Carl von Ossietzky

German pacifist and the recipient of the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in exposing the clandestine German re-armament.

In 1912 Ossietzky joined the German Peace Society but was conscripted into the army and served throughout World War I. In 1920 he became the society’s secretary in Berlin. Ossietzky helped to found the Nie Wieder Krieg (No More War) organization in 1922 and became editor of the Weltbühne, a liberal political weekly, in 1927, where in a series of articles he unmasked the Reichswehr (German army) leaders’ secret preparations for rearmament. Accused of treason, Ossietzky was sentenced in November 1931 to 18 months’ imprisonment but was granted amnesty in December 1932.

Ossietzky opposed German militarism and political extremism of both the left and the right. By the time Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January 1933, Ossietzky had resumed his editorship, in which he uncompromisingly attacked the Nazis. Steadfastly refusing to flee Germany, he was arrested on 28 February 1933, and sent to Esterwegen-Papenburg concentration camp. After enduring three years of incarceration and torture in the camp, Ossietzky was transferred in May 1936 to a prison hospital in Berlin by the German government, which was growing alarmed at the international publicity his case had begun to attract.

On 24 November 1936, Ossietzky was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for 1935. The award was interpreted as an expression of worldwide censure of Nazism. Hitler’s reply was a decree forbidding Germans to accept any Nobel Prize. Though not allowed to leave Germany, Ossietzky was permitted to move to a private sanatorium in May 1936 because of his tuberculosis, but under Gestapo surveillance. He died in the Nordend hospital in Berlin-Pankow, still in police custody, on 4 May 1938, aged 48, of tuberculosis and from the after-effects of the abuse he suffered in the concentration camps.