Nobel Committee Lists Past Winners Who Gave Away Prize – Including to Hitler’s Top Nazi Propagandist

(Alex Brandon/AP photo)

Norway’s Nobel Committee issued a pointed reminder on Friday that its Peace Prize remains “inseparably linked” to the laureate it selects – regardless of what the winner later chooses to do with the medal – before helpfully listing past instances in which prizes had been given away.

Among them was a Norwegian novelist who once gifted his Nobel medal to Nazi Germany’s chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels.

The clarification arrived a day after 2025 Peace Prize laureate and Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado visited the Oval Office to gift her medal to President Donald Trump.

Speaking to Fox & Friends on Friday, Machado said the president “deserved” the prize and that she was giving it to him “on behalf of the people of Venezuela,” crediting his administration with the capture and removal of Nicolás Maduro.

Ahead of that meeting, the Nobel Committee had already stressed that a prize “cannot be revoked, shared, or transferred to others,” but with Trump publicly displaying the medal, the committee followed up on Friday with a press release and doubled down on the technicalities while widening the historical frame.

“The award is inseparably linked to the laureate,” the committee reiterated, before adding that the Nobel Foundation’s statutes place no limits on what winners may do with the physical prize. Laureates, it noted, are free to “keep, give away, sell, or donate” the medal, diploma, or prize money.

What followed was a list of precedents, medals loaned to museums, donated to institutions, or presented to governments. Only one example on the committee’s list, however, involved a laureate travelling abroad to personally honour a political figure.

That case was Norwegian author Knut Hamsun, the Nobel Prize for Literature winner in 1920.

“In 1943, […] Hamsun travelled to Germany and met with Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels,” the committee noted. “After returning to Norway, he sent his Nobel medal to Goebbels as a gesture of thanks for the meeting. Goebbels was honoured by the gift. The present whereabouts of the medal are unknown.”

The committee offered no direct comment on Machado or Trump.