Friedrich Kellner
August Friedrich Kellner (* February 1, 1885 in Vaihingen an der Enz, Germany, † November 4, 1970 in Lich) was a German social democrat, justice inspector and author of a diary in the time of the Nazi period in Germany. During the Third Reich he wrote his diary in secret, and after the war he explained his purpose:
- “I could not fight the Nazis in the present, as they had the power to still my voice, so I decided to fight them in the future. I would give the coming generations a weapon against any resurgence of such evil. My eyewitness account would record the barbarous acts, and also show the way to stop them.”
Family and education
August Friedrich Kellner was born on 1 February 1885 in Vaihingen/Enz, a Swabian town near Stuttgart situated on the Enz River. He was the only child of Georg Friedrich Kellner, a baker from the village of Arnstadt in Thuringia, and Barbara Wilhelmine Vaigle from Bietigheim-Bissingen near Ludwigsburg. Friedrich’s parents belonged to the Evangelical Lutheran faith.
When Friedrich was four years old, his family moved to Mainz where his father became the master baker at „Goebels Zuckerwerk“.
In December 1902, at the age of 17, Kellner graduated from the gymnasium named after Johann Wolfgang Goethe. He began in his profession as a junior clerk in the Mainz courthouse and worked there from 1903 until 1933, becoming a justice secretary, then an accountant, and finally a justice inspector.
Military service and marriage
In 1907 and 1908 Kellner fulfilled his military reserve duty in the 6th Infantry Company of the Leibregiments Großherzogin (3. Großherzoglich Hessisches) Nr. 117 in Mainz.
In 1913 Friedrich Kellner married Pauline Preuss, who was from Mainz. Their only child, Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Kellner, was born three years later.
When the First World War began in 1914, Kellner was called back to active duty as an officer substitute in the Prinz Carl Infantry Regiment (4. Großherzoglich Hessisches Regiment) Nr. 118, in Worms. He fought in France at the Battle of the Marne, and he was wounded near Reims and was sent to St. Rochus Hospital in Mainy to recover.
Political activism
Despite his loyalty to the Kaiser’s regime, Friedrich Kellner welcomed the birth of the German democracy after the war. He became a political organizer for the leading political party, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). From those first days of the Weimar Republic, he spoke out against the danger of extremists, such as the Communists and the National Socialists. He would show his opposition at rallies by holding aloft above his head Adolf Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf, and yell out to the crowd: “Gutenberg, your printing press has been violated by this evil book.” On more than one occasion Kellner was beaten and threatened for expressing his views against the Nazis.
Two weeks before Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor, and before the beginning of the serious and merciless pursuit by Hitler of his political opponents, Kellner took his wife and son into the country for safety. They moved to the village of Laubach, where he worked as the chief justice inspector in the district court. In 1935 his son emigrated to the United States in order to avoid service in Hitler’s army.
During the November pogrom of 1938, known as Kristallnacht (Night of the Broken Glass), Friedrich and Pauline Kellner tried to help their Jewish neighbors. The Kellners were warned that they would suffer the same fate as their neighbors if they continued their resistance against Nazi policies. Kellner was told he and his wife would be sent to a concentration camp if he continued to be a "bad influence" on the population of Laubach. A report written by the district Nazi leader, Hermann Engst, shows that authorities were planning to punish Kellner at the conclusion of the war.
The Diary during and after the war
Because he could not continue to be openly politically active, Kellner entrusted his thoughts to a secret diary, starting from September 1939. He wanted his son and the coming generations to know that democracy must ever oppose dictatorships. He wanted to warn everyone to resist tyranny and terrorism, and to not place any belief in its propaganda.
Throughout the course of the war, Kellner looked to America for rescue, and could not understand why America did nothing to stop the carnage. On 25 June 1941, a few days after Operation Barbarossa six months before Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, he wrote:
- “When will this insanity be brought to an end? Now is a unique chance for England and America to take the initiative, but not only with empty promises and insufficient measures. If America had the will to throw its entire might into the fray, it could tip the balance for a return of peace. Only a tremendous force and the commitment of all war material can bring the German wild steer to reason. Up until now the statesmen, through unbelievable shortsightedness, have neglected or failed their duty. Mankind awake! Attack together with all your might against the destroyers of peace! No reflections, no resolutions, no speeches, no ‘neutrality.’ Advance against the enemy of mankind!”
In the same entry he directed his anger at those who would appease dictators rather than fight them:
- “Even today there are idiots in America who talk nonsense about some compromise with Germany under Adolf Hitler. Those are the most atrocious dummies."
Most Germans after the war would insist they knew nothing at all about the state-sponsored genocide of the Jews, yet as early as October 28, 1941, Kellner recorded this in his diary:
- “A soldier on vacation here said he witnessed a terrible atrocity in the occupied parts of Poland. He watched as naked Jewish men and women were placed in front of a long deep ditch and upon the order of the SS were shot by Ukrainians in the back of their heads and they fell into the ditch. Then the ditch was filled with dirt even as he could hear screams coming from people still alive in the ditch.
- These inhuman atrocities were so terrible that some of the Ukrainians, who were used as tools, suffered nervous breakdowns. All the soldiers who had knowledge of these bestial actions of these Nazi sub-humans were of the opinion that the German people should be shaking in their shoes because of the coming retribution.
- There is no punishment that would be hard enough to be applied to these Nazi beasts. Of course, when the retribution comes, the innocent will have to suffer along with them. But because ninety percent of the German population is guilty, directly or indirectly, for the present situation, we can only say that those who travel together will hang together.”
Pots-war life
At war’s end, Kellner helped to resurrect the SPD in Laubach, and he became the regional party chairman. In the years 1945 and 1946 he was the deputy mayor of Laubach.
Friedrich Kellner continued to serve as chief justice inspector and administrator of the courthouse in Laubach from until 1947. He served as the district auditor in the regional court in Giessen from 1948 to 1950. After his professional retirement at age 65 in 1950, he continued as legal advisor in Laubach for three years. From 1956 to 1960 he was First Town Councilor and again deputy mayor, retiring from offices at age 75.
Kellner’s son, Fred William Kellner, who had emigrated to America, died in 1953. In 1960, Kellner’s grandson, Robert Scott Kellner, travelled to Germany to meet his grandfather who gave his ten-volume diary to his American grandchild to translate and bring to the attention of the public.
On November 4, 1970, Friedrich Kellner died and was buried at the side of its wife in the main cemetery in Mainz.
Diary Statistics
The diary contains 676 individually dated entries from September 1939 to May 1954, 861 pages in 10 volumes. More than 500 newspaper clippings are pasted on the pages of the diary.
Friedrich Kellner intended his observations not only to detail the events of those years, but to offer a prescription for future generations to prevent a reoccurrence of totalitarianism, for them to offering an unrelenting resistance against any ideology that threatened personal liberty and ignored the sanctity of human life.
In using his grandfather's writings to combat the resurgence of fascism and anti-Semitism, and to counter historical revisionists who would deny the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities, Dr. Robert Scott Kellner has offered the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a copy of the diary.
Reception
- In the spring of 2005, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of VE Day in Europe, the diary was on exhibit at the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum in College Station, Texas.
- The Holocaust Literature Research Unit of the Justus Liebig University of Giessen has established the Kellner Project. The deputy director of the group, Dr. Sascha Feuchert, considers Kellner’s work one of the most extensive diaries of the Nazi period.
- The Giessener Anzeiger newspaper and the Heimatkundliche Group in Laubach presented a Friedrich Kellner exhibit in September 2005 in the Laubach Heimat Museum.
- In the summer of 2006 the diary was exhibited at Holocaust Museum Houston in Texas.
- In 2007 CCI Entertainment, a Canadian film company, produced a documentary film about Friedrich Kellner and his grandson Robert Scott Kellner, entitled “My Opposition: the Diaries of Friedrich Kellner.”
- Major universities, such as Purdue and Columbia and Stanford, have requested the diary for their archives. The directors of Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. have asked to have the diary for their collections. A new museum being built in Canada, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, plans to install a permanent Kellner exhibit.