Noel Field - World War II

World War II

In October 1940, Field resigned his post in Geneva to become director of the American Unitarian Universalist Service Committee'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 Marseilles director, Joseph Weill. The two organizations subsequently shared the same quarters in Marseilles 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 Marseilles 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 Marseilles 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.