What do Mahatma Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Adolf Hitler have in common? They have all been—once or several times—Nobel Peace Prize nominees.

That is right, Adolf Hitler, the genocidal mastermind of the Shoah, was recommended to the Nobel committee in 1939, just three short months before he led Germany to invade Poland and start World War II. The recommendation came from Erik Gottfrid Christian Brandt, a social democratic member of the Swedish parliament. (Members of national assemblies are among the many people who can nominate candidates for the Peace Prize.)

At the time, the suggestion generated protests and outrage, with Brandt accused of being a fascist and reportedly banned from lecturing at several associations.

In his letter to the committee, Brandt calls the führer “a God-given fighter for peace” and “the Prince of Peace on earth.” He calls Mein Kampf “the best and most popular piece of literature in the world,” and expresses confidence that the dictator could “pacify Europe, and possibly the whole world.”

If it sounds like he had to be kidding—that’s because he was.

Brandt was an anti-fascist, and had meant the letter to be ironic. As he reportedly said in an interview with the Swedish newspaper Svenska Morgonposten, he had meant it as a commentary on the nomination of Neville Chamberlain, then prime minister of Great Britain, which he thought was undeserved, and also sought to provoke Hitler and the Nazis. Later in 1939, after the war had broken out, he wrote that he had meant the letter’s sarcasm to “nail [Hitler] to the wall of shame as enemy number one of peace in the world.”

Though there’s no indication Hitler came anywhere close to winning the Nobel, he would have had to break his own order to accept it. Angered by the prestigious prize being awarded to his outspoken critic Carl von Ossietzky in 1935, he had banned all Germans from accepting the award.

Here’s the text of Brandt’s letter, obtained by the site nobeliana.com from the Nobel Institute Archive:

To the Norwegian Nobel Committee