Dr. Robert S. Kellner
Texas, U.S.A.
My grandfather, August Friedrich Kellner, was a local court official in Germany during WWII. He was the chief justice inspector in a small town in the Vogelsberg mountains north of Frankfurt.
He spoke out against the Nazis and in March 1940 was called to account for his statements. After that harrowing experience he confined himself to writing down his thoughts in a diary that he titled "Mein Widerstand".
His writings do not deal with the mundane daily events of life, but rather challenge the falsehoods of Nazi propaganda and record the inhuman atrocities committed by the Nazis.
Some of the diary entries refer to the murder of Russian prisoners of war, and to the execution of civilians as reprisals for resistance to German occupation.
There are also entries verifying the deliberate genocide of the Jews and the Poles, and to the active anti-Semitism encountered locally. The dates of these entries belie the argument that the ordinary German was unaware of these atrocities.
But, the diary is not just a record of past evil deeds. On almost every page my grandfather confronts the mentality that succumbs so easily to barbarous doctrines, and in so doing his words serve as a warning to our own and future generations.
And along with this warning comes my grandfather’s constant call for America and other democracies to stand together to fight against the evils of terrorist regimes and dictatorships.
The handwritten diary is 860 pages long with 676 dated entries, and it includes 525 newspaper clippings. The diary is divided into ten notebooks.
"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," my grandfather explained to me, when he gave me the diary for safekeeping.
The members of the research unit for Holocaust literature at Justus Liebig University in Giessen are arranging for funding to publish the diary in Germany. This will be a definitive scholarly edition of the diary, under the editorship of Dr. Sascha Feuchert, with me, Robert Scott Kellner, as an associate editor, writing the biographical introduction.
The documentary film, "My Opposition: the Diaries of Friedrich Kellner," was produced in 2007 by CCI Entertainment and Global Television in Toronto.