American spies Julius Rosenberg and his wife, Ethel, are executed at New York’s Sing Sing prison 70 years ago this hour #OnThisDay #OTD (Jun 19 1953)

1950s, Cold War


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(Friday, June 19, 1953) — Americans Julius Rosenberg, 35, and his wife, Ethel, 37, convicted of spying for the Soviet Union, were executed tonight at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York; Julius at 8:06 p.m. and Ethel at 8:16 p.m. EDT.

Julius died after the first electric shock.

Ethel’s execution did not go smoothly. After she was given the normal course of three electric shocks, attendants removed the strapping and other equipment only to have doctors determine that Ethel’s heart was still beating.

Two more electric shocks were applied, and at the conclusion, eyewitnesses reported that smoke rose from her head.


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The funeral services were held in Brooklyn on June 21, 1953. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were buried at Wellwood Cemetery, a Jewish cemetery in Pinelawn, New York. The Times reported that 500 people attended, while some 10,000 stood outside:

The Rosenbergs were accused of providing top-secret information about American radar, sonar, jet propulsion engines, and nuclear weapon designs; at that time the United States was the only country in the world with nuclear weapons.

Convicted of espionage in 1951, they were the first American civilians to be executed for such charges and the first to receive that penalty during peacetime.


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Other convicted co-conspirators were sentenced to prison, including Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass (who had made a plea agreement), Harry Gold, and Morton Sobell. Klaus Fuchs, a German scientist working in Los Alamos, was convicted in the United Kingdom.

For decades, many people, including the Rosenbergs’ sons (Michael and Robert Meeropol), maintained that Julius and Ethel were innocent of spying on their country and were victims of Cold War paranoia.

But when the U.S. government declassified information about them after the fall of the Soviet Union, the declassified information appeared to have included a trove of decoded Soviet cables (code-name: Venona), which detailed Julius’s role as a courier and recruiter for the Soviets, and information about Ethel’s role as an accessory who helped recruit her brother David into the spy ring and did clerical tasks such as typing up documents that Julius then passed to the Soviets.