My Opposition - Author

Author

Friedrich Kellner was a justice inspector in the courthouse in Mainz between 1903 and 1933. From 1914 until 1918, he served as a soldier in the German army. When the First World War ended and Germany became a republic, Kellner became a political activist for the Social Democratic Party of Germany. For ten years, Kellner openly campaigned against the Nazis until they came to power in 1933.

Once in power, Adolf Hitler soon banned the Social Democratic Party and other political organizations. Concerned for his family's safety, Kellner moved to the town of Laubach in Hesse, where he became the chief justice inspector: the judicial officer in charge of the administration of the courthouse. When Hitler ordered the invasion of Poland in September 1939, Kellner began his secret diary to record the crimes of the Third Reich.

After the war, Friedrich Kellner was made deputy mayor of Laubach. He dedicated himself to reestablishing the Social Democratic Party, and he became chairman of the Laubach branch. He retired from politics in 1960, at the age of seventy-five. In 1968 he gave the diary to his American grandson.

Using his grandfather's writings to combat the resurgence of fascism and anti-Semitism in the twenty-first century, and to counter historical revisionists who would deny the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities, Robert Scott Kellner wrote to the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who according to some sources has referred to the Holocaust as "a myth" and has called for Israel to be "wiped off the map," to offer him a copy of the diary. In his letter to Ahmadinejad, Kellner wrote: "We need to renounce ideologies that do not uphold, above all else, human life and personal liberty."