Background
Carl von Ossietzky was born in Hamburg on 3 October 1889, the son of Germanized descendants of a Polish Catholic family.
Carl von Ossietzky was born in Hamburg on 3 October 1889, the son of Germanized descendants of a Polish Catholic family.
Conscripted into the army where he served as an infantryman during World War I, his earlier pacifist convictions hardened into a profound detestation of all forms of militarism. In 1920 he was appointed Secretary of the German Peace Society in Berlin and two years later helped found the pacifist Nie Wieder Krieg organization. Involved in the founding of the Republican Party in 1924, von Ossietzky became associate editor of the daily Berliner Volkszeitung and a regular contributor to the left-wing political weekly. Die Weltbuhne (The World Stage). In 1927 von Ossietzky assumed the editorship of this periodical, which was the organ of the non-partisan, left-wing intelligentsia and espoused such radical causes as sexual and penal reform, reconciliation with France and working-class unity. Von Ossietzky concentrated his fire in particular against German chauvinism, militarism and attempts to rearm Germany secretly in defiance of the Versailles Treaty.
In a scandalous trial he was accused of treason and sentenced in November 1931 by the Leipzig Supreme Court to eighteen months’ imprisonment for providing details about the secret reconstruction of the German air force. In fact this ‘secret’ information had already been mentioned in a Reichstag debate and observance of the Versailles Treaty stipulations was even written into the German Constitution.
Refusing to flee abroad when the Nazis came to power, von Ossietzky resumed publication of Die Weltbuhne. He was arrested immediately after the Reichstag fire in February 1933 and sent to Papenburg-Esterwegen concentration camp as an ‘enemy of the State’. Suffering from tuberculosis, which he contracted in the camp, he was transferred to a Berlin prison hospital in May 1936. While still an inmate in Esterwegen, von Ossietzky had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 1935, an action which infuriated the Nazis. Hitler responded with a decree of 30 January 1937 forbidding Germans to accept any Nobel Prize in the future.
While in custody, von Ossietzky’s condition deteriorated still further and he was finally transferred to a public hospital in Berlin, where he died on 4 May 1938.
Amnestied in December 1932, von Ossietzky continued to fight the bias of the judiciary and attack the abuses of militarism. Embracing the communist thesis that fascism was already in power (under Chancellor Briining), von Ossietzky failed to distinguish clearly between bourgeois democracy and National Socialism, a mistake for which he was to pay with his life.
Quotations: 'Nothing is more devastating for the cause of peace and democracy, than the omnipotence of the generals’.
An office employee in Hamburg, von Ossietzky married an Englishwoman in 1913.