No mercy for sons of executed Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

ARTIST Pablo Picasso was among hundreds of high-profile agitators who pleaded for the lives of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s sons, Michael, 10, and Robert, six, with an unnamed relative, were adopted by Abel Meeropol after their parents' execution in 1953.

ARTIST Pablo Picasso was among hundreds of high-profile agitators who pleaded for the lives of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

In 1952 he provided a lithograph of the couple, then on death row at New York’s Sing Sing prison, to help raise funds for their legal appeals.

Added to some copies of Picasso’s work are the words “por Michael & Bobby”, referring to the couple’s sons, then aged 10 and six.

The boys, who as grown men have dedicated years to trying to have their mother exonerated, recall being sent to a friend’s house to play baseball until dark on Friday, June 19, 1953. When they came home that evening, Michael asked family members if his parents’ lives had been spared. Given no direct answer, he accepted that his worst fears had been realised. Two days earlier the boys had delivered a letter to a White House security guard, asking US president Dwight D. Eisenhower for clemency for their parents.

Russian spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1950.

An undated picture of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Julius Rosenberg, who was arrested in June 1950, charged with conspiracy to commit espionage, was born in New York a century ago today, on May 12, 1918. His father was a Jewish migrant from tsarist Russia who settled on New York’s Lower East Side. At 18 he became a Marxist and was a Young Communist League USA leader while studying electrical engineering at City College of New York. His wife Ethel Greenglass was born on September 25, 1915, the daughter of a Belarusian Jewish migrant family in Manhattan.

A talented student and singer, she aspired to be an actor and singer but worked as a shipping company secretary. She became a union organiser in 1935 and joined political theatre group Lavanburg Players. She met Julius at a Young Communist League meeting in 1936. They married in 1939, with their first son Michael born in 1943 and Robert in 1947.

Julius worked for the US Army Army Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, from 1940 until 1945. During World War II, research on electronics, communications, radar and guided missile controls was conducted at Fort Monmouth.

Ethel Rosenberg and her brother David Greenglass in undated photo taken outside their childhood home, probably during World War II,.

Former KGB colonel Aleksandr Feklisov, based at the Soviet consulate in New York City from 1940 to 1946, in 2001 wrote that Rosenberg was recruited by Soviet secret police, the NKVD, on Labour Day 1942. In 1997 Feklisov told US journalists that although Julius gave away US military secrets, he did not provide any useful material about the atomic bomb. “He didn’t understand anything about the atomic bomb, and he couldn’t help us,’’ Feklisov said. “And still they killed them.’’

Feklisov later wrote that Julius provided thousands of classified reports from his next employer, Emerson Radio, and recruited sympathisers including engineer Morton Sobell and Ethel’s younger brother David Greenglass, then working on the top-secret Manhattan Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Although the USSR and the US were WWII allies, Americans did not share information or seek Soviet assistance for the Manhattan Project. In January 1950, the US discovered that Klaus Fuchs, a German refugee theoretical physicist working for the British Manhattan Project mission, had given key documents to Soviets throughout the war. Fuchs was arrested in Britain in February 1950, charged with passing atomic secrets to the Soviets, convicted and sentenced to 14 years in a British jail. Fuchs said his courier was Harry Gold, 39, who Fuchs met on wartime trips to Los Alamos. Gold was arrested in May 1950.

A handcuffed David Greenglass arrives at Federal Courthouse in New York City on July 31, 1950, to give evidence that convicted his sister and brother-in-law Ethel and Julius Rosenberg of spying. He has since admitted that he lied under oath to save himself.

Gold explained that at the time he passed secrets to the Soviets, he did not believe he was helping an enemy, but was assisting a US wartime ally against Germany. His arrest was part of a massive FBI investigation into Soviet espionage, particularly theft of atomic secrets, during McCarthy anti-Communist investigations.

Gold’s confession led to the arrest of David, who implicated his brother-in-law and sister, Julius and Ethel. Greenglass denied Ethel’s involvement in grand jury testimony in August 1950, but changed his testimony in February 1951, claiming Ethel typed his notes. In exchange for this testimony, David’s wife Ruth, named as a co-conspirator, was not arrested and allowed to stay with their two children. David later said he was encouraged to lie by prosecution lawyer Roy Cohn.

Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, in February 1953, the first American civilians to be executed in electric chair for selling atom bomb secrets to Soviets.

A jury of 11 men and a woman found the Rosenbergs guilty. On April 5, 1950, Judge Irving Kaufman sentenced Sobell to 30 years in prison (he served almost 18) and the Rosenbergs to the death penalty. David was sentenced to 15 years, and served 10. Gold was sentenced to 30 years and served almost 15. Despite repeated legal appeals and thousands of pleas for mercy, including petitions from Albert Einstein, Jean-Paul Sartre and Pope Pius XII, the Rosenbergs went to the electric chair on June 19, 1953 .

The couple left legal custody of sons Michael and Robert to their lawyer Manny Bloch, who had them adopted by communist party members Abel Meeropol, a teacher and songwriter who composed Billie Holiday song Strange Fruit (1937), and his wife Anne.