Ethel and Julius Rosenberg

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (1951)

Julius Rosenberg (born May 12, 1918 in New York , † June 19, 1953 in Ossining ) was an American electrical engineer, his wife Ethel Rosenberg (née Greenglass, born September 28, 1915 in New York; † June 19, 1953 in Ossining) worked as a commercial clerk. Their criminal case attracted worldwide attention in the early 1950s. As civilians, they were accused of armaments espionage for the Soviet Union . Later statements and released documents from the archives of the Soviet Union and the FBI indicate that the accusations of armaments espionage against Julius Rosenberg were justified, but that his activities could in no way contribute to the development of the Soviet atomic bomb.

Ethel Rosenberg was Julius' life partner and merely an ideologically loyal confidante. Her brother David Greenglass charged her with a false testimony in order to distract herself and his wife from tougher sentences for their own espionage activities for the Soviet atomic bomb project . Despite violent national and international protests, including of Pope Pius XII. , Jean-Paul Sartre , Albert Einstein , Pablo Picasso , Fritz Lang , Bertolt Brecht and Frida Kahlo , were both sentenced to death on April 5, 1951 and executed on the electric chair on June 19, 1953 in Sing Sing New York State Prison. It was only decades later that information and statements made by US officials at the time that indicated the violation of important rule of law principles in the legal proceedings were made public.

Life

Julius Rosenberg was born on May 12, 1918 to a Jewish family in New York with four siblings. He attended Hebrew High School; his father wanted him to become a rabbi . But his interest turned to electrical engineering ; therefore, after leaving school, he took up studies at City College and in 1939 passed the exams as an electrical engineer. While studying, he joined the Young Communist League , a communist youth group. It was here that he met Ethel Greenglass, a New Yorker three years his senior, in 1936, who also came from a Jewish family; The two married in 1939. In 1942 Julius Rosenberg became a full member of the Communist Party of the USA. In the same year he took up a job as a civil employee in the Army Signal Corps, which mainly worked in the field of radar technology . In 1945 he was fired because of his political activities and he opened a small machine repair workshop.

The Rosenbergs had two sons, Robert and Michael. After the execution of her parents were Anne and the New York couple Abel Meeropol adopted. For their protection, the children took the names of their adoptive parents.

Nuclear espionage

Neither Julius Rosenberg nor his wife were involved in the investigation of the US nuclear research project on the development of the atomic bomb. Only Ethel Rosenberg's brother David Greenglass was a machinist and sergeant in the US Army in July 1944 for a short period of two weeks at the Oak Ridge uranium enrichment plant before he was transferred to Los Alamos in August . Although his area of ​​responsibility belonged to the Manhattan Project for the development of the US atomic bomb , his access to relevant information about the research project itself was meaningless in terms of bomb development.

The unmasking of the information gathering pursued by Julius Rosenberg for the Soviet secret service took place with high probability in the period from summer 1949 to spring 1950 through statements made by Harry Gold (1910–1972) at the FBI . He had been suspected of collaborating with the NKVD since 1947. Two interrogations and house searches in 1947 and 1948 with him and the evaluation work of the cipher specialists in the VENONA project produced further suspicious material to put him under pressure. Initially, from October 1949, the investigations focused on the German-born nuclear physicist Klaus Fuchs , but also on other informants from Julius Rosenberg's network. As a result, the FBI then exposed David Greenglass . On July 7, 1950, Julius Rosenberg was arrested by the FBI on suspicion of espionage. In the documents opened in 1993 and viewed by the attorney Marshall Perlin from the 1950 and 1951 proceedings conducted by American courts, there is no evidence that Ethel Rosenberg was involved in her husband's conspiratorial work.

process

Sketch of the implosion bomb that David Greenglass gave to Julius Rosenberg

The trial of the Rosenbergs and Morton Sobell , who was also suspected of espionage, began on March 6, 1951. Irving Kaufman was the chairman, and Irving Saypol was the prosecutor. The Rosenbergs were represented by the lawyer Emanuel Hirsch Bloch. The New York prosecutor Roy Cohn , who led the indictment, allegedly led an unfair trial against Ethel Rosenberg out of a desire for recognition. Cohn admitted in 1986 that the government had "produced" the evidence against the Rosenbergs. David Greenglass played an important role for the US judiciary . As the main witness, he said that Ethel had typed up notes on US nuclear secrets in September 1945 at the Rosenbergs' apartment. He also testified that he gave Julius Rosenberg a sketch of a cross-section of an implosion atomic bomb (of the Nagasaki atomic bomb type, Fat Man ). He later denied any remorse for betraying his sister; he could not have suspected that the death penalty would be considered. Like the rest of the defendants - apart from the Rosenbergs - Greenglass received a prison sentence of several years.

The trial only opened after Julius Rosenberg refused to denounce the leaders of the US Communist Party , who were also in custody, as the price of his own release. The jury for the trial was put under considerable pressure.

The espionage allegation was intensified in the process to the effect that the Rosenbergs had made it possible for the Soviet Union to catch up with the USA in building the atomic bomb.

On April 5, 1951, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were sentenced to death under Section 2 of the Espionage Act of 1917, 50 US Code 32 (now 18 US Code 794). The Espionage Act prohibits the disclosure or attempt to disseminate information essential to national defense to foreign governments. Persistent protest movements because of the death sentences pronounced by the court and appeals filed did not lead to a revision of the verdict. A pardon was rejected by President Eisenhower shortly before the execution.

execution

Julius Rosenberg was executed on the electric chair on June 19, 1953. When Ethel Rosenberg was executed a few minutes later, further electric shocks were used when, after three electric shocks, the heart was still working.

controversy

Whether Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were guilty is still controversial today. They were the only U.S. civilians charged with espionage during the Cold War . They are also the only people in peacetime in the US to be executed for espionage. Her case has since been the focus of a controversial discussion about communism in the United States. Especially among leftists , he is seen as an outstanding example of the anti-communist hysteria of the McCarthy years , which the court was infected by, or of a downright government conspiracy . The German historian Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk takes the view that it was a question of politically motivated judicial murders . The fact that the Rosenbergs were Jews played a role in this. According to the Italian historian Enzo Traverso , American Jews in particular were “suspected of sympathy, if not complicity, with communism” because: “During the Cold War, the USSR was declared a totalitarian enemy against whom all the energies of the ' free world ' were deployed had to be. Therefore, there was a risk that the memory of the extermination of the Jews and the crimes of the Nazis would disorient public opinion. ”During the trial, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg drew attention to Auschwitz .

In the GDR , two days before the execution, there had been a popular uprising on June 17 , which the communist state party SED declared an attempted coup shortly afterwards. Professors Ernst Engelberg , Hans Mayer and Wilhelm Eildermann supported the party's assessment by publicly claiming that "the same fascist circles that first executed Ethel and Julius Rosenberg have now organized the counter-revolution in the GDR". What was meant were the “fascizing Adenauer and Eisenhower states ”.

Most historians today believe, however, that Julius Rosenberg was guilty. The American historian John Earl Haynes is convinced that the Venona papers, which have been known since 1995, clearly identify him as the head of the Soviet spy ring. That he participated in the transfer of military information to the Soviet intelligence GRU was involved, says the statement of the former case officer in the NKVD , Alexander Feklisow , after the end of the Cold War. Ethel Rosenberg, on the other hand, was largely exonerated by Feklisow that she could have proven her innocence, but remained faithful and was therefore probably innocently executed. It later emerged that the notes allegedly typed by Ethel contained little useful for the Soviet atomic bomb project , but contained other military secrets.

In a February 28, 1945 report by the NKVD to Lavrenti Beria , Ethel's brother David Greenglass was named as a key spy for the Soviet atomic bomb.

Later, the then gave Attorney General , William P. Rogers to that the death sentence against Ethel as a bluff should be used to bring Julius to reveal the names of other spies, and that Ethel would prove their innocence can; in particular, it was hoped that their "maternal instincts" would break their ideological allegiance. Since both exercised their right, enshrined in the 5th Amendment to the United States Constitution, not to incriminate themselves, this strategy did not work. According to John Earl Haynes, Ethel Rosenberg's complicity can be proven, but she was guilty to a far lesser extent than her brother and her husband: if the Venona papers had been present at the trial, she would have been sentenced, but certainly not to death.

Decades later, thanks to the efforts of attorney Marshall Perlin , chairman of the Rosenberg Committee, a large part of the case files became accessible. At the same time he tried to initiate a lawsuit to obtain the acquittal of the Rosenbergs. The presiding judge stated in 1993 that there was no real evidence at the time that the Rosenbergs were involved.

Morton Sobell, who was co-defendant in 1951, stated in an interview with the New York Times on September 11, 2008 that Julius Rosenberg had worked as a spy who, along with other data on armaments projects, had also passed on details about the atomic bomb. The atomic bomb data passed on by Rosenberg were essentially only used to confirm the data of other atomic spies . Ethel Rosenberg knew about it, but did not take an active part. It is believed that Ethel Rosenberg was only one of the indictments to persuade her husband to tell the authorities other names of spies.

In 2008, an interview that had been kept under lock and key was published in which Richard Nixon , then Vice President under Eisenhower , admitted "that considerable errors were made in the process" and "incriminating material was manipulated".

The transfer of important information about the construction of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union was rather carried out by Theodore Alvin Hall , a scientist and double agent in Los Alamos, as he himself admitted in 1995. He was never exposed and never charged.

In 2015, the Rosenbergs' sons, Robert and Michael Meeropol, called on the US government to officially rehabilitate their mother, Ethel Rosenberg. In January 2017, they again appealed to US President Barack Obama to recognize, before his end of office, that the death sentence against Ethel Rosenberg had been unlawful. This petition was supported by 50,000 signatories. Corresponding actions on the part of the Obama administration did not take place.

effect

The Rosenberg Trial was the subject of three major American novels of the 1960s and 1970s:

Film, music and television:

Cuba honored the Rosenbergs on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of their execution with a postage stamp issued in 1978 (Mi-No. 2362). In the GDR, streets in various places were named after Ethel and in some cases also after Julius Rosenberg. Most of these street dedications are still in place.

literature

  • Emily A. Alman, David Alman: Exoneration: The Trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Morton Sobell - Prosecutorial deceptions, suborned perjuries, anti-Semitism, and precedent for today's unconstitutional trials . Greenelms, Seattle 2010, ISBN 978-0-9779058-3-6 .
  • Sina Arnold / Olaf Kistenmacher : The Ethel and Julius Rosenberg case. Anti-communism, anti-Semitism and sexism in the USA at the beginning of the Cold War, Münster 2016, ISBN 978-3-96042-009-5 .
  • Sina Arnold, Olaf Kistenmacher: The usual suspects. The Ethel and Julius Rosenberg case. In: Jungle World 28, July 11, 2013. (online at: jungle-world.com )
  • Robert Coover: The Public Incineration . Luchterhand, Darmstadt 1983, ISBN 3-472-86460-5 . (Novel about the story of the Rosenbergs and the trial).
  • Franz Loeser : murder on orders . Why did the Rosenbergs have to die? (nl concrete, Volume 24; Interesting facts for young people). New Life Publishing House , Berlin (GDR) 1976, DNB 760296758 .
  • Robert Meeropol: When the government decided to kill my parents. The Rosenberg case - a son tells. Zambon-Verlag , Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-88975-152-2 .
  • Ethel and Julius Rosenberg: Letters from the House of the Dead . (Original title: Letters from the Deadhouse . From the American by Lore Krüger). Aufbau-Verlag , Berlin (GDR) 1954, DNB 454195117 .
  • Stefana Sabin : speaking of Ethel Rosenberg. New Critique Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main 1996, ISBN 3-8015-0295-3 .
  • Maximilian Scheer : Ethel and Julius . Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin (GDR) 1954, DNB 454319398 .
  • Walter Schneir: Final Verdict. What Really Happened in the Rosenberg Case . Melville Publishing, New York 2010, ISBN 978-1-935554-16-5 .
  • Momme Schwarz: Rosenberg trial. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 5: Pr-Sy. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2014, ISBN 978-3-476-02505-0 , pp. 254-258.

Web links

Commons : Rosenberg process  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Alessandra Stanley: KGB Agent Plays Down Atomic Role Of Rosenbergs. In: The New York Times . March 16, 1997, accessed on June 24, 2008 : “A retired KGB colonel has for the first time disclosed his role as the human conduit between Moscow and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg… Aleksandr Feklisov, 83, said… while Julius Rosenberg did give away military secrets, he had not provided the Soviet Union with any useful material about the atomic bomb. "
  2. ↑ a b c d Sam Roberts: Spies and Secrecy. In: The New York Times . June 26, 2008, Retrieved June 27, 2008 : “No, he replied, the goal wasn't to kill the couple. The strategy was to use the death sentence imposed on Ethel to wring a full confession from Julius - in hopes that Ethel's motherly instincts would trump unconditional loyalty to a noble but discredited cause. What went wrong? Rogers's explanation still haunts me. 'She called our bluff' he said. "
  3. ^ A b c Sam Roberts: The Brother: the untold story of the Rosenberg Case . Random House, 2003, ISBN 0-375-76124-1 , pp. 403-407 (Quotation: On February 28, 1945, the NKVD submitted to Lavrenti Beria a comprehensive report on nuclear weaponry, including implosion research, based chiefly on intelligence from Hall and Greenglass).
  4. ↑ a b Oliver Matz: Death to condemned. April 2, 2011, accessed May 15, 2018 .
  5. ^ John Philip Jenkins: Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Rosenberg (American spies) - Britannica Online Encyclopedia. Britannica.com , accessed September 4, 2011 .
  6. ^ Milestones, Feb. 8, 1954. In: Time . February 8, 1954, accessed June 21, 2008 .
  7. ^ Alan Dershowitz: America On Trial. Warner Books (2004), p. 323.
  8. ^ Ron Christenson: Political Trials in History: From Antiquity to the Present. ISBN 0-88738-406-4 , p. 396. Preview in Google Book Search (English), accessed on March 5, 2011.
  9. ↑ Klaus Steiniger : CIA, FBI & Co. The cartel of the US secret services. Das Neue Berlin, 2008, ISBN 978-3-360-01941-7 .
  10. ↑ Willi Winkler In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. September 27, 2008, weekend, p. VI.
  11. ↑ The Rosenbergs: Exhausted Law , Der Spiegel 27/1953
  12. ↑ Sina Arnold / Olaf Kistenmacher: The case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Anti-Communism, Anti-Semitism, and Sexism in the US at the Beginning of the Cold War . Edition Assemblage, Münster 2016, ISBN 978-3-96042-009-5 , pp. 31 .
  13. ↑ a b c John Braemann: Atomic Secrets . In: Peter Knight (Ed.): Conspiracy Theories in American History. To Encyclopedia . Volume 2, ABC Clio, Santa Barbara / Denver / London 2003, p. 99.
  14. ↑ Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk: June 17, 1953 . CH Beck, 2013, ISBN 978-3-406-64540-2 , pp. 66 ( google.de [accessed December 2, 2018]).
  15. ↑ Indir. Quote with evidence from Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk : Legitimation of a new state. Party workers on the historical front. History in the Soviet Zone / GDR 1945 to 1961 . Links, Berlin 1997, ISBN 978-3-86153-130-2 , p. 225.
  16. ↑ John Earl Haynes: Venona. Decoding Soviet Espionage in America . Yale University Press, New Haven 2008, ISBN 978-0-300-12987-8 , pp. 11, 15, etc. (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  17. ↑ John Earl Haynes: Venona. Decoding Soviet Espionage in America . Yale University Press, New Haven 2008, ISBN 978-0-300-12987-8 , p. 16. (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  18. ^ Marshall Perlin. Retrieved May 30, 2019 .
  19. ↑ WOLFGANG SAXON: Marshall Perlin, Lawyer in Rosenberg Spy Case, Dies at 79 January 4th 1999, accessed on May 30, 2019 .
  20. ↑ Alexander Feklisov, Sergei Kostin: The Man Behind the Rosenbergs , Ed .: Ronald Radosh, Enigma Books, 2004, ISBN 1929631081 .
  21. ↑ Sam Roberts: Figure in Rosenberg Case Admits to Soviet Spying. In: The New York Times.
  22. ^ Johanna Lutteroth: US nuclear espionage drama. Together in death in one day on Spiegel Online from June 18, 2013
  23. ↑ The Meeropol Brothers: Exonerate Our Mother, Ethel Rosenberg New York Times, August 10, 2015
  24. ↑ Konrad Ege: "Robby, you are not coming home anymore" . In: New Germany . January 16, 2017, ISSN  0323-3375 , p. 8 .
  25. ↑ Exiting Obama does not act on request to exonerate Ethel Rosenberg. In: The Boston Globe , January 20, 2017