Background of the Rosenbergs
Julius Rosenberg was born in New York, New York in 1918, just before the end of World War I. He graduated from the City College in New York with a degree in electrical engineering in 1939. After joining the Young Communist League, he met Ethel Greenglass: his future wife. Ethel was born in in 1915 to a Jewish family in Manhattan, New York City. Her father was a Russian immigrant, which influenced her interest in a leftist ideology and subsequently resulted in her joining communist groups associated with the Soviet Union. Julius Rosenberg was fired from the US Army after they found out he was originally a member of a Communist Party. By 1942, Julius began to provide nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. After becoming involved in acts of espionage for the Soviet Union, Rosenberg left the Communist Party in an attempt to protect himself from suspicion. He worked with his brother-in-law, David Greenglass, who worked at the secret atomic bomb lab in New Mexico. Greenglass would provide Ethel and Julius with information regarding atomic tests performed at Los Alamos. Ethel's brother also gave them access to classified documents and a model of a proximity fuze (used in the atomic bomb) to give to the Soviet Union. Julius Rosenberg would then sell this information to his Soviet handler, Alexander Feklisov. After the American government discovered what they were doing, he and his wife were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage.