Noel Field

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Noel Haviland Field , Noël Field (born January 23, 1904 in London , † September 12, 1970 in Budapest ) was an American diplomat, Marxist activist and informant of the Soviet GPU . During the Second World War he headed the Unitarian Service Committee and saved numerous refugees from the Nazi tyranny . After the end of the war, as an alleged US agent, he fell victim to the Stalinist "purges" in the Eastern Bloc .

Life

Origin and time until 1949

Noel Field came from a respected American Quaker family , but was born in Europe and raised in Zurich . This fact favored his versatile talent for languages. He made diplomatic career at the US State Department in the interwar period . As a staunch communist, he was advertised as an informant for the Soviet GPU . The fact that the military intelligence service GRU learned of this activity through Fields own indiscretion was later used against him. Possibly in order to avoid the resulting conflict of loyalty between the fatherland and politics, he accepted a position with the League of Nations in Geneva in 1935 . Among other things, he belonged to the League of Nations committee that oversaw the withdrawal of the international brigades from republican Spain . After the Munich Agreement , he and his brother Henry helped political refugees from Germany who had found asylum in Czechoslovakia to move to Great Britain.

In 1940 Field was fired from the League of Nations and then in the spring of 1941, together with his wife Herta, head of an aid organization in Marseille , the Unitarian Service Committee (USC). During this time, the USC was - similar to the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC) under Varian Fry - busy with the support of refugees who either lived in internment camps or in illegality and had to fear extradition to the Gestapo and the SS. Field used his position to provide food, money, papers, and personal information to this group of people. He was also committed to the medical care of the refugees, u. a. by setting up a clinic in Marseille. For the communists among the refugees in particular, these activities were essential, as immigration regulations prevented them from entering the USA. Even so, most of the money Field needed came from the United States. Because he was the shop steward of the Joint Antifascist Refugee Committee , which, with the participation of many well-known writers such as John Dos Passos , John Steinbeck , Ernest Hemingway and Howard Fast, raised funds to support the refugees. These funds were brought to the south of France by Field from Switzerland . In this function he had contact with a large number of communists, mostly underground or in captivity, whom he was able to help in many cases and whom he served as a courier for the communist resistance when traveling, particularly to Vichy France .

However, Field was also an eye-witness, together with the Protestant pastor Manen, in the summer of 1942 of the first deportations from the Les Milles camp to the extermination camps, including the desperate but usually unsuccessful attempts to avert the deportation.

From the end of 1942 Field continued his work for the USC from Switzerland after a dramatic escape . From May to November 1946 he was USC representative in the CRALOG and initially worked from Stuttgart and later in Berlin.

1949–1955: “Pariah” in the late Stalin era

Sashegy, Budapest

In 1949 he was targeted by communist secret services. The allegation of espionage is considered clumsy for the USA. The pressure of expectation on Mátyás Rákosi to be successful in purges, and Stalin's need , reinforced by Titoism , to eliminate foreign, anti-Stalinist communists, seemed to work together to such an extent that a deadly wave of purges was hung on him. He seemed particularly suitable for this role, as on the one hand he had a career in the USA and on the other hand had dealings with numerous leaders of the communist underground through his aid organization, some of whom were now in high positions, but as western emigrants under General suspicions were.

Field was arrested in Prague and taken to Hungary, where there was a show trial of László Rajk . When Fields brother Hermann, his wife Herta and his adoptive daughter Erika Wallach geb. Glaser searched for him, they too were arrested and tortured in various Eastern European countries. Both Noel and Hermann Field testified under torture that they had set up a large espionage organization in Eastern Europe.

In the course of the purge, all those who had contact with him were confronted with allegations of US espionage and, in many cases, were executed after show trials. Here extorted statements of Fields were used. The defendants in the Slansky trial in Prague included Secretary General Rudolf Slansky , Vladimír Clementis , Ludvík Frejka and Otto Katz . Of the 14 defendants, eleven were of Jewish descent; eleven defendants were sentenced to death .

Anna Leibbrand , Leo Bauer , Paula Acker , Paul Merker , Robert Rompe , Franz Dahlem , Philipp Daub , Kurt Müller and Hans Schrecker survived the campaign more or less lightly . A special case was Erich Mielke , who, revealed as a liar about his biography, almost turned from prosecutor to accused. Reichsbahn general director Willi Kreikemeyer , a close employee of Fields in the relief organization, had more or less accidentally revealed Mielke's stay in western exile and his contacts with the relief organization.

Burial place on the Farkasréti temető in Budapest

1955-1970

Noel Field was also one of the survivors of the affair. In 1955, severely affected by solitary confinement and torture, he was released from prison, partially rehabilitated and financially compensated. His arrested family members were also released and allowed to leave the country. Still a staunch communist, he seemed to regard his arrest as a necessary evil and lived in Hungary until his death .

Movies

literature

  • Bernd-Rainer Barth , Werner Schweizer , Thomas Grimm : The Noel Field case . Basisdruck, Berlin 2006 ISBN 3-86163-137-7
    • Vol. 1: Key figure in the show trials in Eastern Europe . New edition ibid. 2007 ISBN 3-86163-102-4 (review by Wilfriede Otto in the yearbook for historical communism research (2005)).
    • Vol. 2: Asylum in Hungary 1954–1957. New edition ibid. 2007 ISBN 3-86163-132-6
      • therein Bernd-Rainer Barth, The Fall Field after 50 Years. in vol. 2, in edition 2007, pp. 353–397
  • dsb .: Bernd-Rainer Barth: The Noel Field Affair - How an American Communist was made a key figure in the Stalinist show trials. In: Berliner Zeitung . January 24, 2004, accessed June 9, 2015 .
  • dsb .: The life confession of a Quaker communist. The letter from the secret prisoner Noel H. Field from the State Security Prison in Budapest to the Central Committee of the CPSU from March 1954. In: Yearbook for Historical Research on Communism (JHK) 2002. Berlin, pp. 210–285. Online on the homepage of the digitized version of the JHK here.
  • dsb .: Who was Noel Field? The unknown key figure in the Eastern European show trials. In Annette Leo, Peter Reif-Spirek (ed.): Polyphonic silence. Metropol, Berlin 2001, pp. 197-221
  • Flora Lewis: pawn in the red game. The life of Noel H. Field. Ullstein, Berlin 1965
  • Mária Schmidt: Noel Field. The American Communist at the Center of Stalin's East European Purge. From the Hungarian Archives. In American Communist History 3 (2004), No. 2, pp. 215–245
  • Wolfgang Kießling : partner in the “fool's paradise”. The friends around NF and Paul Merker. Dietz, Berlin 1994 ISBN 3-320-01857-4
  • Hermann and Kate Field: Departure Delayed. Stalin's hostage in the Cold War. EVA , 1996 ISBN 3-434-50064-2
  • Anne Applebaum : The Iron Curtain: The Suppression of Eastern Europe 1944–1956 . Munich: Settlers 2013
  • Siegfried Mielke , Stefan Heinz : Railway trade unionists in the Nazi state. Persecution - Resistance - Emigration (1933–1945) (= trade unionists under National Socialism. Persecution - Resistance - Emigration. Volume 7). Metropol, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-86331-353-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Horst Brie : Davids Odyssey , edition ost, Berlin, 1997, ISBN 3-929161-94-X .
  2. ↑ Bernd-Rainer Barth, Werner Schweizer (ed.): The case of Noel Field: Key figure of the show trials in Eastern Europe , Volume 1 ( prison years ), BasisDruck, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-86163-102-4 , p. 326. The editors refer there to a 33-page report by Fields dated November 9, 1946: Report on Journey through American Zone of Germany on behalf of CRALOG Mission . August 16 - October 15, 1946 (the report is in the Fields estate in Budapest).
  3. ^ Entry in the film database of the DEFA Foundation
  4. ↑ [1]
  5. ↑ [2]
  6. ↑ Due to the archive material available to him, Kießling did not yet assume that Field was a communist, as Barth later explained
  7. ↑ Hermann was Noel's brother, who a few years later was also arrested in the Eastern Bloc and imprisoned for several years
personal data
SURNAME Field, Noel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Field, Noel Haviland
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American diplomat, non-governmental organization founder, and communist
DATE OF BIRTH January 23, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH September 12, 1970
Place of death Budapest