SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t read my novel Come Down Somewhere, please do not read this week’s “History Friday” post as it contains potential spoilers about the content of the story.

In a subtle hint of things to come, Jo, one of the main characters in Come Down Somewhere, picks up a newspaper in a local diner and glances over the day’s headlines:

“Most of it was about the war in Korea, reminding people of the importance of a United States victory–even though it had been locked in a stalemate for months–in order to stem the threat of Communist spread. A smaller blurb underneath told of a protest in New York City, demanding clemency for the convicted Soviet spies, the Rosenbergs. It was inconsequential, the article said; their execution would likely proceed next June. Americans had little sympathy for ‘Reds.'” (page 249)

This, of course, was a clue to the Soviet espionage that would be revealed later in the book, but it also reflected a real news story from March 1952. The Rosenbergs were real people convicted of spying in the early 1950’s. And they really were executed, despite occasional protests about their sentence.

So….who were the Rosenbergs?

Julius Rosenberg was the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia. Although he and his family struggled during the Great Depression, he still managed to graduate with a degree in electrical engineering from City College New York. In addition to his studies, however, Julius also found a sense of purpose in the growing Communist movement. In 1936, while attending a meeting of the Young Communists League, he met a woman by the name of Ethel Greenglass, and the two were wed in 1939.

Rosenberg joined the Army Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, in 1940, where he worked as an engineer-inspector. According to documents released by his former handler Alexander Feklisov, Rosenberg was originally recruited to spy for the interior ministry of the Soviet Union, NKVD, on Labor Day 1942 by former spymaster Semyon Semyonov, whom he had met through a high-ranking member of the Communist Party USA.

In addition to supplying thousands of classified reports from his own job, Rosenberg also recruited sympathetic individuals into NKVD service, including a man named William Perl, who provided Feklisov, Rosenberg’s handler, thousands of documents from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, including a complete set of design and production drawings for Lockheed’s P-80 Shooting Star, the first U.S. operational jet fighter. Rosenberg also managed to recruit his brother-in-law, David Greenglass, who was working on the top-secret Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. Greenglass began passing atomic secrets via courier Harry Gold directly to Soviet officials. Rosenburg also managed to recruit a second atomic spy, engineer Russell McNutt, who worked on designs for the plants at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

Although the U.S. long suspected Soviet espionage, it wasn’t until January 1950 that their speculation found solid footing. It was then that they discovered Klaus Fuchs, a German refugee theoretical physicist working for the British mission in the Manhattan Project, had given key documents to the Soviets throughout the war. Fuchs identified his courier as American Harry Gold, who was arrested on May 23, 1950. Gold soon gave up Greenglass, who was arrested on June 15, 1950, who, in turn, gave up Rosenberg. Initially, it was only Julius who was arrested. However, during testimony before a grand jury, Greenglass admitted he had passed information to Julius inside their New York City apartment and Ethel, at Julius’s request, had read over Greenglass’s notes and typed them up. Ethel, for her part, invoked the Fifth Amendment during his testimony and refused to answer any of the grand jury’s questions. She was arrested as she left the courthouse.

The Rosenbergs’ trial began on March 6, 1951, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The prosecution’s primary witness, David Greenglass–Ethel’s own brother–claimed he turned over to Julius Rosenberg a sketch of the cross-section of an implosion-type atom bomb identical to the “Fat Man” bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. Other testimony convinced both judge and jury that Rosenberg was the “king pin” of a large espionage ring and that his wife was a knowing and willing accomplice. On March 29, 1951, both Rosenbergs were convicted and seventy-three years ago today, on April 5, 1951, they were both sentenced to death under Section 2 of the Espionage Act of 1917.

Not everyone, however, was convinced of their guilt.

Some Americans believed the pair to be innocent, the victim of a “witch hunt” or even antisemitism, while others maintained their punishment, particularly Ethel’s, too harsh. A campaign was started to try to prevent the couple’s execution. Tellingly, though, the Rosenbergs did not receive support from mainstream Jewish organizations nor did the American Civil Liberties Union acknowledge any violations of civil liberties in the case. In a time of rapid, rampant fear, support for anything “Red” was dangerous.

On June 19, 1953, both Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed at Sing Sing Prison in New York, becoming the first American civilians to be executed for such charges and the first to receive that penalty during peacetime.

Debate still rages about the severity of their crimes and if death was an appropriate punishment. Their former handler, Alexander Feklisov, maintained that Rosenbergs did not provide the Soviet Union with any useful material about the atomic bomb, especially the notes supposedly typed by Ethel. On the other hand, in 1995, the U.S. government made public many documents decoded by the Venona project, which was a counterintelligence program used by the United States to decrypt messages transmitted by the intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union. Included in the documents was a 1944 cable that clearly stated that David Greenglass was being recruited as a spy by his sister (that is, Ethel Rosenberg) and her husband. Another cable revealed that both Ethel and Julius had regular contact with at least two KGB agents.

Their children, among others, still continue to maintain their innocence, however.