Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

Married in 1939, New York City residents Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were devoted communists who allegedly headed a spy ring that passed military secrets to the Soviets. The scheme got underway sometime after 1940, when Julius became a civilian engineer with the U.S. Army Signal Corps. He was dismissed in 1945 once the military learned of his communist sympathies, but not before recruiting Ethel’s brother, an Army machinist working on the Manhattan Project, to turn over handwritten notes and sketches pertaining to the atomic bomb. Meanwhile, other Rosenberg recruits purportedly delivered thousands of pages of documents detailing new radar and aircraft technologies. At trial following their 1950 arrest, Ethel’s brother testified against them, and a judge sentenced them to death, declaring their crime “worse than murder.” President Dwight D. Eisenhower then sealed their fate by denying a petition for executive clemency. The two were sent to the electric chair at New York State’s Sing Sing prison on June 19, 1953, marking the first time American civilians had ever been executed for espionage. Although worldwide protests erupted over the Rosenbergs’ treatment, with many people feeling they had fallen victim to McCarthy-era red baiting, the post-Soviet release of decrypted KGB messages proved that Julius had in fact been a spy. The evidence against Ethel is less ironclad, and her guilt remains in dispute.