Carl von Ossietzky's 1935 Nobel Peace Prize prompted Hitler to decree that no German could accept any Nobel Prize

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Carl von Ossietzky, a German pacifist journalist imprisoned by the Nazis for his reporting on Germany's secret rearmament, was awarded the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize (announced and presented in 1936, while he remained in custody). The award was itself controversial at the time — Norway's King Haakon VII, who had attended other award ceremonies, stayed away from this one, and two committee members resigned in protest — and it provoked a head-of-state reaction with consequences well beyond Ossietzky's own case. The Nobel Foundation's own page states plainly: "Hitler denied Ossietzky permission to visit Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize and proclaimed that no German could accept any Nobel Prize in the future."

That 1937 proclamation was a blanket decree, not a ruling on Ossietzky's case specifically — it barred any German national from accepting a Nobel Prize in any category, a punitive reaction to a human-rights embarrassment that reached forward into fields with no connection to Ossietzky's journalism or imprisonment. Ossietzky died in 1938, still in custody. The decree's downstream effect — trapping scientists in unrelated fields in forced declines years later — is documented separately in claim-hitler-decree-forced-domagk-kuhn-nobel-science-declines.