“Hitler has risen to be a glaring example of abomination for mankind. For me, he has always been what he was: a brigand, a beast! — Friedrich Kellner, December 17, 1942.
BOYNTON BEACH, Florida — The opening quote sets the tone for a remarkable book, My Opposition, the Diary of Friedrich Kellner, a German against the Third Reich (1939-1945), edited by Robert Scott Kellner. This month, a new paperback edition is being published by Cambridge University Press. Multiple hardback editions have been published since the book’s first release in 2018.
Having grown up imbued with stereotypical views about all Germans who lived in Nazi Germany, my simplistic black and white blanket conceptions of who Germans were during WWII was challenged. My misconceptions included: “All Germans were bad.” “All Germans were Nazis.” “Germans were members of the Nazi party.” “All Germans supported Hitler.” “German culture, society and learning was diseased with hate, especially the ancient hatred of antisemitism.”
Intellectually, I knew not all Germans were Nazis. Intellectually I knew that not all things German were corruptions of hate and blood-curdling crimes of mass murder. I knew these things intellectually, but I had never encountered the soul of those Germans who loved their country, their culture, and were sickened by the disease of Nazism.
For the first time, I read the courageous secret diary of a man and wife who did what they could to record what they saw, they heard, and they felt living in Nazi Germany. They had been denounced. They had barely escaped the concentration camps, the Gestapo, and probable death for being in opposition to Hitler. They knew what they had to do, what they could still do, even if they could not shape the present. They hoped their diary might shape the future when another Hitler could arise somewhere in the world in another vaunted high cultured and “free” society. The diary, a series of volumes that remained hidden long after the war had ended, eventually ran to almost 1,000 pages.
The Kellners had lived in a small town. Though elderly, Kellner made his living as a minor German official. He had recorded in specific detail the names and actions of the Nazis in his small community. Retribution was always a real possibility. The descendants of the Nazis who corrupted rural Laubach, his home, cannot be held to be Nazis today. However, they also would not want it known they were the descendants of Nazis who had committed and permitted the horrors that would forever be a central part of Germany’s soul.
Until the Kellners were reunited late in life with their only grandchild, ironically an American, whose father had served in the American Army in Europe during WWII, they remained deeply reluctant to reveal their secret.
To thwart the infection of Nazism, the Kellners had sent their only child to America. Their only grandchild, a veteran of the U.S. Navy, had known little about his grandparents until a chance turn of fate opened the gates to reunion.
Their grandson, Robert Scott Kellner, prefers to go by his middle name Scott. He has spent years bringing their story forward. His efforts to find a German language publisher were rejected time and time and time again, until success in 2018. Scott’s efforts did not end with the successful German release of the diary. He has also devoted years translating it into English.
Scott’s efforts were consistent with his grandparents’ wishes. They wanted the world to know, not just how Hitler came to be and what life was like under Nazism. They very much wanted the world to know “how” real fascism, can be born, nurtured, and grow in a future time.
Kellner listed 18 bullet points for German fascism’s rise. Kellner’s points were from 1939-1945. Kellner’s 18 bullet points today are reflective of our Politically Correct Culture that demands censorship of opposing ideas and thoughts.
Just one month after the invasion of Poland, October of 1939, Kellner listed his points in his Diary.
1: “The enforced greeting, “Heil Hitler.”
2: “Splitting the people into Party members and non-Party members.”
3: “One-sided control of public opinion – meaning a press with just one voice.”
4: “Suppressing free expression of opinion.”
5: “Protecting the Old Fighters and Party members, even if they are criminals.”
6: “Persecuting decent citizens only because they once had another opinion and perhaps referred to the Nazis as an abscess.”
7: “Persecution and extermination of the Jews.”
8: “Disrespect for people’s religious convictions.”
9: “Continuously changing the laws: new laws in great volumes, and thousands of regulations. Even specialists can no longer keep up with their own subjects.”
10: “Unbelievable over-organization in the nation and, in particular, in the Party and its institutions.”
11: “Dreadfully unproductive offices (and a bloated bureaucracy).”
12: “Irresponsible expenditures without taking income into consideration.”
13: “Protecting the worst people in the State (pardons, etc.).”
14: “Tax burden without end.”
15: “Mendicants in bulk (NSV, WHW). Badges, etc.”
16: “Easy sinecures and benefits for Nazi Party members (minor offices, utensils, uniforms, toys, circus, fanfares: Sieg-Heil, Sieg-Heil)”.
17: “The Fuhrer commands, and we follow!”
18: “We owe everything to our Fuhrer.”
Philosopher George Santayana warned a sleeping world about politically correct forgetfulness.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
George Santayana
There is one very, very significant, firsthand fact Kellner recorded. It was about the murder of the Jews. German society, even today, denies culpability by its silence about the greatest horror in human history, the scientifically engineered and mechanized extermination of the Jews. Many Germans said they knew nothing about the horrors in the East being done by a minority of Germans with their allies.
Kellner documents that was a lie. The Germans knew. They chose to be silent. After all, the victims were only Jews. Kellner hated antisemitism and anti-Semites.
Kellner recorded in his diary.
Pg. 145 – October 28, 1941
“A soldier on leave here said he personally witnessed a terrible atrocity in the occupied part 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 int the ditch. Then the ditch was filled in as screams kept coming from it.
These inhuman atrocities are so terrible that even the Ukrainians who were used for the manual labor suffered nervous breakdowns. All soldiers who had knowledge of these bestial actions of those Nazi subhuman beings were of the same opinion that the German people should already be trembling 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, in the case of retribution, the innocent will have to suffer along with them. Ninety-nine percent of the German people, directly or indirectly, carry the guilt for the present situation. Therefore, we can only say this. Those who travel together hang together.”
It was strange, actually horrifying, how easily readable the Kellner Diary is. It is also essential reading to learn how, in the face of evil, though maybe there were not many, there were good, moral people in the world.
I shared a copy of the book with a German friend. He shared something with me I never knew about him.
“Dear Jerry,
Thanks for the books. It’s very interesting to read. You are right even in the darkest times you have to follow your own way, despite what others say and think about you. I was in prison in East Germany when I was 15 years old (I tried to escape to the west). It’s not comparable to this what happened during the Nazi Regime, but I made the experience that I have to stand for my values and on the end of the day finally the good side gets the victory. But we should never fall silent, whatever it takes.
kindest regards
Andreas”
Should My Opposition be on everyone’s reading list, even if uncomfortable?
Yes!
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Jerry Klinger is president of the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation. His parents were liberated from Buchenwald and Bergen Belsen German Concentration Camps. He reviewed My Opposition for San Diego Jewish World.