INTERNATIONAL: Way of the World

If ever a man worked, fought & suffered for Peace, it is the sickly little German, Carl von Ossietzky. For nearly a year the Nobel Peace Prize Committee has been swamped with petitions from all shades of Socialists, Liberals and literary folk generally, nominating Carl von Ossietzky for the 1935 Peace Prize. Their slogan: “Send the Peace Prize into the Concentration Camp.”

Carl von Ossietzky has spent the last three years in various Nazi concentration camps, taking more than his share of beatings, dying by inches. Yet he is not properly a Nazi scapegoat because every kind of German Government has persecuted him.

After serving four years in the Imperial German Army, Carl von Ossietzky made up his mind once & for all against War. As early as 1921 he was organizing German Peace Society meetings in Berlin, while the remnants of the German Army fought a guerrilla warfare with French troops in the Rhineland.

As editor of the liberal Weltbuhne, von Ossietzky enraged German militarists by exposing their part in the famed Feme Murders. Under a strongly Socialist Government he was sentenced to jail, then fined instead. In 1929 the Weltbuhne published an article entitled Windy News of German Aviation, exposing the extent of German rearmament. In a historic trial von Ossietzky got a year-and-a-half prison sentence. A petition signed by 50,000 Germans failed to free him but an amnesty ordered by Chancellor General Kurt von Schleicher did.

Friends warned him to flee Germany the day Hitler became Chancellor. He refused and on the night of the Reichstag Fire he was swept up into prison by Nazi secret police without a second thought. Of all this the Nobel Peace Prize Committee was reminded this year by such people as Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Romain Rolland, John Dewey, Albert Einstein.

The late Alfred Bernhard Nobel, inventor of dynamite, made much of his money in munitions, provided in his will that the prize fund should be transferred to “safe securities,” which the executors have interpreted to mean first mortgage bonds. The Peace Prize is awarded by a committee chosen by the Norwegian Storting (Parliament), while the other four prizes (Literature, Medicine, Physics, Chemistry) are determined by Swedes. Three weeks ago the Committee took pained notice of a story in the Schwarze Korps, official organ of Adolf Hitler’s special guard, warning the Peace Prize Committee “not to provoke the German people by rewarding this traitor to our nation. We hope that the Norwegian Government is sufficiently familiar with the ways of the world to prevent what would be a slap in the face of the German people.”

Thus warned, the Nobel Committee considered another Carl, Sweden’s Prince Carl, who had been active in Swedish Red Cross work during the World War in Siberia and lately in Ethiopia. This stopgap fell through when a clerk discovered that Prince Carl’s name had been submitted a few days after the deadline. Suddenly the Committee realized it was not obliged to name anybody, having in the past skipped four War years and four years since. Lamely last week it announced there would be no 1935 Nobel Peace Prize award because “with war raging in Africa, Anglo-Italian tension continued in the Mediterranean and a new puppet state approaching establishment in the Far East, the time seems inappropriate for such a peace gesture.”