The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Rosenberg Case Six Months After Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed shortly after 8 p. m. last June 19. They were two rather ordinary persons who had...
...They were two rather ordinary persons who had committed treason against their country...
...During the final desperate effort to win a reduction of the sentence, the defense sought sympathetic statements from all twelve of the jurors??and got nothing from any of them...
...This is a picture of the difference between justice in a democracy and oppression in a dictatorship...
...Court of Appeals...
...S. Andhil Fineberg, and running to 159 pages, it gives a detailed and careful account of the Rosenberg trial and of the propaganda campaign which the Communists and their supporters waged in connection with it...
...These two people, facing death, practically gave no testimony...
...Fineberg were writing now, he might well cite the case of Lavrenti Beria...
...The Rosenbergs had many days in court...
...It was just before this purge that Communists, fellow-travelers and sympathetic altruists all over Europe and much of Asia began to weep for the Rosenbergs...
...About as clearly as anything that has happened, this series of events shows the cleverness, the dishonesty and the general low-downness of the Communist "movement...
...The Rosenbergs went to their death to protect their fellow criminals and their party...
...If Dr...
...Their crime was proved...
...Six months after their execution appears a book entitled The Rosenberg Case—Fact and Fiction (Oceana Publications, $2.50...
...The case is finished...
...There is no such problem...
...This case gives us a look into the heart of Communism...
...He was tried, sentenced and executed —and only then was the public informed what had happened...
...At this late date, there is no need to discuss the problem of guilt...
...It is a ghoulish business...
...But there was not a single word of direct evidence in their favor...
...If they are martyrs, they are martyrs to Communism...
...A rapid digest of the defendants' testimony, displayed side by side with the evidence against them, brings back a conviction strongly impressed upon me during the trial...
...What good purpose can this volume serve...
...The reason is an important one...
...Their sentence was appraised seven times before the U.S...
...Written by a member of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, Dr...
...The Supreme Court considered it seven times...
...I attended the trial...
...Now suppose that they had been innocent...
...Two appeals were made to the President...
...Obviously, they feared the couple might confess and involve the party...
...They stonily denied statements made by Government witnesses, but that was all...
...Fineberg shows the difference between democratic justice and Communist terror...
...Eleven of the fourteen were Jews...
...They could have introduced witnesses to prove that at any particular time they were not running Moscow's errands...
...If they were murdered, it was by their "comrades...
...Why can we not be allowed to forget them...
...Through a dramatic example, Dr...
...Their sentence was carried out...
...On June 17, 1953, two days before the execution of the Rosenbergs, he was arrested for a "crime against the state...
...that they were, in fact, not the sort of people who do that sort of thing...
...Willi Goettling was a house-painter in East Germany...
...He was executed within 24 hours...
...There was not merely the testimony of one or more persons against the defendants...
...It shows what sort of people Communists are and how they operate...
...On November 20, 1952 began the trial of Rudolf Slansky and thirteen other defendants in Prague...
...Even two years after the arrest, there was little excitement about the case in Europe...
...I listened, just as the jury did, to the evidence...
...The Communists didn't say much about the Rosenbergs until the sentence had been pronounced...
...And then something happened...
...The men and women who heard every word of the testimony and looked every witness in the eye were convinced that the verdict was just and that the sentence was not excessive...
...Now their dead bodies are used to distract attention from new crimes...
...There was the laying bare of a whole structure of treason which touched the pair in various ways and caught them so tight that escape was impossible...
...I saw revealed the web of espionage beginning with Igor Gouzenko in Canada, crossing the Atlantic to Allan May and Klaus Fuchs, returning to this country and Harry Gold and David Greenglass, and, finally, enfolding Julius and Ethel Rosenberg...
...Within a few days, the trial was over and eleven of the accused were hanged...
...Committees over a good part of the world are still collecting money by weeping over their graves...
...His arrest was not announced until after his execution...
...It was a cover-up, a blind, a diversion...
...Imagine how many witnesses and how many sorts of testimony they could have produced in their favor...
...They had friends, who knew how they thought, what they did, how they spent their time...
...The Rosenbergs had a trial which ran for 23 days before a jury...
Vol. 37 • January 1954 • No. 2
