It is hard to beat the story that provides the background to the publication of this illuminating Nazi-era diary. To start with, a low-born, well-respected judicial official, a veteran of World War I, and a committed Social Democratic activist whose indignation at the stupidity and opportunism of Nazi hotheads and the “ninety-nine percent of the German population” (p. 192) that seemed to march along with them provided Friedrich Kellner the motivation to write a daily record that documented the self-indulgent and ultimately completely hazardous “sunshine politics” of the Third Reich (p. 358). Then we have Friedrich's ne'er-do-well son Fred, who before the war was hustled off to relatives in New York City, masqueraded as a Jew but continued to dabble in pro-German politics, and killed time after his wife left him and deposited their three young children in a Jewish orphanage in New Haven, Connecticut, to find her fame and fortune as a show girl in the “World of Mirth Carnival.” Killing time, Fred, among other things, repaired pinball machines in a Norfolk, Virginia, amusement park before heeding the stern advice of the FBI to join the army without, however, changing the course of his life which veered into blackmarketeering and ended in suicide at his second wife's Paris apartment in 1953. Finally, readers are introduced to the juvenile delinquent-turned-Marine grandson, Robert, who, after being returned to his mother's new home in Vermont after years in the orphanage, followed snippets of family lore to contact with his grandfather in small-town Laubach, Hessen, while traveling on assignment to Saudi Arabia, went on to mend the broken hearts of his German relatives, and find reward in the grandfather's handwritten diary, which for Robert Martin Scott Kellner became a lifetime project that involved bundles of letters to disinterested publishers. Yet an inquiry to Gordon Mork, the German historian at Purdue, attested to the historical value of the documents, a pitch to Kirk Douglas indicated that the entries might make a good movie, and finally an appeal to ex-President George Herbert Walker Bush at the turn of the twenty-first century brought about the gesture that turned the plot; extracts of the grandfather's wartime testimony were exhibited in the rotunda of Bush's presidential library at Texas A&M University on the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War II in April and May 2005. The subsequent publicity found an echo in Der Spiegel and then the attention of Sascha Feuchert, director and founder of the Holocaust Literature Project at the University of Giessen and, here, the appreciative steward of the final publication of the diaries. The story of the diaries and the political background of the diarist, Friedrich Kellner (1885–1970), are superbly narrated in an appendix by the grandson, Robert Martin Scott Kellner.

The diaries themselves are reproduced in their entirety and include dozens of pasted-in newspaper headlines and articles. Kellner's montage-like arrangements swirl readers into the media universe of the Third Reich and his acid political commentary fully reveals the hubris and hypocrisy of National Socialism. According to press reports, German bombers laid “everything to waste,” while British air forces hit only “open fields, cemeteries, and hospitals” (p. 87). But if, early in the war, the Nazis had trumpeted their intention to “clobber, destroy, and wipe out” all their enemies, later on they “clutched” concepts of “time and space” against which the Allies should ultimately founder; SS journalists at the Schwarze Korps “have become much more modest” (p. 432) remarked Kellner, who “from the very beginning never budged from his position that Germany would lose the war” (p. 262). As a state bureaucrat, Kellner confirms the intimidating, overbearing postures of local Nazis who persistently monitored his commitment to the war effort and threatened him and his wife with incarceration in a concentration camp. In anticipation of revenge after the war, Kellner names the names behind the depradations, including the names of those who, following “secret orders,” fleeced local Jews of their foodstocks and bed linen in October 1941 before deporting them to Auschwitz a year later (p. 187). Throughout the terror, Germans chatted away—in doctors' offices, in waiting rooms, in train compartments. Usually they wove together theories outlining the self-evident nature of Germany's victory; occasionally they wondered why the war was lasting so long. They also passed along quite detailed information about the murder of Jewish civilians and Russian prisoners of war gleaned from soldiers returning from the eastern front. One reason Kellner wrote the diary was to provide evidence against all the Germans who, he believed, would deny their association with the “Nazi beasts” (p. 192) and “Hitler Bandits” (p. 311) after the war. Indeed, Kellner expressed relief that the plot to kill Hitler failed in 1944 because only the total defeat of the Reich would bring Germans to their senses and make impossible any revival of the “stab-in-the-back” legend that had crippled Weimar democracy. There are few even critical diarists who spoke so openly and clearly of their desire to see Germany lose the war.

Kellner, however, did not understand why the “ninety-nine percent” acted as they did. Like his fellow diarist, Victor Klemperer, Kellner reserved special opprobium for educated Nazi sympathizers whom, like Klemperer, he assumed should have known better. But unlike Klemperer he had no doubt that most Germans stood with Hitler. Kellner sometimes lacked words to describe events around him fully, but he did not attempt to track down the genuine “vox populi” for which Klemperer searched or wonder which voices were more typical; Kellner was fully convinced that Germans had lost their minds, been poisoned, “hypnotized” (p. 230), “taken in,” or “fallen for” Hitler the “rat catcher” (p. 241). “Only the dumbest calves choose their own butcher,” he wrote in 1941 (p. 120). Kellner's intellectual apparatus is blunt and therefore inadequate to explain the allure of the Nazis; it tends to turn Germans into passive and self-deluded objects. He cannot identify the dynamics that provided glue to the Third Reich. And he did not understand the motivations behind the Nazi push for war. In Kellner's eyes, Hitler came off badly in comparison to Bismarck because Hitler lacked measure and modesty. But, of course, Hitler pursued very different aims than Bismarck; Kellner did not apprehend the racial basis to Nazi politics or the Nazis' embattled view of the world.

What Kellner's diary does reproduce with startling clarity is the way his German interlocutors continuously deluded themselves about the inevitability of a German victory. Kellner repeatedly objected that the war would not end before 1943, a notion that most people in 1940 and 1941 found preposterous, but since the war did not end until 1945, Kellner had to amend his explanations for German weakness. Instead of looking at the sources of German strength and exploring the sources of the political legitimacy of Nazism, he indicted the Allies for their lack of “idealism” and resolution, which provided a final motivation for keeping the diary (p. 532). Kellner hoped his testimony would stiffen the spine of democrats against tyrants. According to the testimony of his grandson, he emerged from World War II as a frustrated cold warrior with little sympathy or understanding for anti-Americanism, the New Left, or national liberation struggles. Although a life-long Social Democrat, Friedrich Kellner would have been quite gratified to find himself introduced to the wider world by George H. W. Bush.