The Good Traitor

The Good Traitor

The Nazis feared journalist Carl von Ossietzky so much they sent him to a concentration camp. Could winning the Nobel Peace Prize save his life?

By Kate McQueen

The Atavist Magazine, No. 157

Kate McQueen is a writer, editor, and researcher who specializes in literary journalism. She is editorial director of the Pollen Initiative, a nonprofit that creates and supports media centers inside prisons. Her writing has appeared in Alta Journal, JSTOR Daily, Journalism History, and Literary Journalism Studies, among other publications.

Editor: Jonah Ogles
Art Director: Ed Johnson
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checker: Josie Le Blond
Illustrator: Gregori Saavedra

Published in November 2024.

ONE

The first time Carl von Ossietzky disappeared inside a prison, a crowd of supporters cheered him on. It was a sunny Tuesday in May 1932. Several friends had escorted the journalist across Berlin. They fastened black, red, and gold streamers to their cars and departed from the west-side offices of Die Weltbühne (The World Stage), the left-leaning magazine Ossietzky edited. As they paraded slowly toward Tegel Prison, in the north of the city, the colors of the German Republic fluttered around them in traffic.

In a wooded area outside the prison’s main gates, about 100 intellectual celebrities, sympathetic journalists, and general well-wishers had gathered in solidarity. The crowd violated Berlin’s ban on large group gatherings, enacted to quell violence between extremists on Germany’s left and right, but writer Kurt Grossman, the secretary of the German League of Human Rights, a pacifist organization of which Ossietzky was a member, persuaded the police to keep patrols away from the area for 90 minutes. Ossietzky could take his time bidding his audience farewell. “I’m not surrendering,” he said. In prison, he insisted, he would “remain a living demonstration against a judgment from the highest court.”

Fourteen months earlier, the 42-year-old editor had been charged with treason for publishing an article about the German Air Force’s rearmament efforts, which were in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. The treaty forbade Germany from accumulating war matériel or maintaining more than a small defense-oriented military. The facts of the rearmament were not widely known until Die Weltbühne’s story ran. In turn, the military accused both Ossietzky and the author of the article, Walter Kreiser, of betraying their country.

Die Weltbühne’s circulation was small but its readership influential; this included thought leaders in politics and culture both in Germany and beyond its borders. Anticipating international outcry, the German Foreign Office expressed doubts about prosecuting the two men, but the state attorney proceeded with a closed-door trial anyway. For two days, Ossietzky and Kreiser sat side by side in a vast empty gallery, listening to the echoes of lawyers’ competing voices. “Uncanny, such a theater without an audience,” Ossietzky later wrote. The men were ultimately convicted of a lesser charge—publishing military secrets—and sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment. They were given until early May 1932 to hand themselves over to the authorities. Kreiser fled Germany to avoid doing time. Ossietzky made a point of staying.

Ossi, as his friends called him, was a small, quiet man with a high forehead, a long narrow nose, and knife-thin lips. His striking face made him easy to caricature, and newspapers often did just that. He tended to cast his eyes down at the floor during casual conversation, holding a lit cigarette between gently shaking fingers. His reserve, coupled with the “von” in his last name, which was traditionally a marker of noble lineage, caused strangers to mistake him for an aristocrat. But Ossietzky came from a working-class neighborhood in Hamburg. He barely finished secondary school, and then worked listlessly as a clerk in Hamburg’s judicial administration until 1914. His experience serving in the Great War cemented his commitment to peace and galvanized his interest in writing. He relocated to Berlin in 1919, where he became secretary for the German Peace Society and gained acclaim as a political commentator who argued against militarism and for democracy.

Journalists, he believed, ought “to hold a mirror up to the times” and be “the conscience of the day.” Week after week, Ossietzky turned out articles that vibrated with energy. His colleague Rudolf Arnheim once said that Ossietzky could interest even the most unpolitical readers in the country’s fate because his “thoughts [were] not brought forward with jargon but rather in a language in which one can describe flowers, music, and women.” Ossietzky’s articles were those of an advocate for a fledgling democracy stretched to the breaking point by increasingly radical political factions. He didn’t want the young republic to die on his watch.

After Ossietzky took over Die Weltbühne in 1927, he spent long hours working in shirtsleeves amid messy piles of papers at the magazine’s office. He was the kind of editor who preferred pencil stubs to red pens, who remembered to buy the printing crew beer and sausages. Under his leadership, Die Weltbühne published pieces from across the political left, a fact that exasperated contributors who wished he’d hew to a more radical line. The magazine became a necessary if solitary stage for those not strictly aligned with Germany’s leading workers’ parties. 

One frequent topic of discussion in its pages was Germany’s militarism, an original sin that had led the country into the Great War and paved the way for incipient fascism. This got the publication in trouble more than once with state authorities. Prior to Ossietzky’s 1931 trial, Die Weltbühne had already faced a lawsuit over its coverage of the Schwarze Reichswehr, a right-wing paramilitary group that carried out numerous vigilante killings in the early 1920s. The magazine’s articles pressured Germany’s Department of Justice to prosecute the murderers and embarrassed the military, which had denied the existence of underground armed groups even as it sanctioned their activities. Later, the military insisted that another charge be brought against Die Weltbühne, this time for publishing a commentary declaring that “soldiers are murderers.”

The terms of Ossietzky’s punishment for publishing military secrets jarred his friends and admirers. People convicted of high-profile political crimes in Germany were often given festungshaft (fortress confinement), a more comfortable form of imprisonment. Such was the case for Adolf Hitler following the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch; while incarcerated, he had permission to receive visitors, and it was during that period that he wrote Mein Kampf. Yet the court ordered Ossietzky to serve his time in a common prison alongside thieves and murderers. Justice, many on Germany’s left grumbled, was only blind in the right eye.

Ossietzky insisted that his sentence was in keeping with the principles of his profession. “They may condemn us, today, tomorrow, the day after, [and] we will accept it,” he once wrote. “But our pride will be in … becoming more energetic, sharper, denser and tougher. That’s why we are journalists.” His stance inspired fellow members of the press.

Though it had not been his goal, by overseeing coverage of Germany’s militarism and facing judgment for it, Ossietzky also became a symbol for the German peace movement—and for those opposed to fascism. “If you want to fight effectively against the corrupt spirit of a nation,” he told a Die Weltbühne contributor, “you must share its fate.”

The day Ossietzky reported for his sentence, he made a final promise: When his friends saw him again, he would be “released but not reformed.” Hat in hand, he waved to the crowd and allowed himself to be swallowed by the prison’s redbrick walls.

“If you want to fight effectively against the corrupt spirit of a nation,” Ossietzky told a Die Weltbühne contributor, “you must share its fate.”

His freshly painted cell with its stone floor reminded Ossietzky of a bathroom. The food the prison gave him was meager. He needed a doctor’s permission to smoke, and was limited to ten cigarettes per day. But the situation wasn’t too terrible, he told his wife, Maud. He could read and write, at least. Ossietzky penned countless letters to supporters and to Die Weltbühne’s contributors. He drafted articles, smuggled out of Tegel by one of his lawyers, that were published under the pseudonym Thomas Murner. And he wrote to Maud with dozens of small requests: books, soap, lanolin for shaving, shoelaces, handkerchiefs, underwear. Sometimes he asked for paper, other times for envelopes.

Maud, a tiny Anglo-Indian woman with enormous brown eyes, did not have a battle-axe sensibility. She passed on many of Ossietzky’s requests to the magazine’s gruff but efficient operations manager, Hedwig Hünicke, whom one staff member referred to, with equal parts love and fear, as the “corset rods” of the publication.

Die Weltbühne forged ahead thanks to Hünicke and Hellmut von Gerlach, Ossietzky’s close friend and a longtime colleague in the peace movement. Gerlach was in his sixties, with a graying goatee and a boyish sense of humor. His weekly editorials drew on his wealth of experience as a journalist, a former politician, and the current chair of the German League of Human Rights. Gerlach supervised the production of 42 issues of the magazine in Ossietzky’s absence, publishing work by a dozen well-known male contributors and a few women, who wrote under male pseudonyms. 

Gerlach’s decades-younger companion, Milly Zirker, was one of those women. The fashionable Zirker worked as an editor for the daily 8 Uhr Abendblatt and wrote political commentary for Die Weltbühne under the name Johannes Bückler. According to Gerlach, Zirker was as tough in person as she was with words; she is said to have saved his life once during an antiwar protest that turned violent. Hilde Walter was another no-nonsense Die Weltbühne contributor, who wrote articles on unions and women’s issues. Friends described Walter as assertive and opinionated, but not ambitious or vain; sometimes rude but always honest.

In addition to keeping its own doors open, Die Weltbühne assisted the German League of Human Rights and the German branch of the PEN Club with collecting 42,036 signatures in support of a reduction in Ossietzky’s sentence. The petition failed, but Ossietzky was released early anyway as part of a mass amnesty pushed through parliament by an unusual alliance of representatives from the Nazi, Communist, and Social Democratic Parties. Ossietzky walked out of Tegel on December 22, after seven months and 12 days behind bars. He would not be free for long.

The second time Ossietzky disappeared into state custody, it was under guard in the dark morning hours of February 28, 1933. Hitler had been appointed chancellor four weeks prior, though the Nazis had not yet achieved a parliamentary majority. Elections were scheduled for March 5. Representatives of the German League of Human Rights knew that Ossietzky was on the Nazis’ arrest list, prepared in anticipation of the moment when the party gained full control of the government. Robert M.W. Kempner, a Berlin public prosecutor who would later become the U.S. chief counsel at the Nuremberg Trials, was one of many people who urged Ossietzky to leave the country. Just a few more days, Ossietzky said. He would wait until the election was over.

On the evening of February 27, Ossietzky sat quietly with close friends and listened to a radio report about an arson attack on the Reichstag. Then he returned home to Maud. The couple tried to sleep but couldn’t. They got up in the middle of the night and drank coffee, as if expecting the knock that eventually came at 3:30 a.m.

As the Reichstag smoldered, Hitler’s government used the incident as a pretext for exerting unprecedented powers. It ordered law enforcement to round up critics. The police came for socialists, pacifists, clergy members, lawyers, professors, artists, journalists, and writers. Under the watchful eyes of two officers, Ossietzky pulled on his clothes and told a terrified Maud not to worry. “Head up! I’ll be back soon,” he said. Maud, shocked by the night’s events, told herself that nothing too terrible could happen; after all, her husband had done nothing wrong.

Ossietzky was taken to police headquarters at Alexanderplatz. The corridors were packed with people under so-called protective custody. Members of parliament and the Constitutional Court, newspaper editors and novelists, peace activists and academics—all stood shoulder to shoulder. “The entirety of cultural bolshevism,” Egon Erwin Kisch, a flashy socialist reporter from Prague with a chest famously covered in tattoos, later marveled. “Everyone knew each other, and every time the police dragged in another one, we all greeted him.”

The guards were not the usual civil servants with shiny-elbowed suits, but animated young men with swastikas emblazoned on their arm bands. They addressed the detainees insolently and punctuated their commands with insults. Scumbags! Dirty swine! Eventually, they marched the large group to a single cramped cell in the basement.

A day later, the detainees were shuttled to the city’s old military prisons, which had been repurposed by the newly formed Geheime Staatspolizei, better known as the Gestapo. The days dragged on. In letters to Maud, Ossietzky put up a brave front. “My dearest Maudie,” he wrote. “I’ve been brought under sensibly; the cell is large and airy, the guards are friendly—there is no reason to complain. You shouldn’t fear that I’m doing poorly. Gradually I’ve gotten used to any situation I find myself in.” He encouraged her to rely on Hünicke, who already had ample practice arranging Ossietzky’s affairs.

By March 11, a steady flow of men had surfaced from the cells—the well-connected, people deemed minor players by the Nazis, and holders of foreign passports. Among them was Kisch, who emerged to a reception area full of wives desperate for news. He was promptly deported.

Many other political prisoners, including Ossietzky, waited another three weeks to learn their fate. Finally they were placed in chains, loaded into transport vehicles, and driven to the train station. There they were squeezed into boxcars and carried east, to a concentration camp.

TWO

Within days of the Reichstag fire, Die Weltbühne’s ranks had thinned dramatically. The magazine was prohibited from publishing, and many of its contributors fled to neighboring countries as quickly as trains and private cars could carry them.

By mid-March, Hünicke and Walter were about the only friends of Ossietzky’s remaining in Berlin who were willing and able to help him. They knew that the Gestapo was watching them. The authorities searched the magazine’s office in the first week of March, combing through files and confiscating boxes of papers. Officers unsuccessfully hassled Hünicke to name the people behind the magazine’s writers’ many pseudonyms. The police also raided Walter’s unit in Die Künstlerkolonie (the Artist’s Colony), a massive Art Deco complex in the Wilmersdorf neighborhood that offered affordable housing to the mostly left-leaning members of Berlin’s writers’ and stage-workers’ guilds. Officers blocked off major streets to the complex, used fire-engine ladders to enter upper-floor apartments via the balconies, and proceeded to arrest known Communists and confiscate Marxist literature.      

Walter sensed that the Nazis were not taking her and Hünicke very seriously, at least not yet. They had not arrested her, despite the fact that she was Jewish, a liberal journalist, and a card-carrying member of the anti-fascist German Social Democratic Party. She and Hünicke, who was not Jewish, decided that they would use their relative freedom, however long it lasted, to aid Ossietzky and his family.

Maud, in particular, presented a problem. Her mental health was rapidly deteriorating. She drank heavily, and Walter suspected she had been hallucinating when she reported that police had searched her home. Hünicke and Walter decided to send her to a sanatorium in one of the city’s lake-filled suburbs. Then they arranged for Rosalinde, the Ossietzkys’ 12-year-old daughter, to leave for England. In order to draw less attention to the departure, Maud stood at the end of the platform and nodded to the crying girl as her train left the station.

Everything cost money: Maud’s care, Rosalinde’s schooling, packages of food, cigarettes, and newspapers that Ossietzky managed to request from prison. Hünicke extracted some cash from what was left of Die Weltbühne’s unseized funds, but it wasn’t enough. Hünicke and Walter wrote letters to the expatriated German left and to sympathizers in England and the U.S., soliciting money. They hoped it might keep the family afloat. Soon they would need it to save Ossietzky’s life.

Ossietzky was one of the roughly 40,000 opponents of the Nazi regime who were rounded up in Prussia, Germany’s largest and most populous state, in the first few months of 1933. To house so many new detainees, the Nazis requisitioned abandoned factories, underused schools, military barracks, crumbling castles, and aging detention facilities. The 100-year-old prison compound known as Sonnenburg had closed in 1931 because of dangerous sanitary conditions. But there were cellblocks available to be filled, and by the first week of April, transports from Berlin began to arrive. In short order, the prison was occupied by a thousand men, including Ossietzky.

Once the detainees had exited the trains, locals in the town where Sonnenburg was located watched as officers beat the men with truncheons and forced them to sing the German national anthem while marching to their confinement. Some of the cells were without chairs or beds, so the men squatted on the cold ground or leaned against damp, mildewed walls. What sleep they managed to get was on piles of rotting straw. Their water came from a well in a courtyard, and they relieved themselves in chamber pots. 

The Gestapo administered Sonnenburg, but the prison was guarded by divisions from the paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA), whose members were known as brownshirts. The SA filled its ranks with fascism’s truest believers, men eager to take advantage of extrajudicial power. SA officers forced prisoners to sing Nazi songs and perform what was euphemistically called exercise. For hours each day, the men were required to lie on the ground, stand up, lie down and stand up, over and over again, until they were exhausted. Those who fainted or whose bodies gave out got a boot to the belly or a fist in the face.

Ossietzky deteriorated quickly in these conditions; he was often too weak to stand. He would lie without protest as drunken officers beat him and screamed, “You Polish pig, die already!”

Because the Nazis considered Ossietzky a traitor for Die Weltbühne’s revelations about Germany’s rearmament efforts, he was among those subjected to heightened cruelty. He was made to dig his own grave, on the pretext of being shot. He always seemed to be on latrine duty, forced to carry chamber pots at nose level across the prison yard. It took just six days at Sonnenburg for him to suffer his first heart attack.

Ossietzky’s few, sparse letters to Maud revealed nothing of this treatment—they had to pass through censors, after all—but press coverage of the camps was not encouraging to those worried about his fate. Journalists from the U.S. and England had taken a particular interest in the sudden disappearance of a large swath of the German left. Thanks largely to the testimony of released or escaped prisoners, word of the tortures at Sonnenburg trickled out: Detainees with lice were forced to pull out their pubic hair by the roots. Prisoners knelt while officers pricked their naked buttocks and sex organs with pins.

Reporters demanded to see the more famous political prisoners, wanting proof that they were alive. The braver corners of what remained of the free German press produced reports about Sonnenburg, regularly referencing Ossietzky’s detention. Among them was Die Neue Weltbühne, a version of Ossietzky’s magazine produced in exile, first from Vienna and then from Prague.

Critical coverage, no matter how minor, chafed at the Nazi government. But since Hitler’s regime was still eager to remain in the good graces of the democratic world, the government agreed to occasional press tours. One of the journalists who visited Sonnenburg in May 1933 was the Hearst Press Group correspondent Hubert Renfro Knickerbocker. A beanpole of a Texan with red hair, Knickerbocker had a talent for interviews, even with a subject as shifty as Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi’s minister of propaganda. Following a dinner conversation with Knickerbocker, in March 1932, Goebbels complained in his diary of feeling “squeezed dry like a lemon.” Still, Knickerbocker was extended an invitation to tour Sonnenburg, along with his bespectacled colleague, Louis P. Lochner, the Berlin bureau chief of the Associated Press.

The day of the visit, every cell door was thrown open. Prisoners were forced to sing work songs refashioned with fascist lyrics. Reporters were invited to ask any question of anyone, so long as it was under supervision. No one uttered a bad word about their captors.

Knickerbocker and Lochner had been on friendly terms with Ossietzky for years and sought him out. Questions about his treatment drew stiff, nonspecific responses. Then Knickerbocker broached the subject of books—what kind would Ossietzky request if it were possible for him to receive them? Lochner took note of a puckish smile that crossed Ossietzky’s face. “I think medieval history would be very apropos,” he dared to say.

Ossietzky would lie without protest as drunken officers beat him and screamed, “You Polish pig, die already!”

When the first opportunity for a family visit to Sonnenburg arose, in May 1933, Walter borrowed a car, drove Maud to the prison, and walked with Ossietzky’s wife to the visitors’ entrance. The young guard at the gate mistook the “von” in Maud’s last name as a sign that she was a member of Germany’s upper class, and assumed Walter was hired help. He allowed both women in. 

Once inside they watched Ossietzky approach across the wide, deserted prison yard. “Ossietzky could only move with great effort, with small, obviously painful steps,” Walter later wrote. “Both of his arms hung stiffly at his shoulders, as if his limbs were splinted, almost motionless … and his cervical vertebrae were tightly wrapped in a stiff gray soldier’s neckband, which prevented him from turning his head even a few centimeters to the right or left.” His body looked skeletal. Walter found his rigid expression during their short, near wordless encounter heartbreaking.

“How are you?” the women asked.

He answered in monotone, but with a meaningful pause: “Things are OK… for the moment.”

In his 1950 memoir, gestapo chief Rudolf Diels recalls hearing from Ossietzky’s friends and supporters about the conditions at Sonnenburg and feeling obliged to visit the prison himself. Contemporaries thought Diels was more of an opportunist than a fanatic. Prior to 1933, he had worked for the Prussian Ministry of the Interior and regularly socialized with left-leaning civil servants. He did not have the taste for cruelty that animated large swaths of his agency and the SA. And he did not brace himself for Sonnenburg. He later described it as a place from a demonic dream that made his blood run cold.

Upon entering the prison, Diels demanded to see Willi Kasper, a Prussian state representative for the German Communist Party who was being held there. Diels was escorted to a dungeon-like cell, where at the shout of “Attention!” men in tattered clothes slowly raised themselves to stand. Their swollen heads looked like pumpkins, Diels thought, and their faces were yellow, green, and blue. Welts and clotted blood speckled exposed skin. Kasper was unable to speak, his face contorted in tearless sobs. When Diels saw Ossietzky, the journalist dared to ask in a weak voice that someone rescue him from this hell.

In October 1933, Maud’s sanatorium closed after its Jewish owner was hounded into emigration. Maud was then packed off to distant relations in Hamburg. Walter’s apartment was searched again and again. In November, the Gestapo confiscated correspondence showing that she had been seeking funds on Ossietzky’s behalf. Walter didn’t need to be told to leave: She fled to Paris, leaving Hünicke as Ossietzky’s last close friend in enemy territory.

There were already more than 59,000 German refugees in France, including Gerlach and Zirker. Many in Paris gravitated to artist-friendly Montparnasse and neighborhoods along the Left Bank. Some found shelter in crumbling hotels. Others rented furnished apartments in shabby working-class buildings, sharing hallway bathrooms with masons and shop assistants. Many lived precariously, lightheaded with hunger, their shoes slowly falling to pieces.

Walter found a room at 59 Rue Froidevaux, across the street from the Montparnasse Cemetery. It was an easy walk to Rue Jean Dolent, where the German League of Human Rights kept a tiny office, occupied by Gerlach, Zirker, and a young law student turned volunteer named Konrad Reisner. Zirker served as Gerlach’s secretary while also playing a leading role with the Association of German Journalists in Exile.

From Paris, Gerlach, Zirker, Walter, and Reisner began their first attempts to rescue Ossietzky. They started with legal channels. In early 1934, they tried to hire Alfons Sack to represent Ossietzky and push for his release. Sack was a far-right lawyer who had effectively defended one of the men accused of plotting the Reichstag fire. He turned them down.

Ossietzky had well-connected supporters in London, including playwright Ernst Toller, peace activist Otto Lehmann-Russbüldt, and Ossietzky’s former lawyer, Rudolf Olden, and his wife, Ika. They all made attempts at backdoor political influence. With their help, Gerlach asked the Countess Fanny Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, sister-in-law of Hermann Göring, the second most powerful Nazi, to advocate for amnesty, but was told Hitler opposed the idea.

Lord Ponsoby, an English Labour member of Parliament with contacts in the German Embassy in London, funneled updates on Ossietzky’s health to his friends. Wickham Steed, the former editor of the London Times, published the first major public letter about Ossietzky in his old paper. “He is the symbol of a living protest against tyranny,” Steed wrote. “If it is too much to hope for his release, his claim to the sympathy of the civilized world ought not, I think, go entirely unheard.”

Nothing worked. The efforts at diplomatic and legal intervention went nowhere, as did the influence campaign. Ossietzky remained at Sonnenburg, deteriorating by the day. Fearing the worst, his friends decided to get creative.

THREE

The suggestion first appeared in the pages of the Pariser Tageblatt, produced by and for German exiles in France. On April 16, 1934, editor in chief Georg Bernhard made the case that Ossietzky should be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Days earlier, the Nobel committee had announced that there would be no winner for 1932. It had been a relatively common occurrence since 1914; in the chaotic years after World War I began, eight passed without a winner. But to skip another year without emphasizing the importance of peace, Bernhard ventured, would be a mistake. He urged the committee to look beyond the usual candidates: signatories of treaties, famous politicians, founders of influential organizations. If the prize was a metaphor for peace, who better to receive it than someone suffering for the cause—someone like Ossietzky?

Many of Ossietzky’s supporters quickly rallied behind the idea, hoping that the Nazis would be more likely to release Ossietzky if he won the prize. Gerlach followed Bernhard’s editorial with one of his own. “Before he became a journalist, he was general secretary of the German Peace Society,” Gerlach wrote of Ossietzky. “As a journalist, he championed the idea of ​​peace without wavering. As editor of the Weltbühne he led the fight against the armament of Germany in violation of the treaty.”

Some supporters took the suggestion as a direct call to action. One month after Bernhard’s editorial appeared, Ossietzky’s longtime friend Berthold Jacob sent a nomination letter to Oslo on behalf of the Strasbourg chapter of the German League of Human Rights. Kurt Grossman, who had once convinced the police to let Ossietzky say goodbye to his friends outside Tegel prison, did the same from exile in Prague.

Both men received polite letters of decline. The deadline for submitting nominations for 1934 had already passed. Besides, they learned, only a handful of people were allowed to nominate candidates: former Peace Prize recipients; members of the Nobel committee; members of international governing bodies, the international court in the Hague, or leading peace organizations; and professors of law, history, or philosophy. If Jacob and Grossman wished to secure a nomination for Ossietzky, they had until the prize’s next deadline, the following January, to find a qualified person to submit one.

The rejections provided something of a road map for action by Ossietzky’s friends. “We wanted to save this courageous and in every way excellent man, if possible, from death,” Konrad Reisner wrote years later. Of course, there was no guarantee that a nomination or even being awarded the prize would get Ossietzky out of prison. Still, it might send a message. “It was an incredible chance to deliver a resounding slap in the face to the hated, accursed criminals who had taken possession of our country,” Reisner wrote.

Not everyone in Ossietzky’s network was convinced that embarking on a Nobel campaign would be worth it. Among the skeptics was Walter. She worried that, because Ossietzky wasn’t as well-known as past recipients, it would take considerable work to raise his profile and get the right people in his corner. She also feared that his candidacy could backfire: Too much chatter from the German left in exile could infuriate the Nazis, who might punish Ossietzky for it. And if the Nazis found out that Ossietzky’s friends were behind the effort, they could easily discredit the campaign as a public relations stunt.

Walter agreed to set aside her misgivings under one key condition: Support for Ossietzky’s candidacy could not appear orchestrated by people who knew him. It needed to seem organic and independent, embraced by the public and by official nominators, ideally in countries likely to hold some influence with the Nazis. Only then, Walter believed, could Ossietzky’s supporters hope to exert moral pressure on Hitler’s government, possibly leading to their friend’s release from custody.

The next deadline was just eight months away—there was no time to waste. Walter and Gerlach reached out to their networks in the U.S., which included two Princeton professors, Albert Einstein and Otto Nathan. Einstein, the 1921 Nobel Prize winner in physics, had been a leading member of the League of Human Rights in his Berlin days, and while not himself eligible to nominate Ossietzky, he had enviable professional connections. Nathan, an economist, was similarly well-positioned and was able to provide an essential lift: the financial support to employ a full-time organizer of the behind-the-scenes work by Ossietzky’s inner circle.

This informal group of a few dozen supporters, scattered across Europe and the U.S., would come to call themselves Freundeskreis Ossietzkys, or Ossietzky’s Circle of Friends. It included Gerlach, Zirker, and Reisner in Paris, Grossman in Prague, and Hünicke in Berlin. From London, Toller, Lehmann-Russbüldt, and the Oldens played pivotal roles. The paid organizer was Hilde Walter.

If the prize was a metaphor for peace, who better to receive it than someone suffering for the cause—someone like Ossietzky?

By the time the Circle of Friends began to coordinate its efforts, Sonnenburg had closed as a prison, and its detainees were transferred to labor camps newly designed by the Nazis. In February 1934, Ossietzky and hundreds of others arrived at Esterwegen. The camp was one among a constellation of detention sites in Germany’s Emsland region, sunk into the moors 19 miles from the Dutch border. The prisoners’ burden was to support a massive 120,000-acre wetland reclamation project.

Esterwegen housed up to 1,000 prisoners in wooden barracks organized in two orderly rows, with a street running down the center. The SS called it Hitler Alley; prisoners knew it as the Alley of Sighs. Every morning, officers marched the prisoners through the alley and into the humid, waterlogged fields, where they were forced to dig, using only picks and spades, a minimum of 13 cubic yards daily. Men who failed to meet the daily quota risked violent punishment. (The prisoners became known, among themselves and later in popular culture, as the moorsoldaten, or “peat bog soldiers.” Their field songs would soon rally the Republicans of the Spanish Civil War and symbolize resistance to fascism across Europe.)

Already weakened from the abuse at Sonnenburg, Ossietzky relied on the help of fellow prisoners. They called him Carlchen, their “little Carl.” Out on the moors, they would place him in the middle of a row so the men alongside him could help him dig his quota. Tougher prisoners acted as human shields, placing themselves between Ossietzky and a beating. A former taxi-company operator and boxer from Berlin named Georg Schmidt sometimes followed Ossietzky around like a bodyguard, watching over him during even the briefest cigarette breaks.

Still, Ossietzky’s fragile body often gave out, and he spent weeks at a time in the sick bay. Nazi records did not reflect his declining condition. Reporting to the German Foreign Office just days before Ossietzky’s transfer to Esterwegen in February 1934, Gestapo representatives noted that his “health, according to the camp doctor’s professional opinion, has by no means worsened during his imprisonment, but rather improved.” Seven months later, Esterwegen’s doctor made a similar report: “Current illnesses: none, feels fine. Up until now had no complaints…. Healthy and capable of working. Has not suffered any accidents here.”

Ossietzky was often placed on what was known as household duty. He swept and dusted the barracks. He peeled potatoes in the kitchen. When no guards were around, he read aloud from newspapers until someone whispered, “Achtzehn!” The German word for the number 18 sounded very much like achtung (danger). Achtzehn was the code word for approaching guards. 

Fellow prisoners liked to hear Ossietzky talk. Many hailed from the working classes and participated in labor movements, and Ossietzky’s eloquence on political matters was a special treat. “It was always an experience for us to listen to him, discuss things with him, ask him questions and sometimes hear what he had to say in response to our objections,” prisoner Hubert Serwe later said. “He gave more than he could receive from us.^”

Ossietzky sometimes joined Theodor Haubach and Wilhelm Lueschner, former representatives in the Reichstag, in discussing literature. They talked animatedly, until they heard the soft call—

Achtzehn!

Sometimes the men would pretend that they were on Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm, their old stomping grounds. They’d meet at Kempinski’s, maybe, order the roast beef, and continue their discussions over a nightcap under the vault-like ceilings of the Romanisches Café—

Achtzehn!

Even in the sick bay, surrounded by emaciated leaders of Germany’s Workers Party, Ossietzky was tempted to make dark jokes: “Now that just about everyone is gathered here, we could form a provisional government”—

Achtzehn!

By all accounts, Ossietzky never talked about his experience at the camp, in letters or with other prisoners. He preferred to discuss the news, politics. When a topic interested him, prisoner Alfred Bender remembered, “Despite his tattered health, everything in him became lively.” Bender sometimes thought it would be wiser to try out some frivolous, less strenuous chatter. No luck. It was impossible, Bender admitted, to have a pedestrian conversation with Ossietzky.

From mid-1934 to early 1935, the campaign for Ossietzky’s Nobel candidacy gained steam. The flow of letters was constant—hundreds of messages written by or to the Circle of Friends, delivered from or sent to France, England, the U.S., Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and Czechoslovakia. Letters of introduction. Letters of request. Letters of instruction. Letters that in some places could be confiscated from homes, be intercepted in the post, or fall into the wrong hands, alerting the Nazis to what the Circle of Friends was up to and endangering Ossietzky’s life.

As coordinator of the campaign, Walter was a direct but careful communicator. She did what she could to maintain secrecy and urged others to do the same. Her letters were laced with warnings that increased in urgency as time went on: “Confidential.” “Extremely confidential!” “Interesting for us internally but under no circumstances for publicity.” “Confidential! Read alone!! Don’t show anyone!!!” Walter knew that the key to success was keeping the Circle of Friends’ involvement in making Ossietzky a Nobel candidate hidden from the Nazis.

The Circle of Friends and its closest advisers drummed up several nominations before the submission deadline. Einstein, Nathan, and Oswald Garrison Villard, the former editor of The Nation, helped recruit Jane Addams to the cause. The 1931 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Addams had founded the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and was one of ten cofounders of the American Civil Liberties Union. She was joined in nominating Ossietzky by Harold Laski, a professor at the London School of Economics; Helene Stöcker, a German feminist and activist who was on the council of the International Peace Bureau; and Ludwig Quidde, the aged former German Peace Society president and 1927 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Quidde provided his support reluctantly. Like Walter had been, he was concerned that Ossietzky was too much of a long shot to win the prize, and that nominating him could threaten his safety.

Another nomination came from V. Emil Scherer, a member of the Swiss parliament. “No other advocate for the idea of ​​peace has had to suffer as much,” he wrote. It would be nice, he added, “if the Nobel Prize were awarded not to a famous Prime Minister or Foreign Minister,” but instead to someone who distinguished himself “through loyalty and fearless work in a dangerous position.”

With several nominations secured, Walter turned her attention to increasing Ossietzky’s profile around the world, and particularly in England. The country still clung to appeasement as a viable approach to the Nazi regime, and Ossietzky’s supporters hoped that English nominations might be viewed as less politically motivated. Ossietzky, who by now had been informed of the campaign, seemed to think that this was the right strategy, too. “On the whole, he expressed the wish that everything that happens should, if possible, only happen from England,” Walter wrote, “and that publications should not be in our press, but in the bourgeois world press.”

For help, Walter turned to English journalist Amabel Williams-Ellis, who wrote a pamphlet entitled “What Was His Crime? The Case of Carl von Ossietzky.” It was distributed to influential readers and gained support from some of the most illustrious members of the English intelligentsia, including Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell, and Virginia Woolf.

The Circle of Friends faced setbacks. In August 1935, Gerlach died suddenly. And even the most energetic of Ossietzky’s supporters worried that the nomination would not gain traction. Willy Brandt was then a 21-year-old Socialist Workers Party organizer sheltering in Norway. Brandt hustled in Oslo to stoke interest in Ossietzky’s candidacy among journalists and members of the Norwegian parliament. By the end of September, though, he worried in a letter that too many people thought “O. is not well-known enough.”

In October 1935, Swiss diplomat Carl Jacob Burkhardt managed to enter Esterwegen on behalf of the International Red Cross. During his visit, Burkhardt asked to see Ossietzky. At first the camp commander refused, relenting only with extreme reluctance. The reason became apparent when a pair of guards emerged from the barracks carrying a small, frail man. Burkhardt stood face to face with a trembling, deathly pale Ossietzky and took heartbroken inventory: “One eye swollen, teeth apparently smashed in, dragging a broken, poorly healed leg.”

Burkhardt told Ossietzky that he had come as a representative of the Red Cross, but that he also brought greetings from Ossietzky’s friends. “I’m here, in as much as it is possible, to help you,” he said.

At first, Ossietzky said nothing as his eyes filled with tears. When he spoke, he lisped through sobs. “Thank you, tell my friends I’m at the end,” he said. “It’ll be over soon, almost finished. That’s good.” After a moment’s pause, very softly, he added, “Thank you.”

Burkhardt remained to see the five o’clock return of imprisoned workers from the moors. There were about 30 men in all, “a group full of Ossietzkys, cripples emerging from the darkness, under the light of the arching lamps.”

Burkhardt sent reports about his visit to the Nazi government. He arranged for one to be delivered to Hitler directly. There would be no plausible deniability about camp abuses on Burkhardt’s watch.

Walter also heard from numerous prisoners released from Esterwegen, who had found their way to Berlin, Prague, or Paris. She was told that the Circle of Friends’ efforts sometimes made things worse for Ossietzky. “He is said to have said to his wife: ‘The articles abroad have done me great harm,’ ” Walter wrote. “But later he was said to have thought that it might actually be a good thing after all.”

In a letter to Ika Olden, Walter reasoned that “Ossietzky would not be alive today if the international world had not shown an interest in him.” At that same time, she feared that the Nazi apparatus would let him die if the attention fell away. The day the Nobel committee made its decision, she wrote, could be “a death sentence for Ossietzky, if not enough care is taken.”

FOUR

On November 19, 1935, the Nobel committee announced that it would not award a Peace Prize that year. Whatever fears they had, Walter and Ossietzky’s other supporters decided that they had no choice but to double down in the hope of keeping Ossietzky alive. Walter quickly placed an announcement in Le Temps and Le Populaire, France’s biggest dailies, declaring that Ossietzky would be nominated for the prize again, with support from “a large number of important people in Europe and America.” The next Nobel deadline was about two months away, in January 1936.

In Paris, Ossietzky’s supporters published a star-studded appeal designed to attract attention. The 22-page document included a biographical sketch of Ossietzky’s life and a list of Esterwegen’s abhorrent conditions. Heinrich Mann, the German novelist—elder brother of Thomas—provided a foreword. So did journalist and historian Konrad Heiden, one of the first chroniclers of the Nazi era. An appendix shared letters of support from, among others, Einstein, Wickham Steed, and Romain Roland, the beloved French writer and winner of the 1915 Nobel Prize in Literature. Hundreds of copies were sent to professors and members of parliament in nine countries.

Soon, nominations began inundating the Nobel committee. One came from 63 members of France’s Parliament, who cosigned a statement saying, “For millions of people around the world, Ossiesky [sic] is a living symbol of the intrepid struggle for peace.” Leo Polack, a professor of philosophy from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, wrote, “Carl von Ossietzky dedicated his life to international pacifism in the spirit of the prize, even to the point of martyrdom.”

Serendipitous timing may have boosted the campaign’s efforts. The world’s eyes were trained with particular intensity on Germany in 1936, as it hosted both the winter and summer Olympics. The Nazis had hoped to make the events a showcase for their “new” Germany, but as the international press descended for the Winter Games in February, journalists noted the overbearing presence of soldiers and the signs barring Jews from entering villages—worrying indicators to the international community that all was not well in Germany.

Meanwhile, Ossietzky’s health had worsened. Karl Wloch, a journalist for the communist newspaper Die Rote Fahne who was interned at Esterwegen in 1936, was “shocked to his core” the first time he met Ossietzky. “What I saw living on that sack of hay were just his eyes; he hardly moved his mouth when he asked me short questions,” Wloch later said. “I had to listen carefully in order to understand him.” Ossietzky asked for the latest news from Berlin and listened closely as Wloch reported what he knew. “He wasn’t at all world-weary,” Wloch recalled, “although he knew how difficult it would be to come out of the grasp of the SS executioners alive.”

Their conversation turned to cases of suicide in the camps. “Whether we survive is neither certain nor the main point,” Ossietzky insisted. “But how people think about us later is as important as that they think about us. In that, our future lies. Thus, we have to keep living here as long as we breathe. A Germany that thinks of us will be a better Germany.”

Sixty-three members of France’s Parliament cosigned a statement saying, “For millions of people around the world, Ossiesky [sic] is a living symbol of the intrepid struggle for peace.”

As Ossietzky’s candidacy for the Nobel Peace Prize received more coverage in the international press, the Nazis began to worry that he might actually win. Goebbels himself took to the radio on March 12, 1936, to rage at the prospect. “Treason was once a socially acceptable thing, even a fashionable thing,” he yelled. “And there are still people today who apply for prizes for traitors. However, we only saw a traitor as a criminal. Therefore: Off with his head!”

A few weeks after Goebbels’s speech, the Dutch press reported that Ossietzky was close to death, based on testimony from a prisoner in Esterwegen. The New York Times reprinted the news. The same month, a concentration camp inspector, Theodor Eicke, toured Esterwegen. His internal memo about the visit stated that SS chief Heinrich Himmler’s office should be aware of the possibility of Ossietzky’s imminent demise. It further suggested that Ossietzky receive medical attention at the camp, and that it be documented to counter the inevitable outcry his death would elicit.

Instead, on May 28, the Nazis transferred Ossietzky from Esterwegen to the prisoner’s wing of the Berlin Police State Hospital. The hospital’s supervising physician diagnosed him with an advanced case of tuberculosis. Bacteria had carved deep necrotic caves into the upper lobe of his left lung. In a report to the Red Cross, the Gestapo downplayed his illness as tonsillitis. The Nazis also arranged for Ossietzky to sit for an interview with a regime-friendly Danish journalist, Hans-Wolff Juergensen, in the hospital’s prison ward. Juergensen wrote that Ossietzky was completely changed and on his way to embracing National Socialism.

Then, just a few weeks before the Nobel committee was set to announce its decision for the 1936 award, Maud learned that the Gestapo planned to release her husband, provisionally. Walter suspected that the decision was about optics, that the regime preferred the prize to go “to a free [Ossietzky] rather than to the prisoner.”

On November 7, Maud and Hünicke met Ossietzky at the Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. They held their breath as the last bits of paperwork were completed, then hastily exited the doors and emerged into the loud city center. Maud paused just long enough to notice the look of uncertainty on Ossietzky’s pale face. He had been imprisoned for three years and seven months—how could he trust a freedom that came so slowly, then all at once?

Attempts by the Nazis to ensure that Ossietzky didn’t win the Peace Prize weren’t over. Göring himself summoned Ossietzky to his office and tried to persuade him to withdraw himself from consideration. Ossietzky made no concessions. The German ambassador to Norway, Heinrich Sahm, warned his host country that an award for Ossietzky would be considered a hostile act, and that Germany would respond accordingly. There was only so much the Norwegian parliament could do, though; it had the power to select the Nobel committee, but the committee did not consult the government about its decisions. In order to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, the two committee members who were also politicians—foreign minister Halvan Koht and Johan Mowinckel, former prime minister and leader of the Liberal Party—stepped away from their award responsibilities.

By the time the Nobel committee was expected to make its decision, nearly 1,000 nominators had submitted their support for Ossietzky. They included six previous Peace Prize recipients, 69 members of the Norwegian parliament, and 59 members of Swedish parliament, who chose to support his candidacy over that of their own prince’s. Ossietzky’s nomination count remains the highest in the award’s history.

On November 23, the committee made its announcement. The 1936 Nobel Peace Prize went to Carlos Saavedra Lamas, the foreign minister of Argentina, for his leadership in brokering the 1933 Argentine Antiwar Pact, which would prove a vital stabilizing force in South America for years to come. The committee also retroactively bestowed the 1935 prize to Carl von Ossietzky.

The exiled German press in Paris exploded in celebration. The news made the front page of the Pariser Tageszeitung, the successor to the Tageblatt. An editorial in Das Neue Tage-Buch called the decision “an exceptional case of moral courage” in a world that sadly lacked it. The international press offered a more blunt interpretation: Ossietzky’s prize was a “slap in the face of fascism,” according to The New York Times.

The German press, now thoroughly beholden to the Nazis, agreed that the decision was an affront to the country’s leadership. “The bestowal of the Nobel Prize on a notorious traitor to the nation is such a brazen provocation and insult of the new Germany, it will be met with an appropriate response,” the German News Agency said in a brief statement. Editors of the Völkischer Beobachter, another official organ of the Nazi Party, didn’t issue a response for three days. When it finally did, it called the Nobel committee’s decision ridiculous. “One could laugh themselves to death” over it, the editors said.

Three days after the announcement, Goebbels complained in his diary, “Yesterday: huge response in the press because of the Nobel Prize to Ossietzky. He’ll be stripped of citizenship and no more Germans will take the Nobel Prize.” Instead, Hitler announced the country’s own awards program, the German National Order of Art and Science. It ran for two years and honored seven Nazi luminaries, including Alfred Rosenberg, the primary theorist of the party’s racist ideology (later hanged at Nuremberg), and SS officer Ferdinand Porsche, whom Hitler had commissioned to engineer a car for the German people, better known as the Volkswagen.

The Circle of Friends acknowledged one another quietly. Securing the prize for Ossietzky had taken the efforts of everyone in the group, but no one had done as much as Walter. “You should be proud,” Konrad Heiden wrote to her. “As far as I can see, it was you in the first place. Surely others also did their good part. But if the recognition of a political possibility, concentration on the one goal, complete commitment of the person and tenacity until the last breath turn a political idea into an action, then you have undoubtedly brought this action into being.”

FIVE

The Nobel Peace Prize ceremony took place in Oslo on December 10, 1936. Ossietzky did not attend, nor did Maud; the Nazis withheld the necessary travel visas. Also absent were the Norwegian king and the crown prince. The same was true of ambassadors from England, Italy, and Denmark, whose governments had ordered them to stay home. An ensemble played the Norwegian anthem but not the German one.

Frederik Stang, a professor of law at the University of Oslo and a former minister of justice, stood before the thin crowd and read a short speech about Ossietzky on behalf of the Nobel committee. Stang opened by emphasizing that Ossietzky did not belong to any political party, and in fact no political tag could easily be pinned on him. If anything, he said, Ossietzky was a “liberal of the old school,” with “a burning love for freedom of thought and expression; a firm belief in free competition in all spiritual fields; a broad international outlook; a respect for values created by other nations—and all of these dominated by the theme of peace.”

He conceded that the laureate was mainly known for his work as a journalist, but disputed the notion that Ossietzky was less deserving of the award because he had become “a symbol of the struggle for peace rather than its champion.”

“In religion, in politics, in public affairs, in peace and war, we rally round symbols. We understand the power they hold over us,” Stang said. “But Ossietzky is not just a symbol. He is something quite different and something much more. He is a deed; and he is a man…. It is on these grounds that Ossietzky has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and on these grounds alone.”

Walter made the journey to Oslo, as a messenger rather than an honored guest. She hoped to persuade the Nobel foundation’s treasurer to postpone sending Ossietzky’s monetary award—163,849 Norwegian kroner, or close to $900,000 today—to Germany. Walter was not alone in fearing that the prize money would fall into the wrong hands. (Ultimately it did: The lawyer Maud hired to oversee the transfer pocketed it and was later convicted of embezzlement.)

Oslo was dark and cold. A hotel strike sent Walter looking for shelter at the home of a local journalist, where she squeezed herself nightly into a child’s bed. Her letters to Zirker in Paris conveyed exhaustion. “The physical hindrances caused by lack of sleep, lack of space, warmth and comfort are terrible for me,” Walter wrote in a moment of unusual vulnerability. “Hands and other places are chapped and sore from the cold.” Other passages in her letters were perhaps intentionally vague. “A lot of other things … wouldn’t be so bad if the fear about the end didn’t come,” she wrote. “I think I can say with a clear conscience that it couldn’t have been done better. But that doesn’t say anything about the final success.”

Walter did not specify what that success would look like, but she may well have meant a plan to get the Ossietzkys safely out of Germany. Officially, Ossietzky wasn’t a prisoner any longer, but Gestapo documents show that the Nazis had no intention of letting him leave the country. Whatever Walter hoped, Ossietzky’s illness was too advanced for him to travel anyway. In February 1937, two months after the Nobel committee had toasted his win, Maud moved into her husband’s hospital room. They stayed there together for 15 months, under strict supervision of the Gestapo.

During that time, Ossietzky wrote letters to his daughter, now living in Sweden. “Our life here is completely uneventful; we don’t have much to report,” Ossietzky wrote. “We think about you a lot; you are our major topic of discussion. I would like to know so much about you! Write us again, it is so nice to get letters from you. I kiss you, your Father.” He read English detective novels, including The Wisdom of Father Brown and Mystery in the Channel. He watched over a little yellow parakeet, a gift from his nurse, which sat in a cage on his bedside table.

Ossietzky died on May 4, 1938, at age 48. “The death of Carl von Ossietzky is a sad loss for the Germany in which I believe,” Ernst Toller wrote in a letter to a friend. “I have known this man since many years. He was one of the few who lived conformed to his ideas.”

Maud planned to engrave pax aeterna on her husband’s headstone, but the Gestapo refused to place any marker on his burial plot in the Berlin-Niederschönhausen cemetery. They wanted an anonymous resting place for the traitor who had become a martyr. No pilgrims would grace Ossietzky’s gravesite on their watch, and no eternal peace would dawn on their horizon.

Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. France and Great Britain declared war two days later. Most of Ossietzky’s friends in European exile scrambled to find a new sanctuary. A way out opened for the Oldens when the New School for Social Research in New York City offered Rudolf a teaching position. On September 13, 1940, the couple joined 406 passengers and crew—including 90 children—on the SS City of Benares. A German submarine torpedoed the ship, sinking it 600 miles from land. More than half of those on board drowned, including the Oldens.

The Paris team needed rescuing. Ossietzky’s friends survived for several weeks in a French internment camp before catching the attention of the Emergency Rescue Committee and the American Friends Service Committee, American relief groups dedicated to relocating anti-fascist refugees. Late in the summer of 1940, organizers arranged U.S. visas and passage on the SS Nea Helles for Walter, Zirker, and Reisner, accompanied by his wife and 16-day-old baby. The ship was departing from the Port of Lisbon, so Ossietzky’s friends had to escape France on foot, walking into Spain across the Pyrenees. Berthold Jacob also attempted to escape but only made it as far as Lisbon, where he was kidnapped by SS operatives and dragged back to Berlin. Kurt Grossman had a less harrowing journey; he settled in New York City and spent the war advocating for refugees with the World Jewish Congress.

Hedwig Hünicke never left Berlin. She struggled to make ends meet by working for small publishing houses. She kept watch over the elderly parents of exiled Jewish colleagues until they were moved to the death camps. After her family home was destroyed in the war, she lived in a cold, damp room in an apartment near Nollendorfplatz, and worked in the circulation department at the Tagesspiegel. She stayed there until her retirement in 1958.

Walter returned in 1952 to a city decimated. With so many familiar buildings gone, homecomers had to rely on street signs, like tourists, even in the neighborhoods of their youth. Once Walter had settled back in the formerly fashionable west end, she again contributed articles to the German press and worked on book projects. Sometimes she’d meet her childhood friend, the once famous trial reporter Gabriele Tergit, at Café Reimann, an old haunt still standing on the Kurfürstendamm. Their talk often turned to Ossietzky. Walter clipped any and all postwar coverage she could find about the man, filling her apartment with binders full of articles. Many she had written herself.

At some point, Walter contemplated publishing a lengthier account of Ossietzky’s story. Among her papers at the Munich Institute for Contemporary History, sandwiched between newspaper clippings and letters typed on tissue-like paper, is an undated book proposal. The 30-page document contains a tidy outline and descriptions for 14 chapters. The project’s title, Der Preis für einen Friedenspreis (The Price of a Peace Prize), suggests a behind-the-scenes account of the Nobel campaign. But what Walter plotted instead was a rather anemic biography of its subject.

As for the Circle of Friends, the proposal contains only one oblique reference to a “narrowly limited group of people based in Paris.” Her papers do not contain any correspondence with publishers, making it impossible to know whether she submitted the book idea for consideration.

Ossietzky was a legend. His name adorned street signs, libraries, and schools across Germany.

What was the price for the Nobel Prize? When she chose her title, Walter may have had Ossietzky’s suffering in mind. Arguably, too, Walter accepted a personal cost—that all she had done for Ossietzky would go largely unknown, in order to preserve the idea that he had received the Peace Prize as a result of a groundswell of international support rather than a hard-fought political campaign.

Prior to Walter’s death in 1976, no one had disclosed the full activities of the Circle of Friends, not even Grossmann, whose 1963 biography of Ossietzky told all manner of stories in its nearly 600 pages. It wasn’t until some 50 years after Ossietzky’s death that a complete picture of his supporters’ quest emerged. In 1988, the University of Hamburg organized an exhibit about the Circle of Friends and published a corresponding book. The University of London published a collection of letters from the Oldens’ papers in 1990, further illuminating the group’s efforts. 

By then Ossietzky was a legend. His name adorned street signs, libraries, and schools across Germany; his statue stood in parks. He had become a physical part of the postwar landscape, the one that elected his supporter Willy Brandt, first as mayor of Berlin, and later as chancellor of the republic.

Brandt did not let Walter go entirely uncelebrated. On her 70th birthday in 1965, just over a decade prior to her death, he presented her with Germany’s Federal Cross of Merit. Unlike the Nobel, this prize, which honors service to the public good, is not a mighty weapon of influence. Since 1951, the German government has handed out more than 262,000 of the small red, black, and gold crosses. The number is so high, in fact, that the Office of the Federal President does not keep a comprehensive list of recipients, nor does it document exactly what each award is meant to praise.

Of this kind of muted recognition, Walter surely approved.

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