Nobel Peace Prize 1935/6 - Carl von Ossietzky

[Louis VI the Fat]

The absence of Liu Xiaobo from this year's Nobel prize ceremony has raised the ghost of Carl von Ossietzky, the 1920s/30s German pacifist.


Important to me is that Von Ossietzky in the 1920s and early 1930's was very active in exposing Germany's secret rearmament strategy. In a bid to overthrow the peace of Europe, Germany and the Soviet Union closely co-operated in the 1920s/1930s. Ossietzky showed how Germany in the 1920s transferred American funds to the Soviet Union, rebuild an airforce, and secretly trained a new generation of pilots in Stalinist Soviet Union.

Ossietzky, a pacifist and a man of great insight, saw the storm that was brewing. Alas, his writings could not stop the tide, could not prevent the final act of the German conservatives dangerous game, the installation of their puppet in 1933. This meant game over for Ossietzky, who was almost immediately send to a concentration camp, was miserably tortured for years, and died in 1938.


The Nobel committee was so divided over his Peaze Prize in 1935, that initially no prize was awarded. In the fiercely extremist political climate of the 1930s, Conservatives, including the Norwegian king, oppossed Ossietzky as a traitor to his country, as a Christian from a converted Jewish family, and as an enemy of Germany. Eventually, Ossietzky was awarded the prize in 1936, amidst controversy and great pressure for Germany. It very much resembles the current row over Liu's Prize, and China's fierce, vehement, reaction.


I would say that history has vindicated Ossietzky, but sadly modern popular history has adopted the German ultra-nationalist / nazi concept of Germany suffering as a victim of conspiracy in this period, and, perhaps even more sadly, the German federal court of justice in 1992 upheld the verdict of 1931: Ossietzky's publishing of Germany's secret re-armament was an act of treason. Shame on both accounts.

Mr Liu, 54, is currently serving an eleven-year sentence on the charge of "inciting subversion" after he co-authored a petition for political reform in China.

Mr Ossietzky, a German journalist and pacifist who spoke out against Hitler's rise to power, was convicted of high treason and espionage in 1931 after publishing an article about Germany's efforts to rebuild its air force, in contravention of the Treaty of Versailles.

He was tortured in Spandau prison in 1933, after the Reichstag fire, and was interned in the KZ Esterwegen concentration camp near Oldenburg when he was awarded the prize in 1936.

The Nazi regime put enormous pressure on the Nobel committee not to award him the Peace prize, to the extent that the 1935 Peace prize, which he had been nominated for, was not awarded at all.
It took the Nobel committee a year to work up the courage, and two members withdrew, before it finally announced the 1935 prize to Mr Ossietzky on the same day as awarding the 1936 prize to Carlos Saavedra Lamas, who brokered a truce between Paraguay and Bolivia. Mr Ossietzky's prize was described by newspapers at the time as "a slap in the face of fascism".

King Haakon VII of Norway stayed away from the ceremony, while the award was generally condemned by conservatives. Aftenposten, the Norwegian newspaper, argued that Mr Ossietzky was a criminal who had attacked his country "with the use of methods that violated the law long before Hitler came into power".
One of the German activists supporting Mr Ossietzky in Norway was Herbert Frahm, a 21-year-old exile who took the name Willy Brandt and would eventually become chancellor of West Germany and win the Peace prize himself.

Germany reacted with fury, and an unnamed official called the award "preposterous". The Nazi government told Mr Ossietzky, by then suffering from severe tuberculosis in a hospital bed, that he had to decline the prize, a demand that he refused. A year-and-a-half later he died, at the age of 48.
Meanwhile, Hitler established his own alternative Peace prize and declared that no Germans were to ever accept the Nobel prize again. The University of Oldenburg is now named after Mr Ossietzky.

I was going to put this in the Monastery, but then, a thread touching on Hitler, Chinese Communists, Jews and treacherous kings is a bit Backroomish.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...Ossietzky.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_Ossietzky

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

When Carl von Ossietzky, the anti-militarist journalist whom the Nazis had thrown into a concentration camp, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1936, Heinrich Mann wrote, "in one moment the conscience of the world arose, and the name which it spoke was his."

Mann was referring to the international campaign in support of awarding him the prize in which some of the leading figures in the intellectual and political life of the time took part. The Ossietzky prize was one bright moment in the dark days preceding the outbreak of World War II, when the forces for peace and freedom in large sections of the world seemed about to be overwhelmed by ever more powerful forces of totalitarianism and reaction.

In 1936 Nazi Germany was rearming in violation of the Versailles Treaty and in March reoccupied the Rhineland. In the same year Hitler formed the Rome-Berlin axis with Mussolini, who was completing the conquest of Ethiopia, began to aid the rebel generals who were marching to overthrow the Spanish Republic, and entered an agreement with Japan. In the summer of 1936 the Olympic Games in Berlin provided Goebbels with the opportunity to mount a great propaganda show of the "New Germany." Many abroad were dismissing the grim reports of concentration camp atrocities as exaggerated, and statesmen treated them as domestic affairs of no concern to other states.

In the face of this situtation and despite all the efforts of the Nazi propaganda machine and the German Foreign Office, a little band of German emigrès in Paris managed to organize a multinational campaign in behalf of a concentration camp victim little known outside Germany which saved his life, got him released from camp, and won him the Nobel Peace Prize.

http://www.irwinabrams.com/articles/ossietzky.html

What a dreadful age it must have been for the pacificist, the intellectual, the internationalist! To see what was coming, and yet to watch powerless as your entire world comes undone, is put to the flames.