They are the most prestigous awards on the planet, reserved to recognise those at the very top of their field. It is no surprise that cases of people passing up a Nobel Prize are few and far between.

Nobel Prizes are awarded annually for outstanding achievements in the fields of Chemistry, Physics, Medicine, Literature, Economics and Peace.the

Of the 821 Nobel laureates that have been awarded the prizes since their inception in 1901, just six people have refused them.

Four of those were pressured into rejecting the award by their governments- three Germans who Hitler barred from accepting prizes in the run-up to the Second World War, and the Russian writer Boris Pasternak, who refused the 1958 Literature prize for fear of reprisals from the Soviet Union government. His son collected the medal on his behalf in 1989.

Only two people have refused the awards of their own volition, and they did so for very different resons. With Sartre turning it down because he didn't belive in awards and Lê Đức Thọ turning it down because he was not in the position to accept the award because of the situation in Vietnam (the war).

Nobel prizes cannot be returned, nor can they be rescinded; it is simply not possible to be stripped of a prize after it is awarded.

Those who refused the award or were not allowed to accept it by Adolf Hitler were: Adolf Butenandt, Richard Kuhn, Gerhard Domagk, Lê Đức Thọ, Jean-Paul Sartre and Boris Pasternak.

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