A bleeding heart

Today, when the world celebrates the fresh Nobel Peace Prize winners, let us also remember for a minute a great loser of the Nobel Peace Prize.

“You probably know” – said in 1995 Gustav Hendrikssen, emeritus professor of the University of Uppsala – “that immediately after the 1938 Munich conference, Gertrude Stein, a marvelous hostess and an obsessive scribbler, turned to a number of intellectuals – no, not all of them Jews – who signed an appeal urging the Nobel prize committee to give Hitler the Nobel peace prize. The committee rejected this proposal politely but firmly, citing among their reasons the attitude of the Nazi regime toward the Jews. If you ask me how I know this – I was a member of that committee.”

But truth cannot be hidden. The following year, E. G. C. Brandt, a member of the Swedish parliament officially nominated Hitler for the Nobel Peace Prize. However, under the pressure of the committee he was forced to withdraw his proposal.

The news in a contemporary Hungarian daily. Source: Tudózsidó

Although the criteria of the Nobel Peace Prize – “…who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses” – were fully met by Hitler with the Munich peace congress promoted by him exactly seventy-three years ago on 30 September 1983 which, with the agreement between the participating nations, contributed to the annexation of the Sudetenland to Germany, and endorsed the German occupation of Austria and encouraged that of Czechoslovakia, which indeed abolished their standing armies.

“Historians will one day record that never were the peaceful proposals of one man met with more hatred than mine. When Germany became the example to the world of the peaceful solution of social problems and economic difficulties, the hatred of the Bolsheviks and capitalists, the exploiters of nations, was turned against her.”

Adolf Hitler, 1936

“I have never met a happier people than the Germans and Hitler is one of the greatest men. The old trust him; the young idolise him. It is the worship of a national hero who has saved his country.”

David Lloyd George, British Prime Minister of the First World War
and of the Versailles Peace Treaty, Daily Express, 1936. szeptember 17.

Illustration of Life Magazine to the report on the Munich Conference

The Nobel Prize committee has already awarded the prize to so many unworthy persons during its hundred and ten years of existence, that it is really not surprising if they failed to recognize the true merit also this time. Ungrateful was the posterity too, which has not yet demanded the correction of this historical error. Only one people proved to be grateful, which still recognizes, appreciates and weeps for the Führer’s desire for peace: the Ukrainians.


The official supplementary textbook of Ukrainian history classes, The Ukrainian Nation by Mikola Galichanets (Ternopil, 2005) starts the chapter on the German liberation of the Ukraine from the Soviets and the beginnings of the OUN, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists led by Stepan Bandera with the following words:

“Hitler, while preparing for the Polish war, tried to deepen the Polish-Ukrainian conflict, and to win the sympathy of the inhabitants of the Ukrainian SSR too. On 1 April 1939 he declared that his heart was bleeding at the sight of the suffering of the noble-blooded Ukrainian people and of the peoples of the Caucasus, and that the time is ripe for the foundation of an independent Ukrainian state. After the fall of Poland, the German power entrusted very high positions to Ukrainians, especially to the members of OUN. In the Slovakian Piešťany they opened a hotel to rehabilitate the OUN members released from Polish prisons…”

“Glory to Hitler, glory to Bandera!” A welcome sign to the entering German and OUN troops towards the end of June 1941 around Lwów

There is nothing extraordinary in Hitler’s sympathy. For the same textbook also writes in the chapters on the Ukrainian history in the centuries before Christ, that Ukrainians – in contrast to mixed-race Russians – have always been Aryans. But on this we shall write more on another occasion, when we will present, on the basis of this same textbook, the Ukrainian history in the three thousand years before Christ, which is extremely interesting, but hardly known outside of the Ukraine and perhaps of this very textbook.