Ethel Rosenberg was convicted of espionage and executed in 1953. But did she really deserve to die? 

ABC Radio National / 

By Sarah Scopelianos and Julie Street for Late Night Live

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When Julius and Ethel Rosenberg chose to stay silent and not implicate their friends as Soviet spies to US authorities, their fates were sealed.

Both were sent to the electric chair in 1953.

But in the decades since their executions for conspiracy to commit espionage, evidence about the pair and those around them calls into question the extent of their involvement in sharing state secrets.

They were undoubtedly communists and Julius, an engineer with a KGB codename, did pass on information to the Russians about certain US weapons.

However there is no evidence that he had passed on information about the atomic bomb. And his wife was an impoverished New York housewife dedicated to her two young sons rather than a criminal mastermind.

Historian Anne Sebba said Ethel’s story has always been intertwined with her husband’s actions, and she paid the ultimate price for remaining loyal.

“She was not in direct touch with the KGB. She didn’t have a KGB codename. Was she electrocuted for being a supportive wife?” Sebba suggested on ABC RN’s Late Night Live.

Sebba, who trawled through Ethel’s letters from jail and spoke to her sons and others for the book Ethel Rosenberg: A Cold War Tragedy, believes being a few years older than her husband typecast Ethel as the leader of the pair.

And with access to once top-secret documents, the author has discovered how a brother’s lie, the FBI’s thirst for knowledge and traditional ideas about what makes a good wife led to Ethel’s conviction.

Drawn to communism in a time of crisis

Born into a family of Jewish immigrants in New York City in 1915, Ethel Greenglass left school at 15 to work as a secretary for the National New York Packing and Shipping Company.

Sebba said she was probably “radicalised” at work and joined the Communist Party as the world descended into turmoil.

“Communism … [is] a discredited mirage of philosophy nowadays but in 1936, communism, apart from being an idealistic way [for] people like Ethel [to improve] the lot of the poor,  [it] was also the only way to beat the Fascists and the Nazis, who were really flexing their muscles in that year,” Sebba said.

That same year, she also met her future husband at a New Year’s Eve concert fundraiser. Julius was politically active in the Young Communist League, would become an electrical engineer and landed a job with the Army Signal Corps in 1940.

It was an “uncomfortable time” to be communist at that time.

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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-07/why-was-ethel-rosenberg-sent-to-the-electric-chair/100299972