Friedrich Kellner

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Friedrich Kellner, 1923

August Friedrich Kellner (born February 1, 1885 in Vaihingen an der Enz , † November 4, 1970 in Lich ) was a German social democrat , judicial inspector and author of diaries that he wrote in secret during the Nazi era . He later said :

“Back then I couldn't fight the Nazis in the present. So I decided to fight them in the future. I wanted to give future generations a weapon against any resurgence of such injustice. My eyewitness reports should record the barbaric acts and also show how they could be ended. "

Life

Family and education

August Friedrich Kellner was born on February 1st, 1885 in Vaihingen an der Enz . He was the only child of Georg Friedrich Kellner (1862–1926), a baker from Arnstadt in Thuringia , and Barbara Wilhelmine Vaigle (1858–1925) from Bissingen an der Enz. Kellner's parents - like their ancestors - belonged to the Protestant faith .

When August Friedrich was four years old, the family moved to Mainz , where his father worked as a master baker in the "Goebels Sugar Factory" founded by Lorenz Goebel .

He attended elementary school and then switched to high school. At the beginning of December 1902, at the age of 17, Friedrich Kellner graduated from the Goetheschule in Mainz. He began his professional career in 1903 at the Mainz District Court as a court clerk aspirant . He worked there until 1933, becoming a secretary of justice, then an accountant and finally a judicial inspector.

Military service and marriage

Friedrich Kellner, 1914

In 1907 and 1908, Friedrich Kellner did his military reserve service in the 6th Company of the Grand Duchess Infantry Regiment (3rd Grand Ducal Hessian) No. 117 in Mainz. He was promoted to vice sergeant and received the rifle cord.

In 1913, Friedrich Kellner married Pauline Preuss from Mainz. Their only child, Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Kellner, was born on February 29, 1916.

When the First World War began in 1914 , Friedrich Kellner was called up as an officer's deputy in the Prince Carl Infantry Regiment (4th Grand Ducal Hessian Regiment) No. 118 stationed in Worms , and in September initially fought in the Battle of the Marne in France. In mid-December 1914 he was wounded in the leg by a shrapnel during the fighting near Reims and was sent to the St. Rochus Hospital in Mainz to recover. After the convalescence he was in May 1915 in the management of the XVIII. Army Corps (German Empire) transferred to Frankfurt am Main.

Political activities

Despite his apparent loyalty to the German Empire, Friedrich Kellner welcomed the birth of German democracy after the war. He became an avid political organizer for the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). From the first days of the Weimar Republic he took a stand against what he saw as the dangerous extremism of the Communists and the National Socialists. At rallies he repeatedly showed Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf and then shouted the following words to the assembled audience : "Gutenberg, your printing press has been dishonored by this evil book". More than once, Kellner was beaten up and threatened by Nazi thugs for speaking out against her in public and in all clarity.

Two weeks before Adolf Hitler took office as Chancellor and before the start of the serious and merciless persecution of political opponents of National Socialism, Friedrich Kellner brought his wife and son to a safe place in Laubach . There he also worked at the local court himself. In 1935, August Friedrich Kellner's son emigrated to the USA after he was accused of stealing a small amount of money in the Laubach district court . During the November pogroms of 1938 , the waiters tried to help their Jewish neighbors.

Because he could no longer be openly politically active, Friedrich Kellner entrusted his thoughts to a secret diary from that time on. He wanted to convey to his son in America and future generations how important it was that the democratic idea should oppose dictatorships. He wanted to warn everyone against ever trying to appease tyrants, give in to their terrorism, or even believe their propaganda. When the war ended, Friedrich Kellner had filled 861 pages in ten volumes of his diary.

However, Kellner did not limit his activities to just journaling. He continued to make his opinion public. Thereupon he was summoned to the Giessen District Court in February 1940 , where the President of the Court, Hermann Colnot, asked him to moderate his political views. A few months later, Kellner was also summoned from the Laubach mayor's office and warned by the mayor that he and his wife would be sent to a concentration camp if they continued to have a negative impact on the city's population. A report by the NSDAP local group leader Hermann Engst shows that the local party leadership was also considering sending waiters to a concentration camp after the end of the war.

After the war

After the end of the war, Friedrich Kellner helped rebuild the SPD in Laubach and then also acted as party chairman there for some time. In 1945 and 1946 he was an alderman for the city of Laubach. From 1956 to 1960 he was the first city councilor of Laubach and thus the mayor's representative.

From 1933 to 1947, Friedrich Kellner was managing director at the Laubach District Court. From 1948 until his retirement in 1950 he worked as a district auditor at the regional court in Giessen . He was then admitted to the Laubach District Court as a litigation agent and legal advisor for three years.

After their son's suicide in Paris in 1953, Friedrich Kellner and his wife Pauline plunged into a deep and long-lasting depression. He began by destroying parts of his documents from the time of the Nazi state. In 1960 her grandson Robert Scott Kellner suddenly turned up at his grandparents' house in Laubach. An intensive relationship developed, and Friedrich Kellner and his wife found new courage to face life. In 1960 Friedrich Kellner received a reparation notice. Accordingly, he was promoted retrospectively to judicial officer and received a higher monthly pension from it. In 1968 Friedrich Kellner gave nine volumes of the ten-volume diary from 1939 and 1945 to his American grandson Robert Scott Kellner to have it translated and published. The first volume seemed to have been stolen in the meantime.

After his retirement, he and his wife moved back to an old people's home in Mainz. On November 4, 1970, Friedrich Kellner died in the hospital in Lich. He had moved back to Laubach in April 1970 after the death of his wife in January 1970. According to his wishes, he was buried at the side of his wife and parents in the main cemetery in Mainz .

Friedrich Kellner's diary

The diary consists of ten volumes and a total of 861 pages. It contains 676 individually dated entries in Sütterlin script and more than 500 newspaper clippings.

Friedrich Kellner's diaries

In August 2011 the Wallstein Verlag in Göttingen published it under the title “All brains are fogged, darkened - Diaries 1939–1945” . Book 1, believed to have been stolen, had since appeared again. The editors of the two-volume edition with around 1200 pages are the head of the Holocaust Literature Unit at the Justus Liebig University in Gießen , Sascha Feuchert , the former director, Erwin Leibfried , Jörg Riecke and Markus Roth and Friedrich Kellner's grandson Robert Martin Scott Kellner.

Before that, the diaries were issued:

The Gießener Anzeiger and the Laubach Local History Working Group had shown an exhibition on the diaries in the Laubach Local History Museum in 2005.

A Canadian film company made a documentary film about Friedrich Kellner's records in 2006 entitled My Opposition: the Diaries of Friedrich Kellner .

literature

  • Markus Roth : Chronicler of delusion - Friedrich Kellner's diaries 1938/39 to 1945. Supplement to the exhibition “The burden of unsaid words”. Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn 2009, ISBN 978-3-86872-241-3 .
  • Friedrich Kellner (author), Sascha Feuchert , Robert Martin Scott Kellner, Erwin Leibfried , Jörg Riecke, Markus Roth (eds.): “All brains are fogged, darkened.” Diaries 1939–1945. Wallstein, Göttingen 2011 ISBN 978-3-8353-0636-3 ; again series of publications, 1195 Federal Agency for Civic Education , Bonn 2012
  • Benno Stieber: A completely normal citizen. Friedrich Kellner protested against the regime in his diaries, Der Spiegel Geschichte, 2, 2019, pp. 24–29

Web links

Wikiquote: Friedrich Kellner  - Quotes
Commons : Friedrich Kellner  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Magers, Phil: German's war diary goes public. The Washington Times , March 28, 2005
  2. ^ Schmidt-Wyk, Frank: Diaries against Terror ( memento from September 30, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), Mainzer Allgemeine Zeitung, September 24, 2006
  3. ↑ Casstevens, David, spreading his message , Fort Worth Star-Telegram, April 22 2007
  4. ↑ George Bush Presidential Library and Museum - Friedrich Kellner exhibit. (PDF; 471 kB) Retrieved April 27, 2007 .
  5. ↑ Private Writings of Texan's Grandfather Detail Holocaust Atrocities, but also Warn Future Generations to Put Aside Differences. Holocaust Museum Houston, May 4, 2006, archived from the original on March 21, 2007 ; Retrieved February 25, 2007 .
  6. ↑ George Bush Presidential Library and Museum - Friedrich Kellner exhibit. (PDF; 594 kB) Accessed April 24, 2007 .
  7. ↑ Klemens Hogen-Ostlender: Nobody wanted to risk the inclusion of Rudolf Hess ( Memento from November 1, 2005 in the Internet Archive ). In: Gießener Anzeiger , August 20, 2005, archived on November 1, 2005
  8. ↑ Friedrich Kellner. A German against the Third Reich. Gießener Anzeiger, January 20, 2018, portrayal of the grandson Robert Scott
  9. ↑ George Bush Presidential Library, College Station, Texas
  10. ^ Holocaust Museum Houston
  11. ^ Friedrich Ebert Foundation, Berlin and Bonn
  12. ^ Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum, Abilene, Kansas ( Memento June 5, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  13. ↑ Holocaust literature , according to Gießener Anzeiger, September 23, 2005 and ibid. , September 24, 2005: "I am pleased that Friedrich Kellner will stay in the museum", interview with the publisher.
  14. ^ Telefilm Canada ( Memento March 11, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) - CCI Entertainment Toronto
personal data
SURNAME Waiter, Friedrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kellner, August Friedrich (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German social democrat, judicial inspector and diary author
DATE OF BIRTH February 1, 1885
PLACE OF BIRTH Vaihingen an der Enz
DATE OF DEATH 4th November 1970
Place of death Lich