August Friedrich Kellner (1 February 1885 – 4 November 1970) was a German mid-level official and diarist who worked as a justice inspector in Laubach from 1933 to 1945.
Kellner was an infantryman in a Hessian regiment during the First World War. After the war, he became a political organizer for the Social Democratic Party of Germany, one of the leading political parties during the time of the turbulent and short-lived Weimar Republic, Germany's first period of democracy. Kellner and his wife, Pauline, campaigned together as Social Democrats against Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
During World War II, working as a civil servant at a small court house, Kellner wrote a diary to record his observations of the Nazi regime. Based on conversations and attentive reading of newspapers, he described the various crimes of that regime. He titled his work Mein Widerstand, meaning "My Opposition". After the war Kellner served on denazification boards, and he also helped to reestablish the Social Democratic Party. In 1968, he gave his diary to his American grandson, Robert Scott Kellner, to translate into English and to bring it to the attention of the public.
Kellner's diary is voluminous consisting of 10 notebooks and all the entries were handwritten in the Old German style Sütterlin script. As a result, the amount of material and possible transcription efforts dissuaded publishers from the project for many years. German and English publishers were not interested in publishing the diary initially, until in 2005, when former US president George H. W. Bush, who had been a combat pilot in World War II, arranged for the diary to be exhibited in his presidential library, which brought the diary to the public. A Canadian film company produced a documentary about Kellner and his diary in 2007; Robert Scott Kellner edited and translated the diary, and it was eventually published in German in 2011 and in English in 2018.
Kellner explained his purpose for writing the diary:
"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."
Biography
Family and education
Kellner was born in Vaihingen an der Enz, a town on the Enz River in southern Germany. At the time of his birth, Vaihingen was part of the Kingdom of Württemberg in the German Empire. Kellner was the only child of Georg Friedrich Kellner, a baker and confectioner from the town of Arnstadt in Thuringia, and Barbara Wilhelmine Vaigle from Bietigheim-Bissingen near Ludwigsburg. The Kellner family could trace its beginnings to when the Protestant reformer Martin Luther lived and preached not far from Arnstadt. The Kellners were Evangelical Lutherans.
When Friedrich Kellner was four years old, his family moved to Mainz where his father became the master baker at Goebel's Confectionery (Goebels Zuckerwerk).
After completing Volksschule, primary school, Kellner had a nine-year course of non-classical study in the Oberrealschule in Mainz. In 1902 he completed his final exams at Goetheschule, which qualified him for an apprenticeship in courthouse administration.
In 1903 he started work as a junior clerk in the Mainz courthouse, remaining there until 1933. He advanced in the administrative ranks to justice secretary, then to court accountant, and in April 1920 to justice inspector.
Military service and marriage
From September 1907 to October 1908, Kellner fulfilled his initial military reserve duty in the 6th Infantry Company of the Leibregiments Großherzogin (3. Großherzoglich Hessisches) Nr. 117 in Mainz. In 1911, he completed an additional two months reserve training.
When the First World War began in 1914, Kellner was called up for active duty as a sergeant and deputy-officer in the Prinz Carl Infantry Regiment (4. Großherzoglich Hessisches Regiment) Nr. 118, in Worms. Within the first month of his return to army service, Kellner was in eight engagements in Belgium and France, including fights at Neufchâteau, Revigny-Laimont, and Rinarville, associated with what has become known as the Battle of the Frontiers. His regiment also fought at the First Battle of the Marne from 5 to 12 September. Under a prolonged bombardment in the trenches near Reims, he was wounded and was sent to St. Rochus Hospital in Mainz to recover. He spent the remainder of the war as a quartermaster secretary for the 13th Army Corps in Frankfurt am Main.
In 1913, a few months prior to being called up for service in the war, Kellner married Pauline Preuss (1888–1970), who was from Mainz. Their son, Karl Friedrich Wilhelm (a.k.a. Fred William), their only child, was born in Mainz on 29 February 1916.
Political activism
Kellner welcomed the birth of German democracy after the war. In 1919 he became a political organizer for the Mainz branch of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the (SPD). Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, he spoke out against the danger posed to the fragile democracy by the extremists in the Communist Party and the Nazi Party. At rallies near the Gutenberg Museum, which honored Johannes Gutenberg, the founder of the printing press, Kellner would hold 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." He would often be accosted by brown-shirted thugs from the Nazi Party, known as Storm Troopers.
Two weeks before Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor in January 1933, and before the beginning of Hitler's murderous purge of his political opponents, Kellner and his family moved to the village of Laubach in Hesse, 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 the Wehrmacht, Hitler's armed forces.
During the November pogrom of 1938, known as Kristallnacht ("Night of the Broken Glass"), Friedrich and Pauline Kellner tried to stop the rioting. When Kellner approached the presiding judge to bring charges against the leaders of the riot, Judge Schmitt instead opened an investigation into the Kellners' religious heritage. The Kellner family documents, which included baptismal records dating back three hundred years, proved Kellner and his wife were Christians. On 18 November 1938 the district judge in Darmstadt closed the case in Kellner's favor: "Doubts about the Kellner bloodlines cannot be validated." A finding to the contrary could have meant imprisonment and death.
The war years
From his reading of Mein Kampf, Kellner believed the election of Adolf Hitler would mean another war in Europe, and events soon were to support his view. Within a few years after coming to power, Hitler abrogated the Treaty of Versailles, re-militarized the Rhineland, expanded the German military forces, and spent great sums to outfit those forces with modern weaponry. Although the leaders in the democracies were concerned about such rearmament, they failed to take action to stop it. On 1 September 1939, in coordination with the Soviet Union, Hitler ordered the German armed forces to invade Poland.
It was on this day that Friedrich Kellner began to record his observations in a secret diary that he entitled Mein Widerstand, "My Opposition". He wanted the coming generations to know how easily young democracies could turn into dictatorships, and how people were too willing to believe propaganda rather than resist tyranny and terrorism.
Kellner did not confine himself to the diary. He continued to express his views, and in February 1940 he was summoned to the district court in Giessen where he was warned by the president of the court, Hermann Colnot, to moderate his views. A few months later he was summoned to the mayor's office in Laubach where he was warned by the mayor and the local Nazi Party leader that he and his wife would be sent to a concentration camp if he continued to be a "bad influence" on the population of Laubach.Regierungspräsident in Darmstadt, I/1pe2-3w02, Reg. Nr. D/34613/85(J)/Ke, 19 Juli 1966 A report written by the district Nazi leader, Hermann Engst, shows that authorities were planning to punish Kellner at the conclusion of the war.Hogen-Ostlender, Klemens. , Gießener Anzeiger, 2005-08-20
Throughout the first two years of the war, Kellner looked to America to provide support for the United Kingdom and France. Numerous entries in the diary reveal Kellner's belief that Germany had no chance to win if America would put aside its neutrality and do more than just send supplies to the United Kingdom. When Germany declared war on America in 1941, the diary entries show Kellner's impatience for the Allies to mount an effective invasion of the continent, and to bring the fight to the Germans on their own territory. When the invasion of Normandy took place on 6 June 1944, Kellner inscribed in large letters in the entry of that date: "Endlich!," meaning "Finally!"
Kellner rarely wrote about his personal situation. He wrote primarily about Nazi policies and propaganda, and about the war. He noted the injustices in the court system, and recorded the inhumane deeds and genocidal intentions of the Nazis. In all of this he considered the German people as accomplices before and after the fact: first voting Hitler into power, and then acquiescing in his abuse of that power.
One of the most important historical entries in the diary was written on 28 October 1941. Most Germans after the war would insist they knew nothing at all about the state-sponsored genocide of the Jews,Robert Gellately: Backing Hitler. Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, Oxford University Press, 2001 – Review by Simon Miller yet very early in the war Kellner recorded this in his diary, showing that word of atrocities reached the average citizens even in the small towns:
A soldier on vacation here said he was an eyewitness to terrible atrocities in the occupied parts of Poland. He watched as naked Jewish men and women were placed in front of a long deep trench 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-nine 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. George Bush Presidential Library and Museum, Friedrich Kellner exhibit. Retrieved 2007-05-14
After the war
The war came to an end for Kellner on 29 March 1945, when the Americans marched into Laubach. Only a few days earlier, beginning on 23 March 1945, in a series of coordinated events between the British and American forces, the Allies had crossed the Rhine River in their invasion of the German homeland. With the approval of the occupation forces, the new mayor of Laubach appointed Kellner deputy mayor. Kellner aided in the denazification process, which primarily meant removing former Nazis from positions of power in the region. Kellner helped to resurrect the Social Democratic Party in Laubach, and he became the regional party chairman.
Kellner wrote only a few more entries in the diary. In one of the last entries, on 8 May 1945, the day Germany officially surrendered to the Allies, Kellner noted: