Nobel Peace Prize: echoes of 1936 when Hitler barred von Ossietzky - Telegraph.co.uk

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.