NOTE ABOUT PHOTO ABOVE: For a full screen image, save the photo to a file and then open it from that file.
I've been working for years on the translation of my grandfather's diary, getting help from others whenever I could. The picture above is a typical page from the diary, this one dated February 18, 1943. The dark yellow section is a newspaper article that has been pasted onto the page. The article is about a rally in which Prince Schaumburg Lippe is scheduled to give a speech entitled "Victory at any Price." My grandfather writes: "These parrots should use their energy at the East front. But then, drawling on with memorized phrases in front of the patient and disowned nation is a lot less dangerous. The time for accounting is approaching. It would have been smarter if the prince had kept quiet. In his role as an accomplice he will be taken to account just as much as the perpetrators, the abettors, the accomplices or the helpers. Everyone who has knowingly helped is responsible for the deeds of the Third Reich."
My grandparents loved to hike around Laubach in the Vogelsberg mountains. They would vacation in Schwarzwald -- the Black Forest -- near Heidelberg. One of my grandmother's nieces was married to the concertmeister of the Franfurt Orchestra, and my grandparents would travel the two hours to Frankfurt to attend the concerts. Another of my grandfather's interests was genealogy. He traced his father's line back to 1620, and his mother's line back to 1618.
Friedrich and Paulina Kellner had only one child, my father Friedrich Wilhelm Kellner. In 1935
when their son was 19, my grandparents sent him to America to escape the coming horrors. In an
ironic twist of fate my father, who had to join the U.S. Army as part of his citizenship process,
was sent overseas to participate in the fight against his former
schoolmates. In the last year of the war he was an interpreter in the prisoner of
war camps, helping to determine which Nazi soldiers should be tried for war crimes. He reunited
with his parents in Laubach 1946 and remained in Europe.
