Rosenberg, Julius

Rosenberg, Julius (1918–53) spy. Rosenberg was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family on New York's Lower East Side. At City College, he studied electrical engineering and was active in leftwing activities. In 1945 Julius was removed from his position with the Army Signal Corps on grounds that he was a Communist, which he denied. He opened his own machine shop in partnership with his wife Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, who during World War II had worked on the atomic bomb at the Los Alamos, New Mexico, laboratory. In 1950, the Rosenbergs were arrested and charged with spying for the Soviet Union; the government alleged that they had passed secrets on the design of the atomic bomb to a confederate who then passed them on to the Soviets. The Rosenbergs denied the charges but were convicted on April 5, 1951, and sentenced to death. Efforts across the world to have the sentences commuted failed, given the raging anti-Communism that prevailed and the less open anti-Semitism, and the two were executed on June 19, 1953. In the decades since, information released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and by the Russian government have tended to confirm Julius's guilt, although there is less certainty about Ethel's; the Rosenbergs' sons have challenged the authenticity of these documents.