“I hate the Jews; they have to be eradicated. The Jews carry the guilt for all wars,” said Judge Heinrich Bischoff to justice inspector Friedrich Kellner in the autumn of 1942. After nine years of Nazi rule, freely abusing Jews in the streets, desecrating their synagogues and ransacking their homes, such homicidal remarks were commonplace.
“If we had killed all the Jews, this war would not have come,” insisted Bischoff.
Friedrich knew the futility—and the danger–of contradicting the intensively indoctrinated Nazi. During the short-lived Weimar Republic, he had campaigned as a Social Democrat against Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists. When the Nazis came to power, Friedrich and his wife, Pauline, moved to a town where he was not known for his political activities and began a diary to record Nazi crimes.
Friedrich considered Bischoff “a pure type of a molded Nazi: Arrogance personified,” and he responded to him in his diary: “If there had not been one Jew in the whole world, Adolf Hitler would still have waged war against Poland–to steal territory and expand Germany to the East.”
As for Jews fomenting wars: “Chancellor Otto von Bismarck started three wars. Was he a Jew? Was Napoleon Bonaparte a Jew? Or Alexander the Great?”
The person responsible for fueling the ancient hatred known as antisemitism was Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, who ruled the nation’s media. He obsessively slandered Jews in the newspapers and magazines and used radio broadcasts to dramatically incite nationwide violence against them.
“The gullible public swallows whatever Goebbels says–and with enthusiasm,” wrote Friedrich. “Even critical thinkers believe the twisted statements when the subservient press repeats them a hundred times. Party members adore anything the media says and devour the brain food with a burning hunger.”
The “critical thinkers” most aroused Friedrich Kellner’s ire. They should have known better and had a stronger moral fiber. “One could just scream at these people,” wrote Friedrich. “Nothing remains of their earlier virtue. Now only crudeness, brutality, and the quest for power reign.”
“The way these academics—professors, lawyers and judges–subjugated themselves to the Nazi potentates, and how that helped to make the German people stupid, is a great shame. People in these circles, with their schooling, their studies, and their professional training should not be running after a false prophet. How are German students supposed to obtain wisdom from teachers who can be blamed for much of Germany’s collapse?”
The hatred stirred by the relentless antisemitic propaganda, along with the general population’s acquiescence in the abuse, ultimately resulted in Jews being rounded up throughout Europe and sent to their deaths in concentration camps. The massive transfer and murder was accomplished without objection from their non-Jewish neighbors, who seemed to regard it as a boring epilogue to a long story.
But Friedrich Kellner knew what it signified: “This cruel, despicable, and sadistic treatment–with its final goal of extermination–is the biggest stain on the honor of Germany. These crimes can never be erased from the Book of Humanity.”
In 1943, against all expectations of Germany’s usual victories, the self-proclaimed “invincible” German army was severely beaten by the Russians at Stalingrad.
At the end of that year, and with more losses, the blood-thirsty Judge Heinrich Bischoff exhibited surprising humility when he entered Friedrich’s office and said, “Things are not going well at the front. I believe Kellner had it right.”
An open admission of error was unusual for a confirmed Nazi. In Friedrich’s experience, most of them became even more dangerous with each additional defeat on the battlefield. “This type knows that losing this war will do away with them, so they continue to cling fanatically to Goebbels’ soothing phrases.”
But not Heinrich Bischoff. He had glimpsed the darkness of his own soul in the horrendous casualties of young and believing German soldiers. The supposed “Master Race” was thoroughly beaten by the supposed “subhuman” Russians. And Judge Bischoff had no Jews to blame for his country’s ignominious downfall.
As the judge experienced his epiphany about the complete senselessness of his hatreds, Friedrich Kellner was writing sadly in his diary, “Of all their many promises, the Nazis have kept only one: the eradication of the Jews.”
The German propaganda machine finally ran out of words. Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels admitted defeat and killed themselves. But that came far too late for the millions of German soldiers who died blindly following orders to wage vicious war against their neighbors.
Far too late for the six million Jews—about two out of every three European Jews—who were murdered, though innocent of any blame. The Holocaust of the Jews included one and a half million Jewish children.
Today, eighty years after my courageous grandfather, Friedrich Kellner, penned his last diary entry in May 1945, a viral resurgence of this ancient hatred engulfs the Jews yet again.
If the new Judge Bischoffs are not awakened soon enough from their insanity, what will be left of the small, unique tribe that preached, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” and gave civilization its moral foundation in the Ten Commandments?
Robert Scott Kellner– a navy veteran, is a retired English professor who taught at the University of Massachusetts and Texas A & M University. He is the grandson of the German justice inspector and diarist Friedrich Kellner and is the editor and translator of My Opposition: The Diary of Friedrich Kellner–A German against the Third Reich, Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom.
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