Friedrich Kellner

Friedrich Kellner
Education	Gymnasium (High School)
Occupation	Justice Inspector
Spouse	Paulina Preuss
Children	Fred William Kellner
Parent(s)	Georg and Wilhelmina Kellner

August Friedrich Kellner () (February 1, 1885 – November 4, 1970) was a mid-level official in Germany who worked as a justice inspector in Mainz and Laubach. During the First World War, Kellner was an infantryman in a Hessian regiment. After the war he became a political organizer for the Social Democratic Party of Germany, which was the leading political party during the time of the turbulent and short-lived Weimar Republic, the name given to Germany’s first democracy. Kellner campaigned against Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. At the beginning of World War II, Kellner began writing in a diary to record his observations of the Nazi 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. He gave his diary to his American grandson in 1968 to translate into English and to bring it to the attention of the public. He 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 in Vaihingen an der Enz, a town on the Enz River in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. He 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.

Vaihingen/Enz, Kellner birthplace

When Friedrich Kellner was four years old, his family moved to Mainz where his father became the master baker at Goebels Zuckerwerk (Goebels Confectionery).

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 through 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.

Friedrich Kellner, 1914

When the First World War began in 1914, Kellner was called back to active duty as a sergeant and deputy-officer in the Prinz Carl Infantry Regiment (4. Großherzoglich Hessisches Regiment) Nr. 118, in Worms. His regiment fought in France at the First Battle of the Marne. 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.

In 1913, a few months prior to being called up for service in the war, Kellner married Pauline Preuss, who was from Mainz. Their son, Karl Friedrich Wilhelm (a.k.a. Fred William), who was to be their only child, was born in 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 1920’s and into the 1930’s, 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 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.

Kellner as Justice Inspector in 1923.

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 immigrated to the United States in order to avoid service in the Wehrmacht, Hitler’s army.

During the November pogrom of 1938, known as Kristallnacht, ("Night of the Broken Glass"), Friedrich and Pauline Kellner tried to stop the rioting. When he 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 November 18, 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

Kellner knew during his campaigns against the National Socialists that the election of Hitler would mean another war in Europe. Within a few years after coming to power, Hitler abrogated the Treaty of Versailles, the WWI peace treaty that many Germans considered a humiliation. Hitler re-militarized the Rhineland, and spent great sums on modern weaponry and to expand the German military forces.

The politicians in Britain and France were unprepared for another war, so they appeased Hitler and gave in to his demands. In a meeting in Munich in 1938, Britain and France agreed that Germany could annex and occupy the Sudetenland, the German-speaking regions of Czechoslovakia. The British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, declared that the Munich Agreement meant "peace for our time." Despite having given his word that Germany would make no further territorial claims, Hitler invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939.

Hitler next signed a pact with the Soviet Union that included a secret protocol to divide Central Europe into German and Soviet areas of interest, and to divide Poland between the two countries. On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. The Third Reich’s propaganda ministry, under Josef Goebbels, convinced the German nation the invasion was necessary and would lead to great victories.

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. A report written by the district Nazi leader, Hermann Engst, shows that authorities were planning to punish Kellner at the conclusion of the war.

Throughout the first two years of the war, Kellner looked to America to provide support for England 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 England. When America entered the war 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 June 6, 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 October 28, 1941. Most Germans after the war would insist they knew nothing at all about the state-sponsored genocide of the Jews, yet very early in the war Kellner recorded this in his diary, showing that even in the small towns, the average citizen knew what was occurring:

"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-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."

Part of the 28 October 1941 entry. Sütterlin script transcribed to modern German and translated into English

After the war

At war’s end, Kellner helped to resurrect the SPD in Laubach, and he became the regional party chairman. In 1945 and 1946 he was the deputy mayor of Laubach.

Robert Scott Kellner, translator of the diary into English, in 1960.

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 from Germany to the United States, died in 1953. Kellner's grandson, Robert Scott Kellner, who grew up in a Children's Home, located his grandparents in West Germany while traveling to Saudi Arabia as a member of the United States Navy in 1960. Several years later Friedrich Kellner gave his ten-volume diary to his American grandson to translate and bring to the attention of the public.

Kellner died in November 1970 at Lich. He was buried at the side of his wife in the main cemetery (Hauptfriedhof), in Mainz.

Works

Main article: My Opposition

Diary statistics

Volumes of the Friedrich Kellner Diary.

My Opposition consists of 10 volumes with a total of 861 pages. There are 676 individually dated entries written in the old German handwriting script called Sütterlin. The entries date from September 1939 to May 1945. More than 500 newspaper clippings are pasted on the pages of the diary.

Kellner intended his observations not only to detail the events of those years, but to offer a prescription for future generations to prevent a recurrence of totalitarianism, for them to offer an unrelenting resistance against any ideology that threatened personal liberty and ignored the sanctity of human life.

Reception of the diary

• In the spring of 2005, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day, 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 the 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, Columbia, and Stanford, have requested the diary for their archives. The directors of the 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.

External links

• Diary of Friedrich Kellner
• George Bush Presidential Library - Kellner exhibit
• Justus Liebig University - Kellner Project Template:De icon
• Telefilm Canada - "My Opposition: the Diaries of Friedrich Kellner"
• Holocaust Museum Houston - Kellner exhibit
• Heimat Museum, Laubach, Germany - Kellner exhibit Template:De icon