Nobel Peace Prize 1935/6 - Carl von Ossietzky

[PanzerJaeger]

Ah, but Ossietzky was not a Communist. Leftwing, but bourgeois.

Note that I did not say he was a communist. From my understanding of his biography, I believe him to be a communist too savvy to adopt the label (there were many), but IIRC he never joined the party. He certainly played in those social circles and often wrote favorably about the cause.

Further, he was a supporter of Ernst Thälmann, who unlike some of the more organic German communists, took his orders directly from the Soviet Union and Stalin. Had he won, he likely would have mirrored other Stalinist puppets in cruelty and oppression.

The Weltbühne-Prozess, the trial in question is about Ossietzky exposing the cooperation between Germany and the Soviet Union!

Of course. His revelations of low level military cooperation between the two international pariahs was meant to have a twofold effect.

It was to first damage and further ostracize Germany in the eyes of the Western Democracies. Second, it was to make the Soviet Union appear to the German people to be a friend, an ally, of Germany; when in actuality the military cooperation was strictly out of necessity, not any grand strategy.

Thus, Ossietzky's piece was no real effort in pacifism, but an effort to keep Germany ostracized from the West and push her closer to the Soviet Union.

There were people in Europe - an increasingly lonely, but proud minority - who resisted both the extreme left and the extreme right.

Indeed there were. Ossietzky was not one of them.

Dismissing Louis' post based on "Traitor to his country" =

I assume this is directed toward me. First, thank you for your contribution. Second, I did not dismiss Louis' post. He elicited opinions about the man's legacy and I gave mine. I appreciate all of Louis' historical posts, despite disagreeing with most of his analyses. Third, you'll note that the German Supreme Court agreed with my position.