Noel Field
Encyclopedia
Noel Field was an American citizen. While employed at the United States Department of State
in the 1930s, he was a Soviet spy. In postwar Eastern Europe, he served as the pretext for show trial
s in Czechoslovakia
, East Germany and Hungary
, which in their turn were used as a pretext to remove indigenous Communist Party
members in favour of Moscow
-based agents who had returned to their native lands behind the Red Army
.
-born zoologist Herbert Haviland Field, who directed an international scientific bibliographical institute in Zurich
, and his English wife. After Herbert Field's death, his wife took Noel Field, his brother Hermann, and two sisters to the US where the boys later attended Harvard University
.
and Hede Massing
in 1933; they had arrived in the US from Moscow
, with the aim of building a network of Soviet agents among influential left-wing personalities.
In 1935 Hede Massing, who was a NKVD
operative, tried to sign Field up for the NKVD, but learned that Alger Hiss
, one of his State Department colleagues, was also trying to recruit him. Field finally decided to work for the NKVD, but in 1936 he accepted a post with the League of Nations
and moved to Geneva
. Massing set Field up with Ignatz Reiss (Ignace Reiss) and Walter Krivitsky
, who were in charge of Soviet intelligence in Switzerland.
Field was deeply moved by the Spanish Civil War
, and became involved in efforts to aid victims and opponents of fascism
. As a League of Nations representative in Spain from 1938–1939, Field helped to repatriate foreign participants from the Republican
side. During the Civil War, the Fields had become friendly with a German medical doctor named Glaser who worked in a hospital attached to the International Brigade. When the Brigade retreated during the final collapse of the Loyalist forces, his daughter, Erica, became ill and was separated from her parents. Noel and Herta Field found her in a receiving camp on the French-Spanish border and brought her with them to Switzerland, where they treated her as their own child. They intended to reunite her with her parents who had fled to England
, but the outbreak of World War II
in September 1939 made that difficult, and Erica became a permanent member of the Field home, in effect their foster daughter
.
's relief mission in Marseilles with his wife Herta in 1941, providing relief for endangered Jewish refugees
including antifascists and leftists, and helped many to flee to Switzerland
. Field began a major collaboration with the Œuvre de secours aux enfants
(Jewish Children’s Aid Society, OSE) and the Marseille director, Joseph Weill. The two organizations subsequently shared the same quarters in Marseille and Noel Field, with help from Herta, set up kindergartens in the Camp de Rivesaltes
. The Fields worked with a number of French Jewish women and collaborated with OSE to openly liberate Jewish children from French internment camps or to smuggle them out, if the camp director would not cooperate. Also beginning in early 1941, Noel Field established an extensive medical program to provide aid to Jewish refugees in hiding, those waiting to emigrate or those held in internment camps. Drawing from medical expertise of some of the Jewish refugees, Field was able to develop a team of about 20 medical doctors, dentists, and nurses, some with international reputations. With his contacts in Switzerland, Noel Field managed to obtain medicines and nutritional supplements that were extraordinary for that time. With the American Friends Service Committee
, and his lead doctor, Rene Zimmer, Field was able to implement a nutritional survey of many of the thousands of refugees interred in French camps, and provide additional food for those in greatest need.
During this period, Noel Field worked effectively with the Nîmes Committee, a network of about 30 relief organizations in Vichy France, and maintained congenial ties with Varian Fry
and other relief workers who viewed Field to be a dedicated humanitarian who seemed to be working himself into exhaustion and nervous collapse. Field developed a roster of several hundred refugees whose emigration he attempted to realize. Unlike some members of the Unitarian Service Committee and Varian Fry
, Field did not face hostility from staff at the US Embassy in Marseille for his activities, possibly because he sent many of his refugee clients in the direction of Switzerland, rather than the United States. In 1942 Robert Dexter
, director of the Unitarian Service Committee, recruited Noel Field to pass on information to the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS). When the Germans occupied the rest of France in November 1942, the Fields made a last minute escape from Marseille and re-established a refugee program in Geneva. In 1944, Noel Field made a dramatic return to southern France, traveling with the Maquis
and with the approval of Allen Dulles before the area was fully liberated. He arranged for a colleague, Herta Tempi, to establish a small office in Paris as a relief project for the Unitarian Service Committee.
In his relief activities, Field came into contact with a number of communist and antifascist refugees and exiles from Germany and elsewhere and used his position to relay information among various groups. During the war years, Field, based in Switzerland, continued to work on behalf of refugees, including antifascists and communists who would, after the war, assume positions of power in Eastern Europe. Field served Allen Dulles
, then of the OSS and later Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) chief, as liaison to Communist resistance fighters when they were needed for OSS operations. Dulles had first met Field in Zurich in 1918 at the home of Field's father. The two had often seen each other in Washington D.C. when both worked at the State Department. Dulles hoped that Field could use his Communist connections in Switzerland and Germany to shed light on Stalin's postwar objectives in Europe.
. On the one hand, his aim may have been to obtain appointment at Charles University. On the other hand, as the Hiss
-Chambers
Case opened in the US, he may have been trying to escape recall to the States to testify—or he may have been recalled behind the Iron Curtain. Franz Dahlem helped him obtain a residence permit in Czechoslovakia. A few days later, Field walked out of his hotel while accompanied by two unidentified men. He left his papers, luggage, and traveller's cheques in his room as if he expected to return.
, who arrested her and took her to Budapest.
, 1900–1982), and asked for their help in getting him a visa to visit Warsaw. The two women passed on the letter to the Bezpieka and were ordered to ensure that Hermann traveled to Warsaw
, where he was arrested while on his way to the airport to leave the country. Hermann Field was imprisoned in the cellar of a suburban house in Miedzeszyn, where he was interrogated for three years by operatives of the Tenth Department. Like his brother, Noel, Hermann had for a time worked to help endangered refugees and had shown a preference for communist and antifascist individuals. In this capacity, in 1939 Hermann had served in the Kraków
office of the Czech Refugee Trust Fund to help persecuted refugees, who were preponderantly Jewish, to emigrate to Great Britain.
Regional Parliament. She met and fell in love with US Army Captain Robert Wallach. When her party superiors objected to the relationship, Erica broke her connections with the party and the couple moved to Paris. In 1947 she was refused admission to the US because of her communist past. In June 1950, Erica decided to search for her vanished foster parents. From Paris, she called on Leo Bauer, an old friend from the Swiss exile group, who at that time was editor-in-chief of East German radio. The call was monitored by the MVD, and Bauer's Soviet superior ordered him to invite Erica to East Berlin, where she was arrested. Erich Mielke
at one point offered her an immediate release if she revealed the members of her spy network. She was condemned to death by a Soviet military court in Berlin and subsequently shipped to Moscow's Lubianka
prison for execution. After Joseph Stalin
's death in 1953, her sentence was reduced to hard labor in Vorkuta
, in the Soviet Arctic.
authorities, who began to prepare the trial of László Rajk
, the first of the postwar Eastern European show trial
s. The trial occurred in September 1949, its premise being that Field and his agents had worked to undermine the development of indigenous resistance, especially in Germany, in order to strengthen Western influence and create a divided postwar Germany. "Noel Field," stated the prosecutor, was "one of the leaders of American espionage," who "specialized in recruiting spies from among left-wing elements." Field was tortured and held in solitary confinement for five years, often at the edge of death. A matter of interest to students of the Cold War came to light years later when records from Field's interrogations were found in the Hungarian Interior Ministry archives, and in those records Fields named Alger Hiss as a fellow Communist spy.
In East Germany, in August 1950, six Communist functionaries, including the director of East zone railroads and the boss of Radio Berlin, were accused of "special connections with Noel Field, the American spy." All were either imprisoned or executed.
In Czechoslovakia, in November 1952, Rudolf Slansky
, the Secretary General of the Communist Party, and 13 highly placed co-defendants confessed to high treason, conspiracy, murder, espionage, Titoism, and Zionism on behalf of "foreign imperialist agents." "The well-known agent Field." was named as their spymaster.
In Field's own words, written while he was imprisoned: Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who had blocked Field's bid for OSS funds for a German communist front group during World War II, later commented, "Field's simple-mindedness was indestructible".
In October 1955, Erica Glaser Wallach was released from Vorkuta, the Soviet labour camp, under an amnesty declared by Nikita Khrushchev
that year but was unable to join her husband and daughters in the US because of the State Department's concern over her earlier Communist Party membership. It took the personal intervention of Allen Dulles to reunite her with her family in 1957. Her account of her experiences, "Light at Midnight", was published in 1967.
The journalist Drew Pearson maintained that the Soviets, encountering resistance to demands for grain and for military support from nationalist Communist leaders in Eastern Europe who had spent the war outside the USSR, used the myth of a Field-led spy network to purge them all. Pearson speculated that Field was arrested and incarcerated to prevent him from discrediting the trumped-up charges of disloyalty.
It has been suggested that Allen Dulles, informed that Noel Field was on his way to Prague, saw an irresistible opportunity to create havoc among his Cold War adversaries and lit the fuse by instructing Józef Światło, his Polish agent within East European counterintelligence, to alert his colleagues to the impending arrival of Dulles's master spy, coming now to activate the network of traitors he had put in place during the war years. However, it is more likely that CIA officials saw a chance to sow discord once the Fields had been arrested and fanned the blaze of paranoia and Stalinist terror. It is undisputed that Allen Dulles was delighted by the chaos caused by the Field case and did not express any sympathy for the plight of the Fields or the harsh treatment they received. He even refused all efforts by Field's sister Elsie to help rescue Noel and Herta.
Noel Field remained a staunch communist; his final testament, written in Budapest and published in an American political journal, was entitled "Hitching Our Wagon to a Star." In 1956 just out of prison he had published an angry apology of the Russian counterrevolutionary brutality in Hungary. Noel Field died in 1970, his wife Herta in 1980. His story became the subject of a 1997 documentary by the Swiss film producer Werner Schweizer, "Noel Field - Der erfundene Spion" (Noel Field, the invented Spy)
United States Department of State
The United States Department of State , is the United States federal executive department responsible for international relations of the United States, equivalent to the foreign ministries of other countries...
in the 1930s, he was a Soviet spy. In postwar Eastern Europe, he served as the pretext for show trial
Show trial
The term show trial is a pejorative description of a type of highly public trial in which there is a strong connotation that the judicial authorities have already determined the guilt of the defendant. The actual trial has as its only goal to present the accusation and the verdict to the public as...
s in Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...
, East Germany and Hungary
Hungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
, which in their turn were used as a pretext to remove indigenous Communist Party
Communist party
A political party described as a Communist party includes those that advocate the application of the social principles of communism through a communist form of government...
members in favour of Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
-based agents who had returned to their native lands behind the Red Army
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...
.
Early life
Field was born in London in 1904, the first son of BrooklynBrooklyn
Brooklyn is the most populous of New York City's five boroughs, with nearly 2.6 million residents, and the second-largest in area. Since 1896, Brooklyn has had the same boundaries as Kings County, which is now the most populous county in New York State and the second-most densely populated...
-born zoologist Herbert Haviland Field, who directed an international scientific bibliographical institute in Zurich
Zürich
Zurich is the largest city in Switzerland and the capital of the canton of Zurich. It is located in central Switzerland at the northwestern tip of Lake Zurich...
, and his English wife. After Herbert Field's death, his wife took Noel Field, his brother Hermann, and two sisters to the US where the boys later attended Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
.
Career
Noel Field began his career in the US State Department in the late 1920s. In the 1930s he was an antifascist and sympathised with Soviet peace initiatives, as did many Western progressives at the time. Field first met the German anti-Nazis PaulPaul Massing
Paul Wilhelm Massing was a German sociologist.-Biography:Born in Grumbach in the Rhine Province, he attended school in Cologne, and later studied economics and social sciences at Frankfurt University, when Franz Neumann was there and at Cologne Handelshochschule . He graduated in 1926 as a...
and Hede Massing
Hede Massing
Hede Massing, née "Hedwig Tune" was an Austrian actress in Vienna and Berlin, communist, and Soviet intelligence operative in Europe and the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. After the World War II, she defected from the Soviet underground...
in 1933; they had arrived in the US from Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
, with the aim of building a network of Soviet agents among influential left-wing personalities.
In 1935 Hede Massing, who was a NKVD
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....
operative, tried to sign Field up for the NKVD, but learned that Alger Hiss
Alger Hiss
Alger Hiss was an American lawyer, government official, author, and lecturer. He was involved in the establishment of the United Nations both as a U.S. State Department and U.N. official...
, one of his State Department colleagues, was also trying to recruit him. Field finally decided to work for the NKVD, but in 1936 he accepted a post with the League of Nations
League of Nations
The League of Nations was an intergovernmental organization founded as a result of the Paris Peace Conference that ended the First World War. It was the first permanent international organization whose principal mission was to maintain world peace...
and moved to Geneva
Geneva
Geneva In the national languages of Switzerland the city is known as Genf , Ginevra and Genevra is the second-most-populous city in Switzerland and is the most populous city of Romandie, the French-speaking part of Switzerland...
. Massing set Field up with Ignatz Reiss (Ignace Reiss) and Walter Krivitsky
Walter Krivitsky
Walter Germanovich Krivitsky was a Soviet intelligence officer who revealed plans of signing Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact before defecting weeks before the outbreak of World War II....
, who were in charge of Soviet intelligence in Switzerland.
Field was deeply moved by the Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
, and became involved in efforts to aid victims and opponents of fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
. As a League of Nations representative in Spain from 1938–1939, Field helped to repatriate foreign participants from the Republican
Second Spanish Republic
The Second Spanish Republic was the government of Spain between April 14 1931, and its destruction by a military rebellion, led by General Francisco Franco....
side. During the Civil War, the Fields had become friendly with a German medical doctor named Glaser who worked in a hospital attached to the International Brigade. When the Brigade retreated during the final collapse of the Loyalist forces, his daughter, Erica, became ill and was separated from her parents. Noel and Herta Field found her in a receiving camp on the French-Spanish border and brought her with them to Switzerland, where they treated her as their own child. They intended to reunite her with her parents who had fled to England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
, but the outbreak of World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
in September 1939 made that difficult, and Erica became a permanent member of the Field home, in effect their foster daughter
Foster Child
Foster Child is a 1987 documentary film by Gil Cardinal, exploring the filmmaker's search, at age thirty-five, for biological family. Cardinal often meets with frustration during his search, but eventually finds his natural family and discovers his Métis roots.This National Film Board of Canada...
.
World War II
In October 1940, Field resigned his post in Geneva to become director of the American Unitarian Universalist Service CommitteeUnitarian Universalist Service Committee
The Unitarian Universalist Service Committee is a non-profit, nonsectarian associate member organization of the Unitarian Universalist Association that works to provide disaster relief and promote human rights and social justice around the world....
's relief mission in Marseilles with his wife Herta in 1941, providing relief for endangered Jewish refugees
Jewish refugees
In the course of history, Jewish populations have been expelled or ostracised by various local authorities and have sought asylum from antisemitism numerous times...
including antifascists and leftists, and helped many to flee to Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
. Field began a major collaboration with the Œuvre de secours aux enfants
Œuvre de secours aux enfants
Œuvre de secours aux enfants, commonly abbreviated as OSE, is a French Jewish humanitarian organization that saved hundreds of Jewish refugee children in Vichy France during World War II....
(Jewish Children’s Aid Society, OSE) and the Marseille director, Joseph Weill. The two organizations subsequently shared the same quarters in Marseille and Noel Field, with help from Herta, set up kindergartens in the Camp de Rivesaltes
Camp de Rivesaltes
The Camp de Rivesaltes is a military camp in France located on the territory of the commune of Rivesaltes in Pyrénées-Orientales in the South of France. The camp was also used for interning several civil populations during 1939–2007...
. The Fields worked with a number of French Jewish women and collaborated with OSE to openly liberate Jewish children from French internment camps or to smuggle them out, if the camp director would not cooperate. Also beginning in early 1941, Noel Field established an extensive medical program to provide aid to Jewish refugees in hiding, those waiting to emigrate or those held in internment camps. Drawing from medical expertise of some of the Jewish refugees, Field was able to develop a team of about 20 medical doctors, dentists, and nurses, some with international reputations. With his contacts in Switzerland, Noel Field managed to obtain medicines and nutritional supplements that were extraordinary for that time. With the American Friends Service Committee
American Friends Service Committee
The American Friends Service Committee is a Religious Society of Friends affiliated organization which works for peace and social justice in the United States and around the world...
, and his lead doctor, Rene Zimmer, Field was able to implement a nutritional survey of many of the thousands of refugees interred in French camps, and provide additional food for those in greatest need.
During this period, Noel Field worked effectively with the Nîmes Committee, a network of about 30 relief organizations in Vichy France, and maintained congenial ties with Varian Fry
Varian Fry
Varian Mackey Fry was an American journalist. Fry ran a rescue network in Vichy France that helped approximately 2,000 to 4,000 anti-Nazi and Jewish refugees to escape Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.-Early life:...
and other relief workers who viewed Field to be a dedicated humanitarian who seemed to be working himself into exhaustion and nervous collapse. Field developed a roster of several hundred refugees whose emigration he attempted to realize. Unlike some members of the Unitarian Service Committee and Varian Fry
Varian Fry
Varian Mackey Fry was an American journalist. Fry ran a rescue network in Vichy France that helped approximately 2,000 to 4,000 anti-Nazi and Jewish refugees to escape Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.-Early life:...
, Field did not face hostility from staff at the US Embassy in Marseille for his activities, possibly because he sent many of his refugee clients in the direction of Switzerland, rather than the United States. In 1942 Robert Dexter
Robert Dexter
Robert Dexter was the founder of the Unitarian Service Committee, which during World War II was the most significant program of any American church in the rescue and assistance of Jewish refugees and the victims of Nazism in Europe.-Early life:...
, director of the Unitarian Service Committee, recruited Noel Field to pass on information to the Office of Strategic Services
Office of Strategic Services
The Office of Strategic Services was a United States intelligence agency formed during World War II. It was the wartime intelligence agency, and it was a predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency...
(OSS). When the Germans occupied the rest of France in November 1942, the Fields made a last minute escape from Marseille and re-established a refugee program in Geneva. In 1944, Noel Field made a dramatic return to southern France, traveling with the Maquis
Maquis (World War II)
The Maquis were the predominantly rural guerrilla bands of the French Resistance. Initially they were composed of men who had escaped into the mountains to avoid conscription into Vichy France's Service du travail obligatoire to provide forced labour for Germany...
and with the approval of Allen Dulles before the area was fully liberated. He arranged for a colleague, Herta Tempi, to establish a small office in Paris as a relief project for the Unitarian Service Committee.
In his relief activities, Field came into contact with a number of communist and antifascist refugees and exiles from Germany and elsewhere and used his position to relay information among various groups. During the war years, Field, based in Switzerland, continued to work on behalf of refugees, including antifascists and communists who would, after the war, assume positions of power in Eastern Europe. Field served Allen Dulles
Allen Welsh Dulles
Allen Welsh Dulles was an American diplomat, lawyer, banker, and public official who became the first civilian and the longest-serving Director of Central Intelligence and a member of the Warren Commission...
, then of the OSS and later Central Intelligence Agency
Central Intelligence Agency
The Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government. It is an executive agency and reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence, responsible for providing national security intelligence assessment to senior United States policymakers...
(CIA) chief, as liaison to Communist resistance fighters when they were needed for OSS operations. Dulles had first met Field in Zurich in 1918 at the home of Field's father. The two had often seen each other in Washington D.C. when both worked at the State Department. Dulles hoped that Field could use his Communist connections in Switzerland and Germany to shed light on Stalin's postwar objectives in Europe.
Post-war activities
In 1949, Field moved from Switzerland to PraguePrague
Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...
. On the one hand, his aim may have been to obtain appointment at Charles University. On the other hand, as the Hiss
Alger Hiss
Alger Hiss was an American lawyer, government official, author, and lecturer. He was involved in the establishment of the United Nations both as a U.S. State Department and U.N. official...
-Chambers
Whittaker Chambers
Whittaker Chambers was born Jay Vivian Chambers and also known as David Whittaker Chambers , was an American writer and editor. After being a Communist Party USA member and Soviet spy, he later renounced communism and became an outspoken opponent later testifying in the perjury and espionage trial...
Case opened in the US, he may have been trying to escape recall to the States to testify—or he may have been recalled behind the Iron Curtain. Franz Dahlem helped him obtain a residence permit in Czechoslovakia. A few days later, Field walked out of his hotel while accompanied by two unidentified men. He left his papers, luggage, and traveller's cheques in his room as if he expected to return.
Arrest of Herta Field
Field's wife Herta became increasingly worried about the lack of word from Field: she believed that her husband had been kidnapped by the CIA in connection with the Massing and Hiss cases. Eventually, she traveled to Prague in the hope of getting information from the Czech authorities, where she met with members of State Security. She described her husband's involvement with Soviet intelligence to them. Her story matched with Field's confession to Hungarian security which had been made available to them. On August 28, she was handed over to the Hungarians in BratislavaBratislava
Bratislava is the capital of Slovakia and, with a population of about 431,000, also the country's largest city. Bratislava is in southwestern Slovakia on both banks of the Danube River. Bordering Austria and Hungary, it is the only national capital that borders two independent countries.Bratislava...
, who arrested her and took her to Budapest.
Arrest of Hermann Field
Meanwhile, Field's brother Hermann wrote to two Polish friends, Mela Granowska and Helena Syrkus (also spelled "Cyrkus", Syrkus was an architectArchitect
An architect is a person trained in the planning, design and oversight of the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to offer or render services in connection with the design and construction of a building, or group of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the...
, 1900–1982), and asked for their help in getting him a visa to visit Warsaw. The two women passed on the letter to the Bezpieka and were ordered to ensure that Hermann traveled to Warsaw
Warsaw
Warsaw is the capital and largest city of Poland. It is located on the Vistula River, roughly from the Baltic Sea and from the Carpathian Mountains. Its population in 2010 was estimated at 1,716,855 residents with a greater metropolitan area of 2,631,902 residents, making Warsaw the 10th most...
, where he was arrested while on his way to the airport to leave the country. Hermann Field was imprisoned in the cellar of a suburban house in Miedzeszyn, where he was interrogated for three years by operatives of the Tenth Department. Like his brother, Noel, Hermann had for a time worked to help endangered refugees and had shown a preference for communist and antifascist individuals. In this capacity, in 1939 Hermann had served in the Kraków
Kraków
Kraków also Krakow, or Cracow , is the second largest and one of the oldest cities in Poland. Situated on the Vistula River in the Lesser Poland region, the city dates back to the 7th century. Kraków has traditionally been one of the leading centres of Polish academic, cultural, and artistic life...
office of the Czech Refugee Trust Fund to help persecuted refugees, who were preponderantly Jewish, to emigrate to Great Britain.
Arrest of Erica Wallach
After the war, the Fields' adopted daughter Erica had moved to the US Zone of occupied Germany and got a job with the OSS, later leaving to join the German communist party, and work as secretary to the communist representatives in the HesseHesse
Hesse or Hessia is both a cultural region of Germany and the name of an individual German state.* The cultural region of Hesse includes both the State of Hesse and the area known as Rhenish Hesse in the neighbouring Rhineland-Palatinate state...
Regional Parliament. She met and fell in love with US Army Captain Robert Wallach. When her party superiors objected to the relationship, Erica broke her connections with the party and the couple moved to Paris. In 1947 she was refused admission to the US because of her communist past. In June 1950, Erica decided to search for her vanished foster parents. From Paris, she called on Leo Bauer, an old friend from the Swiss exile group, who at that time was editor-in-chief of East German radio. The call was monitored by the MVD, and Bauer's Soviet superior ordered him to invite Erica to East Berlin, where she was arrested. Erich Mielke
Erich Mielke
Erich Fritz Emil Mielke was a German communist politician and Minister of State Security—and as such head of the Stasi —of the German Democratic Republic between 1957 and 1989. Mielke spent more than a decade as an operative of the NKVD during the rule of Joseph Stalin...
at one point offered her an immediate release if she revealed the members of her spy network. She was condemned to death by a Soviet military court in Berlin and subsequently shipped to Moscow's Lubianka
Lubyanka (KGB)
The Lubyanka is the popular name for the headquarters of the KGB and affiliated prison on Lubyanka Square in Moscow. It is a large building with a facade of yellow brick, designed by Alexander V...
prison for execution. After Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
's death in 1953, her sentence was reduced to hard labor in Vorkuta
Vorkuta
Vorkuta is a coal-mining town in the Komi Republic, Russia, situated just north of the Arctic Circle in the Pechora coal basin at the Usa River. Population: - Labor camp origins :...
, in the Soviet Arctic.
Show trials
Noel Field had in fact been arrested - reportedly on the personal order of Lavrenti Beria - and had been handed over to the HungarianHungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
authorities, who began to prepare the trial of László Rajk
László Rajk
László Rajk was a Hungarian Communist; politician, former Minister of Interior and former Minister of Foreign Affairs...
, the first of the postwar Eastern European show trial
Show trial
The term show trial is a pejorative description of a type of highly public trial in which there is a strong connotation that the judicial authorities have already determined the guilt of the defendant. The actual trial has as its only goal to present the accusation and the verdict to the public as...
s. The trial occurred in September 1949, its premise being that Field and his agents had worked to undermine the development of indigenous resistance, especially in Germany, in order to strengthen Western influence and create a divided postwar Germany. "Noel Field," stated the prosecutor, was "one of the leaders of American espionage," who "specialized in recruiting spies from among left-wing elements." Field was tortured and held in solitary confinement for five years, often at the edge of death. A matter of interest to students of the Cold War came to light years later when records from Field's interrogations were found in the Hungarian Interior Ministry archives, and in those records Fields named Alger Hiss as a fellow Communist spy.
In East Germany, in August 1950, six Communist functionaries, including the director of East zone railroads and the boss of Radio Berlin, were accused of "special connections with Noel Field, the American spy." All were either imprisoned or executed.
In Czechoslovakia, in November 1952, Rudolf Slansky
Rudolf Slánský
Rudolf Slánský was a Czech Communist politician. Holding the post of the party's General Secretary after World War II, he was one of the leading creators and organizers of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia...
, the Secretary General of the Communist Party, and 13 highly placed co-defendants confessed to high treason, conspiracy, murder, espionage, Titoism, and Zionism on behalf of "foreign imperialist agents." "The well-known agent Field." was named as their spymaster.
Release of the Fields
No trial of the Fields themselves was ever held, (perhaps Communist authorities in Moscow and Budapest were or became uninterested in such). Noel, Herta, and Hermann Field were released in October 1954. Hermann returned to America, later publishing an account of the case, "Trapped in the Cold War: The Ordeal of an American Family". Noel and Herta Field, however, opted to settle in Budapest, where, despite the torture inflicted on them, they did not condemn the Communist regime, leading some to dub them apologists.In Field's own words, written while he was imprisoned: Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who had blocked Field's bid for OSS funds for a German communist front group during World War II, later commented, "Field's simple-mindedness was indestructible".
In October 1955, Erica Glaser Wallach was released from Vorkuta, the Soviet labour camp, under an amnesty declared by Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964...
that year but was unable to join her husband and daughters in the US because of the State Department's concern over her earlier Communist Party membership. It took the personal intervention of Allen Dulles to reunite her with her family in 1957. Her account of her experiences, "Light at Midnight", was published in 1967.
Hypotheses regarding Field's role in the show trials
Field was ideally suited to the Communists' show trials; he had known and assisted many highly placed officials, including resistance fighters and members of the Spanish International Brigades with whom he had maintained contact after the war. In addition, he had had contact with Allen Dulles which allowed the Communists to construct a scenario of cooperation with the US directed against the Soviet bloc. It could even be argued that Field had turned his friends into a spy network penetrating Central Europe. Moscow could thus counteract the ongoing uncovering of its own network in the US with the bogus uncovering of an extensive network of American spies headed by the same Field whom the US had charged with being a Soviet agent.The journalist Drew Pearson maintained that the Soviets, encountering resistance to demands for grain and for military support from nationalist Communist leaders in Eastern Europe who had spent the war outside the USSR, used the myth of a Field-led spy network to purge them all. Pearson speculated that Field was arrested and incarcerated to prevent him from discrediting the trumped-up charges of disloyalty.
It has been suggested that Allen Dulles, informed that Noel Field was on his way to Prague, saw an irresistible opportunity to create havoc among his Cold War adversaries and lit the fuse by instructing Józef Światło, his Polish agent within East European counterintelligence, to alert his colleagues to the impending arrival of Dulles's master spy, coming now to activate the network of traitors he had put in place during the war years. However, it is more likely that CIA officials saw a chance to sow discord once the Fields had been arrested and fanned the blaze of paranoia and Stalinist terror. It is undisputed that Allen Dulles was delighted by the chaos caused by the Field case and did not express any sympathy for the plight of the Fields or the harsh treatment they received. He even refused all efforts by Field's sister Elsie to help rescue Noel and Herta.
Later life
External links
- Who Was Noel Field? in German. This link does not work