Nobel Peace Prize 1935/6 - Carl von Ossietzky

[PanzerJaeger]

He was nothing more than a communist sympathizer and a traitor. He was acting to hurt Germany long before Hitler came to power. In fact, it was people like Ossietzky that spurred the reactionary anti-communist shift to the far Right in Germany that swept Hitler into the Chancellery.

Every nation has the right to defend itself, and German re-armament in particular was in the best interest of the German people. Despite Louis' claims of some conservative conspiracy, most moderate and even many leftist German politicians saw Stalin's military buildup and the growing threat of expansionist international communism and knew that Germany stood helpless against outside threats under the Versailles conditions. That is why re-armament was sought by the Weimar Republic long before the Nazis ever came into existence. Ossietzky, a communist supporter, sought to weaken Germany not under Hitler, but under a democratically-elected representative government.

He received the prize because he later became a victim of the Nazi Party. It was a convenient choice out of thousands of others because of his outspoken anti-Nazi positions. It was also convenient to ignore that he was a traitor to a legal government before he became a victim. The German Federal court, of course, could not ignore that.

According to the case law of the Supreme Court of the German Reich, the illegality of covertly conducted actions did not cancel out the principle of secrecy. According to the opinion of the Supreme Court of the German Reich, every citizen owes his Fatherland a duty of allegiance regarding information, and endeavours towards the enforcement of existing laws may be implemented only through the utilization of responsible domestic state organs, and never by appealing to foreign governments. –Ruling of the Federal Court of Justice, 3 December 1992