I was reading Max Planck's Nobel Lecture when I noticed that it was dated 1920, despite him having won the prize for 1918. Digging deeper I found out that in 1917:
Charles Glover Barkla received his Nobel Prize one year later, in 1918. During the selection process in 1917, the Nobel Committee for Physics decided that none of the year's nominations met the criteria as outlined in the will of Alfred Nobel. According to the Nobel Foundation's statutes, the Nobel Prize can in such a case be reserved until the following year, and this statute was then applied. Charles Glover Barkla therefore received his Nobel Prize for 1917 one year later, in 1918.
and in 1918:
Max Planck received his Nobel Prize one year later, in 1919. During the selection process in 1918, the Nobel Committee for Physics decided that none of the year's nominations met the criteria as outlined in the will of Alfred Nobel. According to the Nobel Foundation's statutes, the Nobel Prize can in such a case be reserved until the following year, and this statute was then applied. Max Planck therefore received his Nobel Prize for 1918 one year later, in 1919.
I certainly understand cancelling the Nobel Prizes because of the war, as was done in 1916, but why this business of deferring by a year? Was the hope in 1917 that the war would be over by the time Nobel's will forced them to award it but then it wasn't so they were forced to award it and then tried the same trick in 1918 (given that the war didn't end until November)? A similar thing seems to have happened to the Nobel Prize in Chemistry where as the other Nobel Prizes (Medicine, Peace and Literature) seem to have largely not been granted at all during that period.
I can find surprisingly little mention anywhere that this funny business happened at all, much less the exact reasons that it happened. Why did the Physics and Chemistry committees meet, where other prizes didn't, if they had no intention of granting the prize? Was it really just a stall tactic in hope that the war would be over in a year?
In both World War I and World War II, various Nobel Committees decided to "reserve" prizes for future years. This had both practical and political components. Practical because Europe was particularly in disarray during the wars, and the Nobel Prize committees were not exempt from that. Scientific communications became difficult, as did movement. So that's one good reason to say, "let's put this off for a few years."
There are other factors, though, as well. In both WWI and WWII the scientific communities were themselves hardly apolitical. The scientists were literally engaged in the fighting against one another (Fritz Haber, Nobelist in Chemistry for 1918, literally orchestrated the gas attacks on the Western Front in WWI), and were also engaged in fierce wars of words (literally words — the Germans and British scientists both temporarily changed the terms they used in science, banishing competing phrases from each other's scientific vocabularies, e.g., the difference between calling them X-rays versus Roentgen rays).
These kinds of considerations were evident on the Nobel committees and created situations where the even the most apolitical committees feared that awarding a prize to a German, or an Englishman, or a Frenchman, etc., would be seen as a political statement. So the ability to delay the prize was seen as a useful tool. (In World War II, with German recipients this was very pronounce, because Hitler had banned the acceptance of Nobel Prizes by Germans. So Otto Hahn was quietly told he was going to get the Prize in 1944, but it was delayed so that he would not have to renounce it. As it was, he got the Prize in 1945, while he was in detention by the Allies, and so he had to delay his actual acceptance of it.)
I do not know the details of most of the committees. But for 1916, for example, we know that the Physics Committee did meet because they wanted to give the prize to Johannes Stark. But they feared that by doing so they would be perceived as political, as Stark was not only a German but a very outspoken one. So they curiously decided to label Stark's work as interesting but of "uncertain significance" — not because they believed it, but because under the Nobel guidelines they could use that as an excuse to delay the prize decision (where they could not just use the war itself as an excuse), and to delay any finalized decision on Stark, thus reserving him for the future.
Which is only to say: yes, they did use this as a stall tactic, but the considerations they had were actually pretty complicated. It should also be noted that the 1919 decision involved several decisions, not just Planck: it was decided to give prizes to Haber, Stark, and Planck — three Germans, and one of them (Haber) a very controversial one. One scholar (Widmalm, below), says very clearly that:
The award of the Nobel prize to three German professors should be seen as an attempt by the majority of members of the Academy of Sciences to help rehabilitate German science and to re-establish the old bonds between Sweden and Germany. This was indeed how the academy's choice was interpreted by those who favoured it, in Sweden abroad.
For some discussion of the 1916 prize, see Robert Marc Friedman, "Text, Context, and Quicksand: Method and Understanding in Studying the Nobel Science Prizes," Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 20, no. 1 (1989), 63-77. Friedman references several other studies of prizes; this is a topic of some interest amongst historians of science. The one paper I have seen that discusses in depth prize decisions of 1919 (mostly focused on the Haber decision), see Sven Widmalm, "Science and Neutrality: The Nobel Prizes of 1919 and Scientific Internationalism in Sweden," Minerva 33, no. 4 (December 1995), 339-360. For an excellent discussion of the politicization of physics in Europe during World War I, see Stefan L. Wolff, "Physicists in the 'Krieg der Geister': Wilhelm Wien's 'Proclamation'," Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 33, no. 2 (2003), 337-368.
^(Side note: in that photo of Hahn at Ypres, 1915, one can also see two other future Nobelists: his assistants Otto Hahn — first on the left — and James Franck — third from the right.)
