Recently a lot of weblogs have been outraged over comments made by Norwegian Hanna Kvanmo who sits on the Nobel Peace Prize committee. Kvanmo expressed regrets that the committee had awarded Israel’s Shimon Peres the award — but, of course, she apparently thinks Yasser Arafat has done a standup job of upholding the prize’s values.
Fredrik Norman fills in the rest. Ms. Kvanmo’s position is a bit easier to understand in light of her activities during World War II.
On April 9, 1940, Nazi Germany invaded Norway and conquered it in about two months. Kvanmo was one of about 1,000 young Norwegian women who joined the German Red Cross and went to work on the eastern front taking care of Nazi soldiers.
While the Nazis were rampaging across Europe, leaving death and destruction in their wake, Kvanmo chose to spend the war helping to treat war criminals (among other things, Kvanmo and others treated the wounds of members of the SS).
At the end of the war, many of these nurses were returned to Norway where they were sentenced to varying terms of prison for aiding the enemy.
Leave it to a woman who aided the Nazi war effort to lecture the rest of the world about peace.