Norway’s Hanna Kvanmo, who sits on the Nobel Peace Prize committee sparked a controversy when she said that she and other committee members regretted awarding Shimon Peres the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 and wished they could take that decision back. Of course, Kvanmo apparently thinks Yasser Arafat has done a standup job of upholding the prize’s values and said nothing about Palestinian terrorism.
What’s going on here? Fredrik Norman fills in the details. 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 subsequently 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.
Source:
The 9th of April. Fredrik Norman, April 9, 2002.