This is two questions. (1) What is the process and who makes nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize? (2) Is it true, as a local radio commentator said yesterday, that in 1939 Hitler was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize?
The Nobel Committee answers your questions!
Here’s the description of how the Nobel peace prize is awarded:
http://nobelprize.org/peace/nomination/index.html
And here’s a list of those allowed to nominate people (national governments, members of international courts, university rectors, professors of social science, history, philosophy, law, and theology, directors of peace research institutes and foreign policy institutes, former Nobel peace prize winners, board members of the orgs. awarded the prize, active and former members of the Nobel committee, and former advisors of the committee:
http://nobelprize.org/peace/nomination/nominators.html
And, there’s also a database that lets you see all nominees from 1901-1950, so we can see that Hitler was nominated for the 1939 prize by E.G.C. Brandt of the Sweedish parliament, but the nomination was withdrawn on Feb. 1, 1939.
http://nobelprize.org/peace/nomination/nomination.php?action=show&showid=2609
You can find a list of the groups of people eligible to submit nominations at the Norwegian Nobel Institute’s web page, which is available in English.
The Committee does not publish the names of nominees, but the nominator can choose to make his or her submission public. One Norwegian gentleman has nominated Bush and Blair two years running now and both times made sure the press knew about it. I’ve heard it claimed several times that Hitler was nominated, and though I’ve never seen proof it is not impossible given the submission process. “Members of national assemblies and governments” are eligible to nominate, for instance - a member of the German government of the day may well have decided to nominate Hitler.
What was the context in which the aforementioned radio commentator made this claim? Was he merely taking note of an ironic historical tidbit? Or was he actively trying to undermine the Nobel commitee’s current moral authority?
I haven’t heard the radio commentator, but I assume it was to counter arguments that Stanley “Tookie” Williams shouldn’t be executed because he was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Kissinger’s award took care of that.
Captain Amazing is correct. The commentator was talking about Hitler in the context of the Williams case. I have no idea about who nominated him, or even if he was actually nominated or just discussed as someone who should be nominated.
Like the link shows, he was nominated by E. G. C. Brandt. Brandt’s reason, as given by the link was, “Hitler was the leader of the German Nationalist Socialist Party.”, but it’s likely that Brandt nominated him because of the settlement of the Sudeten crisis, as he, Chamberlain, and Benes were all seperately nominated.
Hitler made a big deal about how far he was willing to go to resolve the dispute with Czechoslovakia by peaceful means. According to him, the Slavic people of the Sudeten region were abusing, raping and murdering the poor, helpless Aryan minority. Hitler explained endlessly that he would much prefer to aid this downtrodden minority in a non-confrontational way, and that he would liberate them militarily only after every possible diplomatic option had been exhausted.
If you’re referring to Williams’ nominations, Wiki has this to say :
While it’s slightly tangential to Brandt’s intentions in nominating him, it’s worth pointing out that Hitler might have found it a bit embarrassing to have won, since he’d previously decreed that German citizens must boycott the Nobel Prizes. The 1935 Peace Prize had been awarded - in 1936 - to the pacifist journalist Carl von Ossietzky, at the time a prisoner in a concentration camp. The Nazi reaction was to prevent him travelling to Oslo to receive it and then ban anyone accepting any of the prizes in future.
A German National Prize for Art and Science was set up as a replacement “Nazi Nobel”.