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The Jersusalem Post, 05.04.2005: Anti-Nazi wartime diaries revealed

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Aus: The Jersusalem Post, 05.04.2005:
Anti-Nazi wartime diaries revealed

By SAM SER

Had Scott Kellner never gone looking for the "fount of his own existence," he would never have seen the diary. Probably no one else would have, either.
Nine of the notebooks which anti-Nazi activist Friedrich Kellner filled with his secret thoughts during World War II in Germany are now on display at the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum at Texas A&M University. They have come a long way to get there – from western Germany to the southern United States, from the heart of a man torn over the destruction of his country to the hands of a grandson he hardly knew.
Kellner was a political activist for the Social Democrats in Mainz and campaigned against the Nazi Party. When Hitler came to power and sought revenge against his political opponents, Kellner moved his family to the small town of Laubach, where he became the chief justice inspector in the district courthouse. As such he was the judicial officer in charge of the administration of the courthouse, including police investigative reports, the records of the prosecutor's office, and trial documents.
Kellner's open declarations against miscarriages of justice caused him to be brought before a tribunal and threatened with imprisonment in a concentration camp.
After that he spent his nights writing in a secret diary, risking his life. One of the nearly 600 entries shows not only how much many in Germany knew of the "Final Solution" but also how too few of them felt about it: "28 October 1941: A soldier on vacation here reported as eyewitness a terrible atrocity 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. All soldiers who had knowledge of these bestial actions of those Nazi sub-human beings were all of the opinion that the German people should already shake in their shoes because of the coming retribution.
"There is no punishment that would be hard enough to be applied to these Nazi beasts."
Kellner believed from the outset of the war that Germany was doomed to lose it, so he and his wife sent their only son Fred to the United States in 1935 to save him from serving in Hitler's army.
Meanwhile, Kellner was holding covert parlor meetings with a small circle of like-minded individuals. Even as Germany was conquering more and more territory, Kellner was envisioning Hitler's defeat at the hands of the Allies. Of the ultimate resolution to the war and the reconstruction of Germany, he wrote: "Before all, racial hatred has to be exterminated. It has to be impossible for all eternity for the German people to treat other people like the Jews and the Poles in a sadistic manner and to arrange their systematic eradication."
Speaking of what he then called terrorism, Kellner added: "If we are in Europe so far gone that we simply remove people, then Europe is irretrievably lost. Today it is the Jews, tomorrow it will be another weak nation that is exterminated."
Kellner also warned against a failure to prosecute all those who brought Germany to military and moral ruin – a prophecy whose fulfillment he watched painfully after the war, as Nazis were reinstated in various positions around the country. He was appointed deputy mayor of Laubach then, and helped to restore the Social Democratic Party.
Around that time, the Kellners were reunited with their son, but not as they had imagined they would.
Fred had been sent to Europe in 1946 as a translator for the US Army. Shortly after meeting up with his parents, Fred Kellner killed himself. As Scott Kellner explained, his father could not cope with his situation, wearing the uniform of the victors while feeling the devastation of his homeland.
Fred Kellner had other troubles as well. In New York, he had married a young Jewish woman, Frieda Schulman, with whom he fathered Scott Kellner. When Scott was two years old his parents divorced and Scott's mother put him up for adoption. She "showed up with a stepfather" when Scott was 12, he said, which led to "a very sad period" in his life. At 16, he left home and quit school; at 17 he joined the Navy, ending up in Germany at 19. That's when he decided to search for his grandparents.
"I must have gone to about three small towns named Laubach before finding the right one," Scott told The Jerusalem Post. "I was AWOL for a week just looking for it."
Scott didn't know German at the time, and his grandfather's English was poor as well, so their communication was difficult at first. But, Scott said, the elder Kellner was so inspiring that he "helped me get my life together."
Scott went on to college and, before attaining a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, was given the nine surviving notebooks of his grandfather in 1968. Until then Friedrich Kellner, having grown increasingly depressed, had several times considered simply throwing them away. He died in 1970, at the age of 85.
Even then, Scott Kellner said, his grandfather was disappointed at how little the world had learned from World War II. "To imagine what he would be thinking of humanity today, when we are still facing the same kind of horrors..." he said, trailing off.
Scott tried to have the diary translated and published, to no avail. Several universities – as well as Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum – were interested in keeping the materials in their libraries, he said, but none could guarantee funds for publishing them. In 1997 Kellner was teaching at Texas A&M, so when the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum opened there that year, he saw his opportunity.
Kellner believes his grandfather's warnings about the dangers of National Socialism, and what can happen when tyrants and bigots go unopposed, are just as relevant today as they were 60 years ago.
"This diary is not an historical document," he said, "it's a weapon for today to combat the evil of terrorism that is ever with us."
After the exhibit at the Bush library ends in May, the diary is scheduled to be exhibited at Houston's Holocaust museum next summer. Kellner hopes that the national Holocaust museum will put it on display afterward. The general public needs to see it, he said, because "this is the same general public that is arguing amongst itself whether to fight anti-Semitism, or whether to fight terrorism, or whether to fight Saddam Hussein.
"If my grandfather's words can help in some way in this fight, then his story won't be a sad story, but will have a happy ending."