The Third Reich Chancellery responded to the awarding of the 1944 Nobel Peace Prize to the International Committee of the Red Cross by saying the prize committee was playing politics by not giving it to Chancellor Adolph Hitler.
“The Nobel Committee proved they place politics over peace,” Reich Communications Director Joseph Goebbels wrote in The People’s Observer.
Hitler has publicly stated at least a half-dozen times that he deserves to win the prize. He and his allies have cited various peace efforts, including the German-Polish Non-Aggression Pact in 1934, the Haavara Agreement in 1933, the Munich Agreement in 1938, and the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in 1939.
“They will never give me a Nobel Peace Prize,” Hitler had previously said during a meeting with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. “It’s too bad. I deserve it, but they will never give it to me.”
Hitler’s fellow countrymen Gustav Stresemann, Ludwig Quidde and Carl von Ossietzky have previously won the award.