AN ATOMIC TRIAL

The other day, while surfing the Net, I read an article about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s trial and this is what I want to tell you about in my post.

For those who don’t know who the Rosenbergs were, they were potential Soviet spies during the Cold War.

I decided to write an article about them because nowadays many people are still wondering whether their sentence was fair and correct. In fact, they are the only spies executed during the Cold War.

 

Their story begins 70 years ago, in 1951, when they first sat in front of the judge waiting for their trial to commence. They were accused of spying on the American soil on behalf of the Soviet Union to get secret information concerning the atomic bomb.

The majority of the death penalties were executed in Sing Sang prison with the electric chair, nicknamed “Old Sparky”. In 1953 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg sat on “Old Sparky” and died. Julius died immediately while Ethel didn’t.

 

Before getting arrested, Julius used to work as an engineer for the US army and Ethel as a secretary in a shipment society. The two met at a meeting of the Young Communist party.

The first being arrested was Julius with accuse of passing top secrets information to the Soviets. Ethel was arrested two months later. They were accused by Ethel’s younger brother Greenglass, who worked in the secret atomic bomb lab in New Mexico.

Ironically, Greenglass himself had confessed to provide “atomic” secrets to the Soviets through a mediator. Then he testified against his sister in court. He later served 10 years in prison.

 

In their trial there was also another defendant, Morton Sobell who attended the same school as Julius. The accuse was the same: passing secret information on how to build the atomic bomb, which Americans had already developed years before with the Manhattan project.

Even though US and the Soviet Union were allied during the Second World War, the Americans didn’t share any secret regarding the Manhattan project with the Soviets. So, when the Soviets announced they had developed the atomic bomb, in the American government there was big agitation because of the results their new “enemy” was getting. Many people started to believe that there were spies in the American soil that had passed that information. FBI began to investigate.

The first of the three being arrested was Greenglass who then mentioned Julius’ and Ethel’s names.

 

At the beginning of their trail the judge said: “Evidence will prove that the defendants’ loyalty and alley wasn’t for this country, but for communism. Their love for communism led them in a vast spy ring for the Soviets.”

Those were the years when the American anti-communism was so aggressive that people started to think that the trial was just a farce to satisfy public opinion.

However, many famous people sided with the Rosenbergs, including the Pope himself.

 

But were they actually guilty? Julius Rosenberg was almost certainly guilty.

He was an enthusiastic exponent of the communist party. Soviets had approached him in 1942, probably recruiting him as their spy.

But if his accuses were founded, Ethel’s weren’t. Hers were based on her brother’s testimony. During the trial he told about an episode in which Ethel was involved. Greenglass told one day he had gone at the Rosenbergs’ house and found Ethel writing down the information said by her husband. This was enough to demonstrate her complicity.

 

During the trial, both Julius and Ethel always took advantage of their right to remain silent.

Years later Greenglass would withdraw his testimony admitting that actually he didn’t remember properly who was writing the information, it could have been his wife Ruth.

Going on, many influential people believed that Ethel Rosenberg wasn’t really involved and Greenglass’s testimony had just been a distractor to divert suspects on his wife.

 

In 2015 Greenglass’ statement of a private testimony he did before Ethel had been arrested was unsealed. Those 47 pages of verbal shows that Greenglass never mentioned his sister’s name, contrary to what he said during the trial.

Maria, 3scB