Friedrich Kellner | |
|---|---|
 Friedrich Kellner in 1934 | |
| Born | 1 February 1885 Vaihingen an der Enz, German Empire |
| Died | 4 November 1970 (aged 85) Lich, West Germany |
| Education | Oberrealschule (High School) |
| Occupation | Justice Inspector |
| Spouse | Pauline Preuss |
| Children | 1 |
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.[1]
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.[2] 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."[3][4]
- ^ Kellner, Robert Scott (8 November 2019). "The little Lutheran lady who battled the Nazis on Kristallnacht". nydailynews.com. Retrieved 2019-11-11.
- ^ Schmitter, Elke (October 5, 2011). "Diaries Reveal How Much Wartime Germans Knew". Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan. Der Spiegel. Retrieved October 29, 2011.
- ^ Magers, Phil (2005-03-28). "German's war diary goes public". UPI United Press International. Retrieved 2009-12-14.
- ^ Hogen-Ostlender, Klemens (2005-04-06). "Ich entschloss mich, die Nazis in der Zukunft zu bekämpfen". Giessener Anzeiger. Retrieved 2009-12-14.