A secret diary. A fearless Nazi hunter. An unknown Jewish grandson. Robert Scott Kellner finally honors his grandfather’s deathbed wish

Photos: Shlomie Nathanson, Family archives

In the thick of World War II, a mid-level official named Friedrich Kellner risked his life to pen his secret diaries, one man’s battle against Germany’s path to dictatorship and genocide. Years later, in intersecting lives filled with pain and challenge, Robert Scott Kellner, Friedrich’s Jewish grandson, has finally fulfilled his grandfather’s last wish

In an airtight vault of a Wells-Fargo bank in College Station, Texas, lies a treasure. It’s not gold or a crown or jewels, and someone looking in from the outside might wonder at the value of a bunch of yellowed bundles of old ledger paper penned with thousands of lines in now-antiquated German script. But for Dr. Robert Scott Kellner, a retired English professor at Texas A&M University, it’s a precious heirloom of historic proportions. And for the past five decades, he’d been devoted to sharing its contents with whoever will pay attention.

These sheaves hold a sacred trust: They are the secret diary of Dr. Kellner’s grandfather, Nazi adversary Friedrich Kellner — one man’s courageous opposition to totalitarianism and the rise of the Third Reich.

A mid-level official in a provincial German town, Friedrich Kellner kept a stash of secret notebooks from 1939 to 1945, risking his life to record Germany’s path to dictatorship and genocide and to protest his countrymen’s complicity in the regime’s brutalities. Now, after an improbable and emotionally-wrenching series of events spanning nearly eight decades, Robert Scott Kellner, Friedrich Kellner’s Jewish grandson, has finally fulfilled his grandfather’s deathbed wish with the publication of those fragile folios in readable book form, by Cambridge University Press.

Dr. Kellner feels the diary has enduring significance, especially in these days of heightened, overt anti-Semitism. “My grandfather wanted his diary to serve as a guide, a warning, for the generations after him,” says Dr. Kellner, whose soft, whispery voice and positive disposition even in the face of crippling difficulties belies an early life fraught with profound personal challenges that could handily sink a lesser person.

Friedrich Kellner: The Moral Fight

Who was Friedrich Kellner? He was a social activist and Lutheran by birth who had no Jewish friends and few Jewish encounters. Yet from the outset, his diary shows his moral character as he warns of the planned genocide of Jews, when so many others were still in denial that Hitler’s intent was nothing short of extermination. The notebooks were a courageous act of defiance in the face of terror — Friedrich felt that if he couldn’t stop the spread of madness in the present, by documenting it carefully he might at least have an impact on the future.

Friedrich Kellner and his wife Pauline married in 1913, and soon afterward he fought with the German army in World War I. He was a patriot and had a love of law and justice, but the high toll of the war bothered him, and the ensuing anarchy prompted him to join the short-lived Weimar Republic’s Social Democratic party.

When Hitler began his rise to power, Kellner, a justice inspector, clearly foresaw what was to become of his beloved country. He read Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kampf, which laid out the future Fuhrer’s diabolical doctrine, and he understood the horror that would ensue were absolute power handed over to this madman.