Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

Julius Rosenberg (May 12, 1918 – June 19, 1953) and Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg (September 28, 1915 – June 19, 1953) were a married American couple and members of the Communist Party USA who were convicted in 1951 of conspiring to commit espionage by recruiting and facilitating the transmission of classified information on the Manhattan Project's atomic bomb to Soviet intelligence handlers during and after World War II. Their trial, which also implicated co-defendant Morton Sobell and relied on testimony from Ethel's brother David Greenglass—a machinist at Los Alamos who admitted sketching implosion lens designs for Julius to pass along—culminated in death sentences imposed by Judge Irving Kaufman, who deemed their actions responsible for accelerating Soviet nuclear capabilities and endangering American lives. Executed by electric chair at Sing Sing Prison on June 19, 1953—the first such peacetime penalty for U.S. civilians—the Rosenbergs maintained innocence amid global protests, yet declassified Venona Project decrypts of Soviet cables, released in the 1990s, explicitly identify Julius as a key KGB operative ("Liberal" or "Antenna") overseeing an espionage ring and affirm Ethel's awareness and minor supportive role, including typing Greenglass's notes, thereby validating the conspiracy conviction against revisionist denials often amplified in academia and media despite evidentiary shortcomings in trial testimony alone.