Nazis For Peace

I read an article this morning that listed Adolf Hitler as a past Nobel Peace Prize nominee.

I didn't believe it at first, so I looked it up.

It's absolutely true. The man who invented WWII was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1939. The nomination is recorded on this page of the Nobel Prize's web site.

Any active member of a national legislature can nominate someone for the Nobel Peace Prize. To be a Nobel Peace Prize nominee doesn't mean you're worthy or even that the people at Nobel HQ think that you're worthy. All you have to do to get nominated is impress a single politician, somewhere, anywhere in the world. Every one of us is one steak dinner and a golf-weekend away from getting nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Hitler was nominated by a single Swedish parliamentarian named E.G.C Brandt. The Nobel committee ignored the nomination. The Nobel Peace Prize's opinion of Hitler was expressed three years earlier, in 1936, when it awarded the prize to outspoken German pacifist named Carl Von Ossietsky. He was dying of tuberculosis in a Nazi concentration camp at the time. The Nazi response to Von Ossietsky's win was a declaration that no German would be allowed to accept the prize in the future.

If you wanna bash the Nobel Prize for not quite grasping the concept of Peace, Hitler's nomination will not support your argument. However, the fact that the prize was actually given to war criminal Henry Kissinger and terrorist Yasser Arafat will.