Holocaust
The Diaries of Friedrich Kellner
The second and final volume of the biography of Adolf Hitler by German historian Volker Ullrich is entitled Hitler: Downfall: 1939-1945. Roger Abrams, writing in the New York Journal of Books, calls Ullrich’s work “a remarkable treatise on the malevolence of power in modern times.”
Early in the volume, Ullrich commends the diaries of Friedrich Kellner. Kellner was a court official in the western German town of Laubach who had no special access to wartime information. Kellner was repulsed by the Nazi regime and kept detailed diaries based on what he read in the German press and by talking to people. He hoped his diaries would be a warning to future generations about blind faith.
Ullrich explains1 that Kellner’s diaries “show that it was entirely possible for normal people in small-town Germany to see through the lies of Nazi propaganda and learn of things like the ‘euthanasia’ murders of patients in psychiatric institutions and the mass executions carried out in occupied parts of eastern Europe.”
The Kellner diaries were published in 2011 in German and now are available in English. The diaries are also the subject of a touching 2007 TV documentary on YouTube created by Kellner’s American grandson.
George Will: Holocaust Museum Showcases Lessons for Today
George Will writing in The Washington Post on the 25th anniversary of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington:
Nothing — nothing — is unthinkable, and political institutions by themselves provide no permanent safety from barbarism, which permanently lurks beneath civilization’s thin, brittle crust.
This is why the Holocaust is the dark sun into which this democracy should peer.
Expanding our Understanding of the Holocaust
Dan Stone’s 2024 important book entitled The Holocaust: An Unfinished History documents and explains that the images of concentration camps and gas chambers do not tell the whole story of the Holocaust. The majority of those murdered did not die in gas chambers. Although this is not a new discovery, Stone explains it well:
The images of the Holocaust which still dominate the collective memory are those from the liberation of the camps, especially of Belsen, Buchenwald and Dachau. But Jews were only in those camps in Germany in large numbers because of the ‘death marches’. As the Red Army approached from the east, Himmler’s order that camp inmates should not fall alive into enemy hands resulted in the bizarre phenomenon of the camp evacuations, or ‘death marches’. Here the concentration camp and Germany became synonymous as the inmates passed through just about every small locality in Central Europe, especially across Silesia, Thuringia, Bohemia and Bavaria. The complicity of the population at large was assured, and claims, commonly heard after the war, that ‘no one knew’ became impossible to defend. More importantly, the marchers were killed in huge numbers, such that perhaps a third of the more than 714,000 concentration camp inmates as of January 1945 were dead by the end of the war. They died of exhaustion or were shot on the route and buried, often in unmarked graves, by the roadside where they fell or in local cemeteries.
Thus, although camps such as Belsen and Dachau had not been created to house Jews and, up until late 1944, had hardly been associated with the Holocaust at all (apart from in the training of camp guards, in the case of Dachau), by 1945 these camps were effectively functioning as death camps. This is especially so in the case of Belsen, where the British, on the surrender of the camp on 15 April, found some 60,000 dying inmates. The horror of Belsen remains a scar on the world’s conscience, and the sources from that moment remain painful to read, see and hear.
Stone, Dan. The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (pp. xl-xli). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition (footnote omitted).
Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Google Calendar no longer shows Holocaust Remembrance Day and Jewish American Heritage Month
Google Calendar has removed International Holocaust Remembrance Day and Jewish American Heritage Month from its default display in the United States, part of a broader removal of cultural and ethnic observances from the app.
International Youth Meeting Dachau Starts July 26th
The International Youth Meeting Dachau (IYM) was funded in 1983 as Internationale Jugendbegegnung Dachau (IJB Dachau). Since then, every year young people from all over the world get together. They search for answers concerning questions of the past, the present and the future. Participants will be able to meet eyewitnesses or their descendants, visit historical places and engage in workshops about historic and current forms of nationalism, exclusion and discrimination of minorities.
The meeting is scheduled for July 26th – August 8th, 2025. Applications are open now.
