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Star-Telegram.com, 22.04.2007: Search led to family, diary and a cause

WorldNetDaily.com, 22.09.2006: Will Ahmadinejad ever read Nazi diary?

University of Massachusetts Magazine, Septmeber 2005: A Promise To Keep

The Dover Post, 05.04.2005: A promise fulfilled by former Dover resident

The Bryan-College Station Eagle, 01.04.2005: A&M displays German's diary of Nazi reign

The Bryan-College Station Eagle, 31.03.2005: Anti-Nazi activist's diary at Bush museum

The Washington Times, 28.03.2005: Feature: German's war diary goes publicy

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Aus: Star-Telegram.com, 22.04.2007:
Search led to family, diary and a cause

To fulfill a pledge, man has spent decades trying to publish a relative's anti-Nazi diary

BY DAVID CASSTEVENS
STAR-TELEGRAM STAFF WRITER

COLLEGE STATION -- The treasure is stored inside a bank vault, locked in a safe-deposit box.
He brought it home for one day to show to a visitor.
"It gets more fragile every year," the man reminded himself, and gently lifted the object from its carrying case.
Robert Scott Kellner, 66, is a small, mannerly man with soft brown eyes and full head of graying hair.
He talks in a whispery voice, as if careful not to wake a baby.
One might assume this soft-spoken figure has tiptoed through life, trying to blend in, hoping not to be overheard or noticed. In truth, he has devoted his adult life to telling everyone who will listen about the significance and value of the heirloom he possesses. Sharing the message is his vocation, his calling.
Kellner believes with all his heart that the entries meticulously penned in old German script on page after page of accounting ledgers are historically illuminating and relevant today and belong not only to him -- and the Kellner family -- but to the world, to every one of us.
In his hands he held a sacred trust: the secret diary of Friedrich Kellner.
From 1939-45, his German grandfather risked imprisonment -- and possibly execution -- by writing about the political atmosphere in his beloved homeland during the reign of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich.
A midlevel government official and member of the Social Democratic Party, which Hitler banned after coming to power in 1933, Friedrich Kellner denounced the Fuhrer as a "peddler and fanatical rabble rouser" in his diary. He passionately challenged the falsehoods of Nazi propaganda and related eye-witness accounts of atrocities committed against Jews.
In the 860 pages, Kellner called for America and other democracies to stand together and fight against terrorist regimes.
Fearing a repeat of history, he urged future generations to combat the resurgence of mindless prejudice and totalitarianism.
A former Texas A&M English professor, Scott Kellner has spent more than 35 years translating Friedrich Kellner's legacy and fulfilling a promise.
The 10-volume diary, filled with hundreds of newspaper clippings, was displayed last year at the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum in College Station.
A Toronto television company recently produced an hourlong documentary about Friedrich Kellner's journal and life.
The grandson is so committed to his mission that he wrote to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last year after the Iranian president publicly stated that the Holocaust was a "myth" and called for Israel to be "wiped off the map."
In his letter, Scott Kellner asked to meet the Middle East leader so he could hand him a copy of the diary.
"I'm not foolish. I'm not an idealist," he said, as if to answer those who might label him as such. "I don't expect anything I say to Ahmadinejad would change his mind. But any ideology, such as Islamic fundamentalism, that doesn't have as its first value human life, and personal liberty for human beings, is an evil ideology.
"It sounds corny, I know. But the reality is we must confront him. I can do so with the diary. With the truth."
Gazing at its brittle pages, Kellner faintly smiled in private thought.
The handwritten words of his grandfather call up fond memories of the white-haired author, a man who was 75 when they first met.
Kellner also thought of his own father, a flawed and tragic figure.
And in his mind's eye he glimpsed the image of himself -- an orphan who never knew the gift of family love until, by a stroke of fortune, he found his grandparents, in a tiny German village. And so began a story of discovery that is as remarkable as the diary itself.

A search in Germany

Fred Kellner deserted his family when son Scott was 10 months old.
At age 4, Scott and his older brother and sister went to live at a Jewish children's home in New Haven, Conn. They were left to that cheerless existence by their mother, who went off and became carnival dancer.
He quit school after the ninth grade, and he joined the Navy at age 17.
Two years later, in 1960, the young sailor found himself in Frankfurt, Germany, en route to duty in Saudi Arabia. During a 48-hour layover, Kellner asked and was denied permission to leave the base so he could look for his German grandparents, on his father's side. Impetuous and strong-willed, he ignored orders and went AWOL.
Kellner didn't speak German. He began his search with only one clue: a scrap of paper on which was written Laubach, the name of several German towns. Traveling by bus, he went to three villages, stopping strangers to ask whether they knew of a Friedrich and Paulina Kellner. In German, the family name means waiter, so some mistook the American's inquiry and directed him to the nearest cafe. Kellner departed each town in frustration, wondering whether he might be leaving his relatives behind.
On the third day, Kellner sat in a train depot in Hungen. When a teenage girl greeted the U.S. serviceman with a flirtatious smile, Kellner introduced himself and asked for help. Ursula Cronburger spoke English. She lived in a small town 10 miles away called Laubach. Not only that, she told Scott that an elderly couple named Kellner lived in her neighborhood, and so they took a bus to the town. Uncertain that Scott Kellner and the couple were related, Cronburger and her parents went to the home of a reclusive man and his wife and told them that a young sailor from the U.S. was looking for his grandparents and wanted to meet them.
Dressed in his Navy whites, Kellner felt excited and apprehensive as he walked up a dirt road toward the cottage on that October day, with winter in the air.
He assumed that Friedrich Kellner, a former justice inspector, had been a Nazi during World War II.
That's what Scott's mother had called Fred Kellner -- her husband, the man who walked out on her and their three kids. "That Nazi [expletive]."
Fred Kellner grew up in Germany and became enamored with the Nazi ideology as a teen. In 1935, Friedrich and Paulina sent their wayward 19-year-old to America to save him from being drafted into Hitler's army. Fred became involved with the German-American Bund, a pre-war American Nazi movement, and was reported to the FBI for making anti-American statements. To demonstrate his allegiance to the U.S., he joined the Army and late in the war served in France as a guard and interpreter at a camp for German prisoners.

'I knew I had found them'

Scott's father never returned to America. After the war, he became involved in the European black market. In 1953, having failed as a parent and feeling like a man without a country, he turned on a gas stove and killed himself. He was 37.
Friedrich and Paulina grew despondent. They felt as if their own lives had ended with their son's suicide.
Now, amazingly, the child of Friedrich Kellner's only child stood at his door.
His presence was like sunlight filling the grief-darkened home of the elderly man and wife.
Any doubt that Scott had come to the wrong place vanished when he produced a photo of his young father.
The tears came for all three when Friedrich Kellner opened an album and showed his grandson the identical picture.
"I knew I had found them," Scott Kellner recalled, eyes shining as he retold the story.
His visit lasted four days. Within the first 30 minutes together, his grandfather went into the dining room and knelt before an ornate antique hutch. With the turn of a small key, he opened a compartment door. Reaching inside a secret place, he withdrew a thick sheaf of papers -- ledgers -- meticulously written in the old man's hand. Even in 1960, he kept the document hidden. Friedrich had penned two words on its cover: Mein Widerstand. It means "My Opposition."
In a moment of dawning, the young American understood. This was a journal, his grandfather's diary, written at great peril during one of the most dangerous periods in history. Friedrich Kellner fixed his grandson with his gaze. He desperately wanted the young man to know that he had resisted and rejected the madness of Hitler's dictatorship.
"Ich war kein Nazi!" the grandfather said, his voice rising. I was no Nazi!
He emphasized no by making a slashing gesture with his flattened palm.
In the 1930s, Friedrich had spoken out in opposition to the rise of Nazi power. He defiantly held up a copy of Mein Kampf at rallies and ridiculed Hitler's autobiography and political ideology.
Friedrich would tell his son's son, "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." The wartime diary, he explained, was his gift to future generations, to be used as a weapon "against any resurgence of such evil."
For hours, the old man and his grandson sat at a table. Using dictionaries, they patiently conversed, translating word by word. Scott learned that after the war his grandfather was appointed deputy mayor in Laubach, where he helped to restore the Social Democratic Party. Friedrich told his grandson that one day he wanted him to take the diary to America, but first -- the grandfather was emphatic -- the young man needed to return to school. He must get all the education he could. He simply must.
When Kellner returned to the military base in Frankfurt after a week's absence, he was placed under guard but not severely punished for his insubordination.
"I would have willingly spent a year in jail," he said. "It was something I just had to do."

Parsing the diary

Eight years passed before Scott would see his grandparents again.
During the interim, he earned his GED and put himself through school at the University of Massachusetts, majoring in English and European history. He also studied the German language and later earned a Ph.D. He returned to Germany in 1968 and brought the diary home. Two years later, as promised, he took the first painstaking steps of transcribing his grandfather's old German handwriting into a more readable form and then translating that manuscript into English.
Needing help, he wrote to every major publishing company in the U.S. but received form-letter rejections.
"This is not like the Anne Frank diary," Kellner said. "My grandfather deliberately chose not to write about himself or his daily events -- what he had for breakfast that morning."
As Kellner read the entries, he longed for -- hungered for -- just that: some personal information about his grandfather.
Yet the more he read, the more his respect and admiration grew for the man's wisdom and foresight and for his abiding love of country.
Kellner continues trying to use the journal for good. He still hopes to get the document published in English and widely distributed before offering it to a prominent museum, possibly the soon-to-be-built Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg.
Passing along the gift that was given to him will be the last chapter in what is at its core a love story.
Kellner's grandfather was 83 and his grandmother 81 when he returned to Germany in 1968.
Two years before their death, they took their grandson to a singing festival in a majestic castle on the Rhine River. A German choir performed, as did singers from America. That evening, as the joyous music filled the ancient fortress in the town of Mainz, where the couple had lived before the war, Friedrich Kellner felt so moved that he began to sing along.
Some seated nearby shot him disapprovingly looks.
The man who was wounded as a soldier during World War I, this poet and artist who once scuffled with Nazi brownshirts, this eloquent, freedom-loving patriot blithely ignored those who told him to hush.
He would sing if he wished. And why not?
In German and with a smile, he told Scott seated next to him, "The entire world should be singing."

DIARY EXCERPTS

Sept. 14, 1939: "Who carries the blame? The people without a brain! To trample democracy with one's feet, and to give power to a single man over almost 80 million people are so terrible that one can probably tremble over the things which will come here."
Sept. 18, 1939: "Only and alone the stubborn obstinacy of our 'Fuhrer' has brought us into today's situation. We have indeed learned nothing from history."
Oct. 9, 1939: "Again and again we must ask ourselves this question: How was it possible that a cultured people like the Germans could have delivered all power to only one man, given up their democracy for a dictatorship? ... What our ancestors had fought to achieve over centuries, was forfeited in the year 1933 by stupid, carelessness, incomprehensible gullibility. ... When there is no longer any hope in the Fuhrer's castles in the air and other miracles, the entire house of cards will collapse. Then naturally everyone will insist he knew all along it would turn out that way. No one will admit to having been a member of the Nazi Party."
June 25, 1941: "Now is a unique chance for England and America to take the initiative. But not only with empty promises and insufficient measures. If America has the earnest will to throw its entire might into the fray, it could tip the balance for a return of peace. At the height of their insane power the German people certainly can't be brought to reason with words."
July 29, 1941: "A cultural people must be able to think as individuals and behave themselves properly. But the German people have repeatedly allowed themselves to be dictated to by their 'infallible' Fuhrer without participating in the slightest degree in their own destiny. The Fuhrer is always right, the Fuhrer never errs. The German people have been taken in by this devil."
Oct. 28, 1941: "A soldier on vacation here reported as eye-witness terrible atrocities in the occupied parts of Poland. He has 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 closed and from the ditch you could still hear screams. These inhuman atrocities are so terrible that the Ukrainians who were used as tools suffered nervous breakdowns. ... There is no punishment that would be hard enough to be applied to these Nazi beasts."
Dec. 10, 1942: "If France wants to be saved it has to be enthusiastically on the side of England and America without any limitation. Each Frenchman who fraternizes with Hitler is a mean scoundrel."
May 30, 1943: "The collapse of France in 1940 was a real puzzle for many people throughout the world. ... France was attacked by Germany, completely robbed and plundered, and totally occupied. In spite of all this, there are still Frenchmen who are completely and totally on the side of Hitler."
March 28, 1945: "While sitting at my desk shortly past 3:00 in the afternoon, I heard airplanes circling over Laubach in pursuit of retreating German columns of troops. Suddenly, while I was looking out the window toward the sky, a bomb hit the post office and two more bombs landed just across the street at the entrance of Ruhl's courtyard. The blast damaged the front of the courthouse and blew out all the windows, including in our apartment. ... My desk and I were covered with glass splinters and pieces of the ceiling. Our window curtains and the flowers are now part of the war."
March 29, 1945: "Shortly after 3 o'clock in the afternoon we hear noises on the road. In the cellar of our building are gathered those wounded in the name of Goebbels' Propaganda, and some neighbors, all obviously intimidated. Among them, naturally, are the party members, none of them with a clear conscience. These believe the approaching Allied soldiers will behave like the German soldiers did in Poland, etc. Their sheepish fear gives me pleasure. I cannot pass up the chance to make scornful remarks. ... For the first time we behold Americans."

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Aus: WorldNetDaily.com, 22.09.2006:
Will Ahmadinejad ever read Nazi diary?

Owner's plan to confront Iranian leader with Holocaust proof fails at Columbia

Posted: September 22, 2006
1:00 a.m. Eastern

© 2006 WorldNetDaily.com

WASHINGTON – Plans to present Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with a copy of a famed World War II diary that documents Nazi war crimes fell through when Columbia University scrapped plans for an address today by the Iranian president because of security and logistical problems.

Robert Scott Kellner, the grandson of the diarist, Friedrich Kellner, a chief justice inspector in the German town of Laubach during Adolph Hitler's reign, saw an opportunity to confront Ahmadinejad with the truth about the Holocaust, which the Iranian leader has denied on several occasions.

Coincidentally, Columbia University had long expressed interest in becoming the custodian of diaries in its Library of Rare Manuscripts – a fact Kellner was hoping to use as leverage to make the presentation to Ahmadinejad.

Kellner first wrote to Ahmadinejad Aug. 28 about the diary offering proof of the Holocaust.

"My father was born in Germany, and his father, Friedrich Kellner, served as chief justice inspector in the town of Laubach in Hessen," he explained in his letter. "During the Third Reich, my grandfather secretly recorded the deeds of the Nazis. He gave me his diary in 1968 with the request I use it as a weapon against any resurgence of those forces that brought about the war."

Kellner pointed out the nine notebooks were on exhibit last year at the George Bush Presidential Library, that a university in Germany is planning to publish the material and that a Canadian film company has completed a documentary about his grandfather's life.

"So the diary has already reached out to three nations," Kellner wrote to Ahmadinejad. "I am hoping it can reach out to a fourth: Iran."

Columbia's President Lee Bollinger came under severe criticism from the New York-based Jewish Defense Organization for "for inviting the vicious Jew-hating president of Iran to speak" on campus.

"I find President Ahmadinejad's stated beliefs to be repugnant," Bollinger said, while adding, "I have no doubt that Columbia students and faculty would use an open exchange to challenge him sharply and are fully capable of reaching their own independent conclusions."

A spokeswoman said that the invitation to Ahmadinejad was made and accepted on Wednesday by noon, however, by the afternoon, it had become clear "that it would not be possible to make the extraordinary logistical and security arrangements necessary on short notice."

Even though Ahmadinejad will not address the conference today at Columbia, Kellner is hoping the university will make every effort to coordinate a future presentation of the diary to Ahmadinejad.

Columbia first wrote to Kellner in 1982 seeking to make the diaries part of its rare book and manuscript collection.

"The diary contradicts Ahmadinejad's perceptions about the Holocaust and also calls upon the democracies to stand firmly against any future fascists," Kellner told WND. "If President Ahmadinejad's appearance at any American university at any time in the future is to have the fullest meaning, he should receive there a copy of this historical document."

Friedrich Kellner spoke out against the Nazis in 1940 and was nearly sent to a concentration camp. After that, instead of making his protests vocal, he dutifully recorded his observations and analysis in a diary he titled, "Mein Widerstand," which can translate to both "My Resistance" or "My Opposition."

"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," explains his grandson. "The entries in the diary read like today's headlines, and Friedrich Kellner's solution for the terrorism of his own time may be the answer for the terrorism confronting our generation."

Robert Scott Kellner seems determined – at some point – to confront Ahmadinejad with the truth of the Holocaust as experienced first-hand and recorded by his grandfather.

"I would like to make an appointment with you, so that I might present to you a copy of the diary of Friedrich Kellner," he wrote to the Iranian leader. "Not only does the diary confirm the events of World War II, but it gives a prescription for preventing such man-made catastrophes in the future. Another war can be prevented if our leaders view historical events as parables for current ones, and if they have the will to spare humanity the sufferings of another conflagration. More specifically, we need to renounce ideologies that do not uphold, above all else, human life and personal liberty."

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Aus: University of Massachusetts Magazine, Septmeber 2005:
A Promise To Keep

—Marietta Pritchard

IN A QUEST TO TRANSLATE and publish his grandfather’s wartime diaries, Scott Kellner ’77G found his own history

How do you pay tribute to your forebears? How repay a debt of gratitude for their trust, for their encouragement and inspiration? Scott Kellner put himself through college and graduate school, and raised funds for needy children. And most important, he translated his grandfather’s secret diary from wartime Germany, spending 37 years in the effort to get it properly displayed and published.

This year, after decades of struggle and reams of rejections from publishers, the diary of Friedrich Kellner was put on display in the George Bush Presidential Library at Texas A & M University ( http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/ ), just eight minutes from Scott Kellner’s home in College Station. His story was the subject of a big spread in the Houston Chronicle and has been picked up by United Press, the Jerusalem Post, and the German magazine Der Spiegel, along with several newspapers in Germany. Scott Kellner is well on his way to completing a biography of his grandfather, and a documentary film is under consideration. (Holocaust Museum in Houston: http://www.hmh.org/ )
But there is more. As a result of the article in Der Spiegel, the Justus Liebig University in Giessen will publish the diary as a book in Germany. A museum in his grandparents’ hometown of Laubach will also hold a special ceremony honoring the couple and will create a permanent exhibit there.
Scott Kellner, a 1977 Ph.D. in English from UMass Amherst who became a professor at Texas A & M, had a rough start in life. His father committed suicide, and his mother consigned Scott and his two siblings to a cheerless life in a children’s home, then took off, as Scott puts it, “in search of fame and fortune” as a carnival dancer. The young man was a high school dropout, alone, and on a road to nowhere when he joined the U.S. Navy in 1958. In 1960, he was posted to Saudi Arabia, with a stop in Germany on the way. While in Germany he decided to see if he could find his father’s parents, about whom he knew almost nothing except for the name of the place where they lived.
Armed with a tattered photo of his father and a piece of paper on which was written the word Laubach—the name of several towns in Germany—the young sailor went AWOL. After several tries, he located Pauline and Friedrich Kellner. So began a very long journey, a growing relationship of trust and encouragement between two elders and their newfound grandson. So began, too, the grandson’s lifetime quest to live up to his grandparents’ expectations and fulfill his promises to them.
He describes the walk up a long hill in Laubach to a small house in the woods: “It was cold outside, and I felt cold inside, too, and wondered what warmth could possibly await in the house before me, a house owned by strangers I had never met who just happened to be my grandparents.” When he started his search, he writes, “I was prepared to forgive my grandfather for a myriad of imagined crimes, because what else does one do with a German grandparent who had been a justice inspector during the Nazi era? I quickly learned how wrong my assumptions had been when he showed me his diary and told me of his resistance to the terrorism of his time.”
The 19-year-old Scott spoke no German when he arrived on his grandparents’ doorstep, but he was warmly received by the astonished pair, both in their 70s. They were still grieving the suicide of their son, Scott’s father, whom they had sent to America for his protection before the war broke out. He had joined the U.S. Army, returned to Germany in 1946, and shortly thereafter committed suicide, evidently in despair at being in the country of his birth in the uniform of its enemy.
Over a number of years and return visits, Scott and his grandparents learned everything they could about one another. Friedrich Kellner had served in the German army and had been wounded in World War I. During the 1930s, he had been an activist in the Social Democratic Party in the city of Mainz, and a vocal opponent of the rising Nazi power. He had often stood up in rallies waving a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, shouting “Gutenberg, your press has been violated by this evil book,” for which he endured harassment and beatings from Nazi thugs.
When the Nazis took power, they banned Kellner’s Social Democrats, and the family moved from Mainz to the small town of Laubach. Here Kellner became chief justice inspector at the local courthouse, where he could observe firsthand the ways the Nazis were perverting his country’s laws. But after being threatened with internment in a concentration camp if he continued to speak out, he took his protest underground.
As the grandson came to know his Lutheran grandparents, he learned that they were capable of selfless bravery in helping a Jewish neighbor’s family escape from the country. He also came to know of the diary that his grandfather had kept hidden throughout the war.
The 10 notebooks, nearly 1,000 pages, had been kept in a secret chamber in the back of the dining room cabinet. It was not until 1968, when Scott was well on his way to completing his undergraduate degree at UMass Boston that his grandfather entrusted the treasured documents to him. From that moment forward, the diary became a sacred trust, a promise to keep.
On their first meeting, grandfather told grandson that he must learn German in order to read the diary, titled Mein Widerstand—“My Opposition.” Friedrich would someday hand the notebooks over, he said, in hopes that Scott would carry on his work of opposing tyranny and injustice. “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,” said Friedrich. He hoped that his eyewitness account would give coming generations “a weapon against any resurgence of such evil.”
It was a heavy charge, but a life-giving one. The grandparents became an anchor for this drifting young man, insisting that he take himself seriously for the first time in his life. They asked him to promise to get an education and to take charge of the diary. In addition they asked him to find a way to take care of children in need of the kind of help he himself had lacked. Scott Kellner took up these promises as a kind of holy vow, completing college and earning a doctorate, and eventually raising substantial amounts of money for the Christian Children’s Fund.
In 1969, he married Beverly Stein, whom he had met at UMass Boston. In 1970, he began his doctoral studies in English at UMass Amherst, studying with Harold McCarthy and Stanley Kaplan, among others, and writing a dissertation on Herman Melville. The university held a special meaning for him, he says. “Because I was a high school dropout and had been in the Navy, I saw that this was my lifeline to safety. And because I hadn’t spent my whole life in school, just walking across the campus was a thrill every single day.”
In 1973, Scott Kellner began translating parts of his grandfather’s diary, an arduous task, not only because he was still learning the language, but also because it was written in an old-fashioned gothic handwriting style, known as Sutterlin script. At various times over the years, he tried to engage others in the work of translation, but wound up doing most of it himself. He also approached dozens of publishers, foundations, and universities about translating and publishing the diary, but found that the publishers were uninterested and that the others wanted him to hand over the documents to put into their archives, with no promise of disseminating them. Kellner was not willing to let control of the diary pass out of his hands. So his recent successes in publicizing and displaying them have felt like a true triumph.
Unlike some other wartime diaries, the writings of Friedrich Kellner do not even peripherally concern themselves with his household’s day-to-day life. Rather, they provide a running commentary on the depredations of what he called “state-sponsored terrorism,” with the inclusion of photos and clippings from newspapers. And although the Kellner documents are private meditations, they have a very public tone. What the reader hears is the voice of a speaker at a political rally, exhorting his audience to rise up in opposition to a brutal regime—something Friedrich Kellner was no longer able to do.
For Friedrich Kellner, the diary was a way to preserve his inner dignity in the face of the unspeakable. For Scott Kellner, it has been a calling, a vocation, an obsession even, and a way to a kind of personal redemption

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Aus: The Dover Post, 05.04.2005:
A promise fulfilled by former Dover resident

German grandfather’s WWII diary goes on display at presidential library

By Jeff Brown
Staff writer
Friedrich Kellner was a man of peace, seemingly a dichotomy during the barbarism that overtook Germany during the 12 years of the Third Reich. A chief inspector in that nation’s civil justice system, he saw daily how the law could be twisted to suit the ends of Nazi officials. But Kellner also knew that speaking out could cost him everything.
So Friedrich Kellner kept quiet, writing down his thoughts in the hope they might, some day, help expose the insanity that had overtaken his beloved country. More than a decade after the end of the war, those thoughts helped give a young man, Kellner’s own grandson, a new direction in life.

Life given purpose

Happiness was a foreign concept during Dr. Robert Scott Kellner’s childhood. His father, who had been sent to America to escape Nazism, committed suicide in 1946, leaving his ex-wife and three sons to fend for themselves. His mother abandoned the boys, but reappeared, newly married, after 11 years to bring them to Dover along with her new husband.
However, life in Dover was not easy for young Bob Bellew, as Kellner was known at that time. Unhappy and rebellious, he did poorly while attending Dover High School, finally calling it quits at the age of 16. Joining the U.S. Navy, he went absent without leave in Germany to search for the grandparents he had never known. Their lives, and the diary Friedrich Kellner had kept at the risk of his own life, proved an epiphany for their grandson.
“The story of their remarkable courage during two world wars gave me the inspiration to change my life,” Kellner said recently.
Today, that once-secret diary is on public display at the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library in College Station, the east Texas town that Scott Kellner, now a retired professor, calls home.
Born in 1885, Friedrich Kellner had served as a soldier in the Kaiser’s army during World War I. A self-described man of peace, however, Kellner was a political activist who worked against the emerging Nazi party during the late 1920s and early 1930s. When Hitler succeeded in coming to power, Kellner moved his family to a small town a few miles from the Dutch border, where as chief justice inspector, he spoke out against the rampant abuse of government power. Warned by the Nazis his actions could lead to a sentence in a concentration camp, Kellner decided instead to record his thoughts for posterity.

Fighting for the future

Filled with Friedrich Kellner’s tightly written German script, the nine volume, 753-page diary includes Kellner’s observations on daily life under Nazism, newspaper clippings of important events and his personal thoughts on tyranny and the means people must find to combat it.
“I could not fight the Nazis in the present, as they had the power to still my voice,” Kellner told his grandson, “so I decided to fight them in the future. I would give the coming generations a weapon against any resurgence of such evil.”
Kellner was witness to the turmoil of post-World War I Germany, where a fledgling democracy was torn asunder by competing political ideologies that seemed to have only their own interests at heart. Such unrest was fertile soil for people like Hitler, people who promised prosperity but only brought ruin, he wrote.
“If there is to be peace, you must have democracy, where laws have been agreed upon by the governed,” Kellner wrote, “and democracy must be preserved by men of courage who will fight for it.”
Those are sentiments still valid today, said Scott Kellner, and are one of the reasons he decided to allow his grandfather’s words and thoughts to be placed on public display. When Friedrich Kellner entrusted the diaries to him in 1968, he told his grandson he hoped they not only would help expose Nazism, but could serve as a source of inspiration to those who would oppose future dictatorships and government-sponsored terror.
Since his grandfather’s death in 1970, Scott Kellner worked at translating the diary and helping get the information in it disseminated to the public. Now, with the diary on display through the end of May and a documentary film about his grandfather in the offing, Kellner thinks Friedrich Kellner would be pleased.
“I feel I have come closer to fulfilling that promise,” he said.

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Aus: The Bryan-College Station Eagle, 01.04.2005:
A&M displays German's diary of Nazi reign

By GREG OKUHARA
Eagle Staff Writer
Friedrich Kellner at first used political campaigning to fight the rise of the Nazi party in Germany and the tyranny he believed it represented.
But once the Third Reich emerged in the early 1930s, he was brought before a tribunal and threatened with imprisonment in a concentration camp if he continued his anti-Nazi rhetoric.
Forced to no longer publicly speak out against Adolf Hitler and his regime, Kellner instead began to collect his thoughts in a series of diaries detailing the injustices he witnessed during the Nazi reign.
In 1968, Kellner met his grandson Scott for the first time and gave him the 753 pages of journal entries.
“My grandfather told me to use them, to bring it to the attention of the public,” said Scott Kellner, now a retired Texas A&M University professor.
He since has carried out his grandfather’s wish after spending years translating the writings. The diaries and translated excerpts are on public display for the first time in an exhibit that opens Friday at the George Bush Presidential Library.
The journal also will be the subject of a documentary produced by a Toronto-based film company.
Scott Kellner said that although the books are more than six decades old, his grandfather’s message remains relevant. Friedrich Kellner wrote about the social injustices he witnessed as a judicial officer for the district courthouse in the small German town of Laubach.
In many earlier diary entries, Friedrich Kellner called for the United States and England to become involved to stop Hitler’s rise to power.
“He said there should be no neutrality or discussions,” Scott Kellner said. “He called for the U.S. to step up against what he called ‘destroyers of mankind.’”
The anti-tyranny and anti-dictatorship messages his grandfather wrote about so passionately are just as important today as they were during World War II, the grandson said.
“If that doesn’t resonate with people today, I don’t know what does,” he said. “It makes the diaries very unique in that regard.”
One entry deals with a discussion Friedrich Kellner had with a young German soldier who witnessed the mass murder of Jewish men and women.
“He wrote that this is a stain on the honor of Germany that will never be erased,” Scott Kellner said.
The entries were written in 10 notebooks, but only nine remain. Scott Kellner said an acquaintance of his grandfather read one of the books and destroyed it in 1968 because he was upset that a fellow German was critical of his own country.
The diaries were written in Sutterlin script, an old form of German lettering that made translating a slow and tedious process. It took Scott Kellner more than two decades to translate the entire manuscript, a job he completed about a year ago.
Once he finished, he wrote several American universities about displaying the diaries. Purdue University, Columbia University, New York University and Stanford University were among the schools interested in using Kellner’s diaries, he said. The director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum also expressed interest in displaying the diary in a future exhibit.
But Texas A&M was the most fitting choice for the first public display because of the school’s ties to the Bush family, Scott Kellner said.
He said both former President Bush and the current president have fought battles against dictatorships and tyranny — the same things his grandfather railed against in his diary.
“It’s a wonderful place to have the diary,” Scott Kellner said. “I’m deeply honored they’re showing it, and my grandfather would be, too.”

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Aus: The Bryan-College Station Eagle, 31.03.2005:
Anti-Nazi activist's diary at Bush museum

Special to The Eagle

The secret World War II diary of Friedrich Kellner, a justice inspector in the Third Reich, will be on display starting Friday at the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum on the Texas A&M University campus.
The exhibit of Kellner’s 753-page diary is the first public display of the material, and it will remain on exhibit through May 30.
Kellner, a political activist in Mainz, Germany, for the Social Democrats, campaigned against the Nazi Party.
When Adolf Hitler rose to power and sought revenge against his political foes, Kellner moved to Laubach, where he became chief justice inspector in the district courthouse. As such, he was in charge of police investigative reports, prosecutor’s office records and trial documents. His declarations against miscarriages of justice prompted threats of imprisonment in a concentration camp.
After that, he spent his nights writing in a secret diary, at great risk to his life.
When the war ended, Kellner was appointed deputy mayor of Laubach. He helped to restore the Social Democratic Party and became chairman of the Laubach branch.
In 1968, two years before his death at age 83, Kellner entrusted his diary to grandson Scott. Kellner hoped his diary would not only expose the crimes and propaganda of the Third Reich, but also serve as a warning for future generations to vigorously oppose dictatorships and state-sponsored terrorism.
The Bush museum is open from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday and from noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $7 for adults, $2 for children 6 and older; $5 for senior citizens and retired military with ID, as well as groups of 20 or more with reservations. Children 6 and younger and A&M and Blinn College students get in free.

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Aus: The Washington Times, 28.03.2005:
Feature: German's war diary goes publicy

By Phil Magers
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL

Dallas, TX, Mar. 25 (UPI) -- The grandson of a German justice official who spoke out against the Nazi party during World War II will put his ancestor's personal diary on display for the first time in Texas, and he says it has lessons for today's war against terrorism.
"When men and women of good will are confronted by evil, they must put aside their differences and stand together and fight," said Scott Kellner, a retired Texas A&M University English professor who has translated the nine volumes.
His grandfather, Friedrich Kellner, was a justice inspector, the chief administrative officer in a German courthouse. He died in 1970 at the age of 85, but not before turning over his diary to his grandson, who vowed to use it as a weapon against anti-democratic forces.
The handwritten diary will be on display, along with family photos and other mementos, at the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum on the Texas A&M University campus at College Station from April 1 to May 30 to mark the 60th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day.
Susie Cox, assistant to the curator at the Bush library, said they believe the diary presents a "fascinating" perspective on World War II Germany.
As a courthouse administrator, Friedrich Kellner witnessed many acts that are identical to the terrorism committed today, his grandson says. Among them were the indoctrination of children with prejudice and targeting of Jews as scapegoats.
Kellner wrote on Oct. 26, 1941: "The world will rightfully be enraged about this inhumanity, and a hate will burn that can never be extinguished. How long will this reign of terror continue?"
Kellner looked to the United States and England to lead the fight against Nazi Germany.
"Now is a unique chance for England and America to take the initiative but not with empty promises and insufficient measures," he wrote. "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 beast of war to reason. Up until now the statesmen -- through unbelievable shortsightedness -- have neglected or failed their duty."
Kellner, who served in the German infantry during World War I, later became a justice inspector in Mainz, where he campaigned as a Social Democrat against the Nazi party during Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany.
Kellner would take a copy of Hitler's "Mein Kampf" to rallies in Mainz, the home of Johann Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press, and use it as a weapon against the Nazi party.
"He would hold this book above his head, and he would tell the crowd, 'Gutenberg, your press has been violated by this evil book,'" his grandson said.
Kellner was beaten on two occasions, and when Hitler became chancellor in 1933 he moved to the small town of Laubach, where his views were not well known, but he continued to speak out against miscarriages of justice.
Kellner was hauled before a tribunal in Laubach and threatened with imprisonment in a concentration camp. After that incident he began his diary, decrying the militarism of his countrymen and the insanity of Hitler.
"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," he told his grandson in 1968. "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."
When the war ended, Kellner was appointed deputy mayor of Laubach, where he helped restore the Social Democratic Party. He and his wife, Pauline, suffered a personal tragedy, however, when their only son took his own life.
In 1935 the Kellners had sent their son to the United States to keep him out of the German army. Fred Kellner joined the U.S. Army and ironically was sent to serve in France. He was later reunited with his parents in 1946.
Scott Kellner, who grew up in a children's home, said the father that he never met could not adjust to the "fractured reality" of being a man without a country. He is buried in the American Legion Tomb in Paris.
Inspired by his grandfather, Kellner went on to college and graduated from the University of Massachusetts. He taught there for several years before joining the faculty at Texas A&M, now the home of the Bush library and museum.
Kellner's grandfather turned the 753-page diary over to him with the condition that it be used as a weapon against any resurgence of anti-democratic forces. He has used his retirement to complete the translation and prepare it for its first public display.
"Maybe it's good that it took so long to get to this point," he said. "I don't think the world has needed to hear my grandfather's voice more than they need it now."