Friedrich Kellner
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During the First World War Friedrich Kellner was a soldier in a Hessian infantry regiment fighting in the trenches in France, getting wounded for Kaiser and Fatherland. Twenty-five years later, during World War II Friedrich was the chief justice inspector in the small town of Laubach, writing in a secret diary, at risk to his life, to decry the militarism of his countrymen and the insanity of their leader, the Führer Adolf Hitler.
Between the two world wars, while living in Mainz, the birthplace of Johann Gutenberg, Friedrich Kellner was a political organizer for the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the SPD, the leading political party of the Weimar Republic when Germany labored to make the transition from monarchy to democracy. In 1945 Kellner helped to re-establish the SPD, which had been banned by Hitler, and became chairman of the local party in Laubach, Hessen.
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[edit] Military service and politics
August Friedrich Kellner was born on February 1, 1885, in Vaihingen, a town situated on the Enz River, not far from Heidelberg. His father was a baker, Georg Friedrich Kellner, and his mother a waitress, Barbara Wilhelmine Vaigle. When Friedrich was four years old, his family moved to Mainz. Friedrich graduated from the gymnasium in 1902, and becoming a law clerk in the Mainz courthouse, where he continued his studies to become a justice inspector.
In 1908, Kellner served one year in the Kaiser's army reserves. In 1914, at the outbreak of World War I when he was 29 years old, he was called up to active duty. He was wounded in the trenches in France.
Friedrich Kellner welcomed the abdication of the Kaiser and the formation of a democracy in Germany. From 1919 through 1932, he was a political organizer for the Social Democratic Party of Germany and challenged the strong-armed tactics of the National Socialist German Workers Party, the Nazis. Throughout Mainz and in the surrounding communities, Kellner derided Adolf Hitler’s historical concepts and exposed his plans to return Germany to one-man rule. He worked incessantly to alert his fellow citizens to the dangers of the National Socialist agenda. At his rallies he would often hold Hitler’s Mein Kampf above his head and exclaim: “Gutenberg, your press has been violated by this evil book.” On two occasions Kellner came to blows with Hitler’s Storm Troopers, but his service in the infantry during the First World War gave him the courage to stand up to them. What hurt him more than the blows, was the blindness of his countrymen. In a diary entry, he wrote:
- “Hitler has laid out in his book, Mein Kampf, his disdain for the general public. In spite of that the masses go to him and howl ‘Heil Hitler,’ just like the dumb calf electing its own butcher.”
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Hitler banned the Social Democratic Party and imprisoned its leaders. Kellner moved with his wife Pauline and their sixteen-year-old son Fred to the safety of the small town of Laubach. As chief justice inspector, he was in charge of the administration of the district courthouse, including police investigative reports, the records of the prosecutor's office, and trial documents. In Laubach he continued his opposition to Nazi policies. His refusal to join the Nazi Party, and Pauline Kellner’s refusal to join the women’s organizations, caused him to be brought up before a tribunal where the mayor of Laubach and the leader of the regional Nazi Party threatened to send him to a concentration camp. “If you continue to question the policies of the party and exert a bad influence on the public, you will be made to disappear.” Kellner still did not join the party, but he did became more cautious about what he said in public.
[edit] The secret diary
Realizing he could not fight the Nazis in the present, Friedrich Kellner turned his energies to writing a diary to expose the crimes and propaganda of the Third Reich. His intention was to warn future generations to vigorously oppose the evil of dictatorships and state-sponsored terrorism.
- “In my journal would be the truth, and from this truth my grandchildren and the other children in the world would have a torch to light their way, and a weapon to guard them against those in the future who would harm them or have them harm others.”
He fashioned a secret chamber in the back of their dining room cabinet, and there he kept the diary for safekeeping. Between 1939 and 1945, the Friedrich Kellner Diary would grow to almost 900 pages of his observations. And many years later it would be placed on display in a presidential library in America.
The entries in the diary reveal little about the private lives of the Kellners, but instead focus on the broader issues that affected Germany and the world. Kellner wrote about the political atmosphere of a country run by a tyrant and his army of terrorists, and about their militarism and evil misdeeds. He described the new laws and regulations implemented by the Nazis to systematically strip away the human rights of Jews and Poles. In one entry he listed the restrictions regarding the use of Jewish labor:
- “The Jew cannot become a member of a German union; he has no right of pay in case of sickness; there is no dependents payment; no financial aid for births or marriage or death. Jews have to take any employment assigned by the labor office and are to be separated from the rest of the employees. Why so many words in these new laws? Why not just say: Jews are not people but slaves. In this regulation against the Jews breathes the spirit and essence of National Socialism. Jews who have emigrated from Germany should thank God. The treatment of those who have remained in Germany is cruel, relentless, and inhumane. Their fate is pitiful.”
Kellner blamed his fellow Germans for having voted Adolf Hitler into power. But he also accused and condemned the politicians and citizens of other nations who had remained indifferent to the murderous inclinations of Hitler and Mussolini and the Japanese warlords, who should have taken immediate and decisive action to stop such tyrants. Foresight and courage on their part would have spared mankind misery and death.
- “Hitler has fooled the whole world. He had the great unbelievable luck to meet with weak and undetermined opponents, cowardly people who did not know anything about idealism and the feeling of solidarity, who did not possess honor and love for freedom.”
He also directed his scorn at people like the famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, whose hero status made his pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic speeches all the more morally confounding; and Kellner pointed an accusing finger at the university professors and the professional classes who so slavishly kowtowed to Hitler.
- “Since 1933, the great majority have been all for the Führer. The university professors, with sack and pack, underwrote the new political correctness and shoved everything to the side for which they earlier stood up for and taught. What should a simple man say of these learned and wise scholars, who no longer give expression to their best knowledge?”
[edit] Calls upon the democracies
He looked to America for rescue, and could not understand why America did nothing to stop the carnage. On June 25, 1941, six months before Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Friedrich 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. Churchill said once that whoever feeds the crocodile would be eaten.”
In a similar call to arms, after America was in the war but seemingly not making enough of an effort to bring the terrorism to an end, he wrote:
- “What do these gingerbread men in England and America think? Do they think it makes any impression on anyone when they only threaten and talk for almost three years? In 1939 it was shown to the surprised world what an incomprehensible mistake it was for England and France to have quietly waited and done nothing. By now, one would suppose that the responsible men on the opposite side have learned at least something from Germany's method of making war: Attack! Attack!”
[edit] A record of evil deeds
The reason for Friedrich Kellner’s impatience for the Allies to attack his country and bring a quick end to the war was his knowledge of the inhuman atrocities being committed by his countrymen, the murders being practiced in the sanatoriums and concentration camps and prison-of-war camps. He wrote of one instance about a sanatorium not far from Laubach:
- “The sanatoriums have become central execution agencies. I learned that a family of a mentally deranged son fetched him back from the sanatorium to remain at home with them. After some time the family received a report from the sanatorium that their son had died and that they were sending them his ashes! The office apparently had forgotten to strike his name from the death list. In this manner the intended planned execution came to light.”
More horrifying incidents were yet to be brought to his attention. 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.”
A year later Kellner wrote again about the injustices being perpetrated against the Jews. The systematic deportation of Jews to Poland and Russia began in the month of October 1941. Kellner’s diary entry of December 15, 1941, shows that the ordinary citizens of Germany were aware of such deportations and of the official plans of genocide.
- “It has become known that in some areas Jews are transported to somewhere. They are permitted to take a little money and about 60 pounds in baggage. The Nazis are proud of their animal protection laws, but the treatment they give to the Jews proves that Jews, as far as the law is concerned, are considered less than animals. This unfeeling, sadistic and cunning treatment against the Jews, that has lasted now several years with its final goal of eradication, is the biggest spot on the honor of Germany. They will never be able to erase these crimes.”
Such barbarous treatment was not confined to the Jews, and Kellner denounced the German military for slaughtering Russian prisoners-of-war, and for their policies against the resistance forces in the occupied lands.
- “In France two German officers have been shot by unknown murderers, in Nantes and Bordeaux. In retribution fifty citizens in each of these towns were apprehended and executed. To make people who are completely innocent suffer for the actions of another reminds us of the horrific deeds of wild beasts in times long gone by. The world will rightfully be upset over so much inhumanity, and a hate will burn that can never be extinguished.”
In an anguished cry Friedrich Kellner added: “How long will this reign of terror continue?”
[edit] Horrors close to home
The reign of terror came to a head in Laubach on September 16, 1942, when the Jews were rounded up in that small, out-of-the-way town, where they might just as easily have been left in peace to live out their lives. Instead, we find this entry in the diary:
- “In the last few days the Jews from this region have been removed. The families Strauss and Heynemann were taken from Laubach. I've heard from a reliable source that all the Jews were taken to Poland and murdered there by SS brigades. This cruelty is terrible. Such horror will never be able to be erased from the book of humanity. Our murderous regime has for all times besmirched the name ‘Germany.’ It is unfathomable for a decent German that no one can put a stop to these Hitler bandits.”
Friedrich Kellner did not believe everyone in Germany was responsible for these crimes, but he made it clear the majority of Germans shared the guilt.
- “Not only those who devised the camps and put the people in them, and those who punished and killed the people are guilty. A very large circle of Germans carry the moral debt for the concentration camps. Primarily, every party member of the NSDAP, as well as every person who was a proponent of the National Socialist system cannot deny knowledge of the violent actions of the secret state police, the Gestapo.”
[edit] Direct activism
Seven years before the Jews were taken from Laubach, the Kellners had been instrumental in helping the Heynemann’s daughter Lucie, and her husband Julius Abt, and their child John Peter escape the clutches of the Gestapo. Julius was wanted for having forcibly resisted an attempt to arrest him. Kellner knew the case against Julius Abt was unjust, so the chief justice inspector of Laubach, and his wife Pauline, helped the fugitive get to Hamburg and aboard a ship to America. A year later, after Lucie had given birth to John Peter, and the child was old enough to travel, they helped them escape as well.
For Friedrich Kellner, what the Nazis were doing to the Jews was a great evil, and the world’s failure to condemn Hitler and Germany was no less than collaboration with that evil. He did not come to that opinion out of any special knowledge of Jews. His and Pauline’s families were Evangelical Lutherans. They could trace their lineage almost as far back to when Martin Luther himself was alive and giving anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic sermons. For all their years in Mainz, the Kellners had no personal connection with Jews, no Jewish associates or friends. But that was the norm, considering Jews made up less than one percent of the seventy-five million citizens of Germany. But in Laubach the Heynemanns lived a few houses away, and the Strausses but around the corner, so they were neighbors. They tried to convince Lucie’s parents, Salli and Hortense Heynemann, and their relatives, Joseph and Helene Strauss, to leave Laubach as well. But the Heynemann and Strauss families had lived in Laubach for generations and wouldn't leave.
On the night of November 9, 1938, which came to be known as Kristallnacht, they first realized their mistake. In a town where neighbors were not anonymous, where for many generations the civil greetings of Guten Tag und Wie Geht’s passed amiably between one and all, the Jewish families Katz, Strauss, Zodick, Heynemann, Kaufmann, Wallenstein and others were targeted by their Christian neighbors, led by the school teacher Albert Haas, leader of the local Storm Troopers. The Jews of Laubach weren’t killed on that day. But great injury was done them, and much of their property was looted and destroyed. One of the banners carried by the mob that night read, The Jews are our downfall. In a retort, Friedrich Kellner wrote: “These Nazis are the greatest downfall for Germany.”
The Night of the Broken Glass was also a period of danger for the Kellners. They openly admonished the rioters, and Kellner demanded that the presiding judge, Ludwig Schmitt, order the police to escort the Jewish families to the courthouse for protection. The request was anathema to the judge, who was not only anti-Semitic, but had an active dislike for his maverick chief justice inspector. Pauline Kellner had no better luck with the leader of the Nazi Women’s Auxiliary, only angering them when she insisted it was their duty to help innocent people.
After the pogrom, Friedrich Kellner sought to press charges against those in the mob. Judge Schmitt refused, and at the instigation of Frau Desch, leader of the Woman's Auxiliary, the judge requested an official investigation into Pauline Kellner’s German ancestry. Marking her as a Jew was one way to get back at his justice inspector.
The rumor about Pauline Kellner being a Jew stemmed from her interest in the welfare of the Laubach Jews. It also provided her enemies an explanation why she had sent her son out of Germany in 1935 to avoid being in the German army. Friedrich Kellner sent a thick file of family archives to the investigating court in Darmstadt to disprove the rumors. With so many official birth and death certificates to dispute the claim, on November 18, 1938, the Chief Regional Court President of Darmstadt, Dr. Meier, sent a curt note to Judge Schmitt putting an end to the matter: “Doubts about the German bloodlines of Kellner’s wife cannot be validated.”
[edit] End of the war
When Hitler sent his army into Poland in 1939, Friedrich Kellner believed the Allied forces would bring the war to an end by 1943. Even after the Jews were taken from Laubach in September 1942, he continued to be optimistic about that. On Christmas Day he wrote: “We endure all this in the knowledge that by the end of 1943 we will be free of the Hitler tyranny.” They did not know on that Christmas Day there would be another two years to endure.
In those last two years, from 1943-1945, Friedrich worked not only in the Laubach courthouse, but as the chief justice inspector in Altenstadt, Hesse, where he had to spend three days each week. He continued his recordings in his diary, although with some gaps of time between the entries.
On March 29,1945, the Americans marched into Laubach. Hitler and the Third Reich had but a few weeks left, their evil legacy to be the more than fifty million graves of their victims. There would be no real justice for the slaughtered multitudes. At Nuremberg some of the Nazis were convicted for crimes against humanity, but in most cases throughout Germany very little was done on the local level. Most of the Nazis suffered no more than the inconvenience of keeping out of sight for a year or so, usually at a relative’s home in the country. Because there was an urgent need to rebuild the nation as a bulwark against the expanding Soviet Union, many of the Nazis returned to their former positions when the Allied Occupying Forces discovered their bureaucratic usefulness.
Friedrich Kellner was appointed town councilor and deputy mayor of Laubach. He worked to restore the Social Democratic Party, and he became the chairman of the branch in Laubach. He also served as the Chief Regional Auditor in the nearby city of Gießen. But he was now sixty years old, and his optimism was proving ever harder to sustain, especially as he saw how easily the German people blamed others for their monstrous behavior withe the phrase: “I was just following orders,”. “Naturally, no one today will admit he was a genuine Nazi,” Kellner wrote.
In the book, Seventy-five years of the Social Democratic Party in Laubach, in which Friedrich is lauded for his help in restoring the party, the author writes: “The initial sympathy boom for the restored Social Democratic Party lasted only until the conclusion of the Allies’ arbitration boards. Then they all emerged again, the small and large, the harmless and the bad Nazis, democratically voluble, but rarely changed, seeking to get back into the administration and the circles of power.”
[edit] Homecoming of the lost son
In 1935, Friedrich and Pauline Kellner sent their only child, their son Fred, to America so he would not have to fight for Hitler. Fred returned to Laubach in 1946, in the uniform of the U.S. Army. He had left behind his wife and three children in America, never to reunite with them. Upon seeing the ruins of the country of his birth, while wearing the uniform of the victor, Fred William Kellner became a man without a country. He could not adjust to that troubling reality, and a few years later he ended his life at the age of thirty-seven years.
He was buried in the American Legion Tomb in Neuilly, France, on the outskirts of Paris.
Friedrich and Pauline Kellner had stood fast through two world wars that had destroyed their nation and killed millions of their countrymen, but the death of their only child was devasting.
Although he kept up a façade, continuing with his work for his party, and even serving the community as a free legal advisor after his retirement from the court, Kellner discontinued writing.
As dictatorships flourished around the globe, and democracies once again failed to challenge them, as neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism and racial prejudice caused upheavals on every continent, Friedrich Kellner became completely disillusioned. He destroyed the documents he had accumulated before and during the war years, including the manuscript of a book. He considered destroying the ten notebooks of the diary as well.
[edit] Discovery of the diary
In 1960, when Friedrich Kellner was seventy-five years old, and Pauline seventy-two, they met their grandson, Robert Scott Kellner, for the first time.
When Scott Kellner's father died, he was placed in a Children's Home. He joined the navy at seventeen. While traveling through Germany on his way to Saudi Arabia, he went in search of his father's parents. His arrival in Laubach was propitious, as Friedrich Kellner was seriously considering destroying the diary. His grandson promised to learn German so he could translate the diary, and he promised also to bring the diary to the attention of the public so that Friedrich Kellner's eyewitness account could be used against any resurgence of fascism or terrorism.
In 1968 Friedrich Kellner gave the diary to his grandson and told him:
- “Civilization has its foundation upon laws and justice. The preservation of law requires the support of people with courage. I was a man of peace, but I was also a soldier and a judicial officer. When dictators such as Adolf Hitler seek to impose by force their ideology of intolerance and hatred upon others, men and women of good will, no matter how much they hate war, must stand together and fight.”
[edit] Fulfilling the diary's purpose
Friedrich and Pauline Kellner died in 1970, just months apart, after fifty-seven years of marriage. Their ashes are buried in the main cemetery in Mainz. Robert Scott Kellner received a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts and went on to teach in college and translate the Friedrich Kellner Diary. He has received requests from a number of major universities, including Purdue and Columbia and Stanford, to have the diary for their archives. Also, the directors of Yad Vashem 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, is considering a permanent exhibit for the diary.
The diary was on display in the spring of 2005 in the rotunda of the George Bush Presidential Library in commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of VE Day, the end of the war in Europe.
A documentary film about Friedrich and Pauline Kellner, entitled My Opposition: the Diaries of Friedrich Kellner, has been made by CCI Entertainment in Toronto. The first American screening of the film will be in the theater of the George Bush Presidential Library.
To use the diary for that which it was intended, to combat the resurgence of fascism and anti-Semitism, Dr. Robert Scott Kellner has offered the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a copy of the diary. The Friedrich Kellner Diary provides an eye-witness testimony to counter Ahmadinejad and others who would rewrite history to fit their personal ideologies.
