This Week in History: The Rosenberg espionage trial
On March 6, 1953, at the height of the Cold War, two American Jews accused of passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union were put on trial in New York. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, later sentenced to death, would become one of the most famous cases of Cold War spying in the United States. They became a cause célèbre for people around the world who believed them to be innocent, or at least the victims of injustice. Julius Rosenberg was the son of Polish immigrants to New York. A member of the Young Communist League in the United States, he had been fired from his job as a civilian inspector from the US Army Signal Corps during the Red Scare, in which Communists and Communist sympathizers were sought out and purged from a wide range of industries and government positions.