Dziennik sprzeciwu. Tajne zapiski obywatela III Rzeszy 1939–1942
My Opposition. Secret Notes of a Third Reich Citizen 1939–1942)

Author(s): Friedrich Kellner
Subject(s): History, Political history, Social history, Recent History (1900 till today), Interwar Period (1920 - 1939), WW II and following years (1940 - 1949)
Published by: Ośrodek KARTA
Keywords: diary; reminiscences; World War II; Third Reich; Allies; Germany; Nazism; Hitlerism; Adolf Hitler; Joseph Goebbels; propaganda; Holocaust; Friedrich Kellner
Summary/Abstract: The testimony of an ordinary German who evocatively describes the everyday life of the German provinces during World War II. The author tracks the hypocrisy of fascist propaganda and gives the lie to the thesis that the Germans allegedly were not aware of the atrocities of Nazism. He predicted the defeat of national socialism at a time when Hitler was most triumphant and the behavior of German society after the war when it came to settlements. Nobody, as he wrote in his diary, anticipating the future defeat of his own country, will be willing to admit their faith in Hitler, nobody will admit wartime wicked deeds, either. If, therefore, one is to count on de-Nazification and re-education of entire German society, it must be a long process forced from outside by the Allies. The Germans themselves will never do such an assignment. The propaganda daze which Kellner discovers in his circle (he is an employee of court administration in a small town near Gießen) is so universal that the only effective remedy for such a state of affairs seems to be a lost war and unconditional capitulation.

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