The unyielding memory of Herr Kellner
“Memory says, ‘I did that.’ Pride replies, ‘I could not have done that.’ Eventually, memory yields.” —Friedrich Nietzsche
AGerman bureaucrat named Friedrich Kellner wrote these words in his diary on Oct. 7, 1939:
“The major guideline was ‘Just do not think.’ And it was so charmingly ‘beautiful’ that the ‘Leader’ makes everything clear for those too lazy to think ….
“Jugglers, dazzlers, bigwigs, and position seekers are in influential positions. Terror is trump. Methods of common brutal suppression are considered sanctified laws ...
“How can a reasonable person think there can be any eternal values carried out within such a cagey and criminal system?”
Kellner was the administrator of a local courthouse in the small Hessian town of Laubach in central Germany near Frankfurt. It is important to note that Laubach was a particular hotbed of Nazism; while nationally Hitler’s party received 33 percent of the vote in the Reichstag election of 1932, it carried Laubach with nearly 63 percent. And the district in which Kellner settled was especially fervent, with 77 percent of the vote going to the Nazis.
Still, in 1933, Kellner requested a transfer to Laubach. Ironically, this request was to escape Nazi harassment in his hometown of Mainz, where he had been a mid-level judicial official.
Kellner had been a prominent member of the Social Democrats, the party that presented the only serious opposition to Nazism in the waning days of the Weimar Republic. He had vigorously campaigned against Hitler and the Nazis. He had lost.
Though the Nazis had carried only 31 percent of the vote in Mainz, they were in position to take revenge on their political opponents. Kellner’s party was banned. But in Laubach no one knew him; he was free to start over. He and his wife moved into a small state-owned apartment in the 110-year-old courthouse he administered. He kept his head down and observed as the Germany he loved and had fought for during the First World War (he was wounded in the Battle of the Marne) went mad.
It was a dangerous time. Kellner was once upbraided by the former mayor of Laubach for greeting him with a “Good day.”
“You say ‘Heil Hitler’, young man!” the mayor responded.
Still, Kellner resisted in the small ways that were available to him. He discouraged his friends and colleagues from joining the Nazi party and discreetly passed on leaflets dropped from Allied planes during the war. He secretly listened to the BBC and shared what he heard with a few like-minded souls.
Mostly he cut out stories from the newspaper, pasted them in a book, and wrote commentaries about the events. He made observations and expressed his outrage and disgust that his countrymen could be so gullible and weak as to follow a man so obviously opportunistic, racist and absurd as Adolf Hitler. And then he hid the book away, because he understood he lacked the wherewithal to fight the Nazis anywhere but in future histories. He hoped his diary would survive to serve as a warning for future generations to oppose dictatorships and totalitarian ideologies.
He opened his diary on Sept. 26, 1938, nearly a year before Hitler’s invasion of Poland, stating:
“I want to capture in my writings the immediate mood and images of my surroundings so people in the future will not be tempted to fabricate a great event out of them—a “Heroic Period” or the like … Everyone hopes, trusts in miracles, and fashions in their own little minds a picture of the world that has nothing to do with foresight. Whoever wants to learn about the souls of the ‘good Germans’ in my contemporary society should read my notes. But I harbor the misgiving that once these events have come to pass, only a few decent people will remain, and the guilty will have no interest in seeing their disgrace written down on paper.”
After the invasion, which marked the beginning of the second World War, he wrote:
“The foolish people are intoxicated by the German army’s exaggerated initial successes in Poland. Tales of atrocities of the worst kind are buzzing in the air and inside the heads of the armchair warriors … nothing has shaken the childlike faith in the infallibility of gods and demigods. What can one say when even those who always formed opinions based on their own experiences now ravenously devour ridiculous gossip and asinine rumors—which have been planted and purposefully circulated—and then use such nonsense to prop up the shaky image of their hero?”
Kellner’s writings reveal what the German people knew or should have known about how the Nazis conducted the war and their attempted extermination of the Jews. His diary mentions the executions of “vermin” who made defeatist remarks and Nazi notions of “racial hygiene.” His entry on July 28, 1941:
“The mental hospitals have become murder centers … a family brought their mentally deranged son back home from an institution. After some time, they received a letter from the sanatorium informing them their son had died and his cremated ashes were being sent to them! The office clerk had forgotten to strike this boy’s name from the death list. From that oversight, the … premeditated murder came to light.”
On Oct. 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 into the ditch. Then the ditch was filled in as screams kept coming from it!”
Kellner survived the war, and despite his caution, enough was known about his sympathies for him to be appointed deputy mayor of Laubach. Immediately after the war, he played a role in rebuilding the Social Democratic party, but soon he retired from politics, resuming his bureaucratic career.
In 1968, he gave his diaries to his American-born grandson Robert Scott Kellner, a professor of literature who devoted 50 years to transcribing, translating and publishing this remarkable document. The English language edition of My Opposition: The Diary of Friedrich Kellner, A German against the Third Reich, will be published by Cambridge University Press this week. Some of you might find it worth checking out.