The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences gives out the Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry. In 1940, 1941, and 1942, they did not award any prizes due to WWII.
However, in 1943, they started up again, and subsequently gave the 1943 prize in Physics to Otto Stern (born in Germany), the 1944 prize to Isidor Isaac Rabbi (born in Austria-Hungary), and the 1945 prize to Wolfgang Pauli (born in Vienna).
Stern and Rabbi were Jewish, and Pauli, though raised Catholic, was of Jewish descent and the Nazis certainly would have considered him Jewish. All three certainly deserved their prizes, but it makes me wonder if the Swedes intended to send a message as well with their choices.
Why did the Royal Academy choose to start back up in 1943, despite the fact that the war was definitely still ongoing? And did it cause them any problems as a "neutral" country to be awarding Jewish-American scientists, two of whom were born in Nazi Germany and later fled?
EDIT: As for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, also awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy, the '43 prize went to a German-Jewish scientist who had fled to Denmark, and then Sweden in 1943. The '44 prize went to a non-Jewish German scientist, and the '45 prize went to a non-Jewish Finn.
Yes, the nobel prize had caused political ramifications before and after the cancelled prizes during ww2
Nazi Germany was not very pleased with the Nobel prize before the war. In 1935, Carl von Ossietzky was awarded the peace prize for revealing the illegal German re-armament of the Schwarzer Reichswehr in 1931, including training an illegal air force in the Soviet Union, which was a controversy since von Ossietzky had been convicted of high treason for his revelation and was interned at Esterwegen concentration camp.
Following the peace prize for von Ossietzky, Hitler forbade Germans from accepting Nobel prizes, and Richard Kuhn (chemistry, 1938), Adolf Butenandt (chemistry, 1939) and Gerhard Domagk (medicine, 1939) were awarded but unable to accept their prizes. After the war, Kuhn and Domagk would get their diplomas and medals (but not the prize money) in 1947 and Butenandt in 1949.
Due to the German control of Norway and the North Sea, Sweden was in a very precarious position 1940-42, especially as Germany completely controlled Sweden's access to coal, without which electricity (and with it the running of the electrified Swedish railways) and steel production would have ground to a halt.
However, by 1943, Germanys' strength had waned considerably, and Sweden's own armed forces had been expanded, trained and equipped to a level where the country in general started to feel strong enough to resist German demands - and with the German response being diplomatic protests, but not much more.
Sweden had also broken the German codes and read most of the messages between Norway and Germany and had an excellent network of agents inside Norway and Denmark - for example, in late April 1945 the German garrison in Norway played a Kriegsspiel of a Swedish invasioon, the result of which were present in the Swedish planning for Operation Rädda Norge (Operation Save Norway), the planned Swedish invasion of Norway should the Germans there not surrender when Berlin did.
Germany had become more or less dependent on Swedish ball bearings as the Americans were constantly bombing their own production facilities and would have a hard time to replace Swedish iron ore and copper and led that was exchanged for coal, coke, rubber and nitrates.
By 1944, Germany was limited to only protest diplomatically against Sweden blatantly violating neutrality by trainging and equipping 22 000 Norwegian and Danish refugees as "police", in reality as regular infantry equipped with artillery, AA guns, AT guns, tanks, machine guns, sub-machineguns and all other equipment along the lines of regular Swedish infantry and heavily equipped motorised military police - so the
The nobel prizes of 1943 and 1944 were mostly given in ceremonies after the war, as the laurates were unable to attent a ceremony in Sweden - Otto Hahn learned that he had been awarded the prize while in a British internment camp after the war, for example.