the most important strands of the spy network responsible for betraying the secret of the atomic bomb to the Soviets. Before Ethel was even arrested, she was already responsible for the atomic bomb that could fall on American soil at any moment.

Julius and Ethel had no way of knowing what Ruth and David had been up to, but the ever-optimistic Julius was confident that Ethel was safe and would not be implicated in any legal proceedings. The US authorities, however, had other plans and saw two solutions in arresting Ethel, namely a confession by Julius and a deterrent warning to anyone who might play with similar pro-Communist thoughts. They were all wrong.

Ethel Rosenberg was arrested on 11 August 1950. She called seven-year-old Michael and when she told him what had happened, there was a loud scream from the other side of the line.

At first, she was without legal help and answered all questions only by saying that she did not want to answer. This became the key difference between the Greenglasses’ and the Rosenbergs’ defences – while the former answered everything and more, Julius and Ethel insistently invoked the Fifth Amendment and the right to remain silent.

All they could accuse Ethel of was talking to her brother and her husband. And that is exactly how bizarre her indictment was, with bail set at an astronomical 100 000 dollars. She never saw freedom again.

The young mother, who at the time of her arrest was most interested in child care and psychiatry, became public enemy number one. She could not say goodbye to her sons. From then on, they were passed around like hot potatoes, but first they ended up with Tessie, who wanted them least of all. She disliked her grandchildren as much as her daughters, and complained constantly that they were disruptive and ill-mannered, while at the same time she made no bones about her own daughter in front of them.

Of course, she took her son’s side and blamed her for not doing anything for her beloved Davey: “Tell the FBI whatever you have to so you can save him. You and your husband are killing him and you are killing me.”

From the beginning, she held up quite well behind bars, was able to attend church services and sing. Word of her singing spread quickly and soon she was getting requests for this or that song. Despite the ban on noise in the evenings, she was encouraged to sing by the guards, as it soothed the women prisoners.

From vice to hell

It was a difficult time for the children, who did not see their mother for seven months. She preferred to suffer the agony of loneliness rather than allow herself to be seen in such vile circumstances. She wrote them loving letters constantly, but this was not enough to make the boys feel loved. In fact, all their relatives except Julius’s mother, Sophie Rosenberg, were afraid of them, fearing persecution or even social ostracism because of their association with Julius and Ethel. The older boy, Michael, in particular, was unhappy and repeatedly wished aloud that he had been run over by a car.

In April 1951, she was moved to the high-security Sing Sing prison, to the prison wing closest to the cell with the electric chair. She was the only female prisoner and her well-being deteriorated drastically in solitary confinement.

Then the preparations for the trial began. But unlike David Greenglass, who had the best legal assistance available because of his cooperation, the Rosenbergs had two dedicated and committed lawyers, but no experience for such a large-scale trial and no money for the research necessary to optimally prepare their defence.

They chose the tactic of invoking the Fifth Amendment, or the right to remain silent, inadvertently reinforcing the public and media perception that the Rosenbergs did indeed have a reason to conceal the truth.

Surprisingly and fatally, ten days before the trial was due to start, David and Ruth suddenly ‘remembered’ a new element of the story that could have been used to confirm Ethel’s guilt. They had witnessed her copying Julius’s secret notes on a typewriter that she was supposed to have had for that very purpose.

The fabrication, which had grown on Ruth’s sprout, was repeated by David in a flawless rehearsal at the trial which began on 6 March 1951. There was not a single Jew on the jury, even though one-third of all New Yorkers were of Jewish origin. Moreover, the prosecution had managed to manipulate the jury pool so that there was only one woman among them, and, most fatal of all, all the jurors were supporters of the death penalty.

The prosecution team, which largely orchestrated the trial in advance, included Roy Cohn, an ardent McCarthyist and one of the most twisted figures of the 20th century American political elite. As a very young lawyer, he had made a name for himself by participating in the Rosenberg trial.

Ethel and Julius were both charged with conspiracy to commit espionage for allegedly passing secret nuclear and military information to a foreign government. They were portrayed as agents of Stalin who stole a peaceful future from the Americans.

During the trial, the prosecution constantly mentioned that they were actually guilty of high treason, which was, of course, a worse crime than espionage. Even though the authorities knew exactly that the evidence against Ethel was virtually non-existent, they were prepared to portray her as the ringleader of the espionage pair. But no one could have imagined that she would end up in the electric chair.

The prosecution was impeccably prepared and, among other things, provided a list of more than a hundred witnesses ready to testify against the Rosenbergs. Among them were many of their acquaintances and youthful supporters of communism, and even the father of the atomic bomb himself, Dr Robert Oppenheimer. This was only a fraction of the intimidation tactics that underpinned the whole process.

Ethel’s appearance in court was, to put it mildly, a fiasco. On the face of it, she had always been a woman of little substance, and in chauvinistic times, when women were particularly scrutinised for their appearance, this did her a great disservice in front of a packed courtroom and the entire American public.

The media often made fun of her appearance too. In shapeless clothes, a plain shirt, a dark skirt, inappropriate shoes and hat, and above all with a deliberately expressionless face and pursed lips, Ethel appeared cold, insensitive and antipathetic.

What an irony for a woman whose inner sensual world has always been a whirlwind. But she was too proud to show her emotions, her vulnerability and her excitement outwardly: “They expect me to break down because I am a woman. /…/ They think I’ll break down without Julie. But I won’t.”

When David came up to the witness stand, the resemblance to his sister was obvious. But he had gone out of his way to look immaculately groomed and impressive. He smiled throughout and answered questions kindly and fully. He told what information he had passed on to Julius and the Soviet agents. One of them was about the complex lenses for the atomic bomb, which he said he was able to draw from memory four years after he had seen them.

The defence tried to show how unlikely such claims were, and that it was impossible for a junior technician without proper training to remember such complex information.

David’s wife Ruth also came out in the best possible light in court. Young and beautiful, in an elegant black dress, with a diamond necklace and a haircut according to the latest fashion, she made a great impression as she confidently explained how Ethel had typed Julius’ notes in her presence.

The always well-groomed Julius, while appearing very polished during his perfectly prepared performance, did not sound convincing by denying everything that had been said by other witnesses up to that point. The same was true of Ethel, who answered most questions by invoking her right to remain silent.

In his closing address, their lawyer tried to prove that the biggest moral pervert and liar of the whole affair was in fact Ethel’s brother David Greenglass: “Any man who testifies against his own family member and laughs knowing that he is sending his own blood to his death is disgusting.”

Epilog

Despite the initial hesitation of one juror, it did not take the jury long to reach a unanimous verdict of guilty for both defendants. Although they were not competent to determine the sentence, no one was surprised when a week later, on 5 April 1951, the judge sentenced the Rosenbergs to death in the electric chair.

He theatrically said: “Your crime is worse than murder. A criminal kills only one victim, but you have put into the hands of the enemy a secret that has already caused thousands of deaths and who knows how many millions of innocent people will suffer. They have changed the course of history and of the country to its detriment.”

Ethel, who knew that the whole world was staring at her, accepted the verdict stoically, without a twitch of her facial muscles. As she and Julius left the courtroom hand in hand, he asked her, “How are you?” “Fine. If it’s just you,” she replied to her husband’s question.

Julius began to sing and she joined him with her beautiful soprano voice. She sang Puccini’s famous aria from Madame Butterfly, in which she longs for her beloved husband.

But the execution was delayed until June 1953 because of numerous appeals and pleas for clemency. By this time, their case had become world famous and, particularly in Europe, there were numerous demonstrations and calls for clemency. Both left-wing and right-wing and apolitical celebrities took part in the campaign to save the Rosenbergs, including Pope Pius XI, Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso and the entire French intellectual establishment.

But in America it was different and the majority supported the execution. Even the famous human rights and women’s rights campaigner, opponent of the death penalty and influential ex-wife of Franklin Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, was under the spell of anti-communism. She publicly said that Ethel must die for her crimes.

All attempts to plead for clemency were thus in vain. Only a confession could have changed their fate, but the couple stubbornly maintained their innocence. President Eisenhower, who succeeded the Democrat Truman, admitted that he was pained by the woman’s execution and even toyed for a while with the idea of pardoning her alone, but in the end he upheld the conviction.

Julius thought to the last that he and his wife would be acquitted, while Ethel accepted the fact that she would end up in the electric chair sooner. All she could think about were her children and waking up in nightmares, haunted by their screams.

Michael learned of his parents’ death the same day and was unable to cry for six years. But at least for the two children, the story ended positively, as they were adopted by an elderly couple with no children, raised in a loving and progressive spirit, and supported in their efforts to preserve the memory of their parents.

Julius Rosenberg was undoubtedly a spy. This was proven by the results of a large-scale project called Venona, in which thousands of intercepted machine guns were deciphered by US intelligence services. Julius was mentioned under a secret name in many of them. But Ethel, who did not have a secret name, which is an important argument in favour of the thesis that she was not a spy, was mentioned only as his wife. She therefore paid with her life for being the spy’s wife, faithful to the last to their love.