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On January 24, 1939, twelve Swedish parliament members nominated British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain for the Nobel Peace Prize.
They argued that Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement with Hitler in September 1938, which handed over Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland to Germany, had saved world peace.
According to their nomination letter, Chamberlain was the one who “through this dangerous time saved our part of the world from a terrible catastrophe.”
Three days later, I, Erik Brandt, a Swedish Social Democrat parliamentarian, sent a letter to the Norwegian Nobel Committee nominating German Chancellor Adolf Hitler for the Nobel Peace Prize.
In an interview with Svenska Morgonposten, I explained that my nomination was meant as pure irony.
Chamberlain’s nomination had provoked me, and I nominated Hitler as a protest against him and Nazism.
The Munich Agreement was nothing but a betrayal of Czechoslovakia by the Western powers, who handed over Sudetenland just to keep the peace.
Neither Chamberlain nor Hitler deserved a Peace Prize. In a letter to the editor of the anti-Nazi newspaper Trots Allt after World War II broke out in the fall of 1939, I wrote that my nomination of Hitler was meant to “use irony to suggest a Peace Prize for Hitler and, by doing so, pin him to the wall of shame as the world’s number one enemy of peace.”
But when the backlash to my nomination hit hard, and it became clear that most people in Sweden didn’t catch the irony, I decided to withdraw Hitler’s nomination.
On February 1, 1939,the last day for nominations,I sent a letter to the Norwegian Nobel Committee to take it back. 1 reply
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