Houston Chronicle by Robert Scott Kellner Nov. 10, 2019
Pauline Kellner hated the snide tone of the Führer's voice, his posturing and bluster, and the vulgar remarks toward perceived enemies. His name was ever on the lips of his besotted followers, but the wife of the courthouse manager in the small town of Laubach, Germany, refused to say "Heil Hitler" along with them. Pauline's attitude was noted, and most of the townsfolk shunned her.
She and her husband, Friedrich, had campaigned together as Social Democrats against the Nazi Party for more than a decade until Hitler came to power in 1933, ending Germany's first, and highly fragile, republic. Five years later, in mid-autumn 1938, Pauline and Friedrich were still in the fight. Like journalists on the front lines of battle, they observed and recorded. Friedrich eventually would fill 10 notebooks, and he considered his journal a "weapon of truth" for future generations to use against any resurgence of Nazi-types.
The prelude to genocide began that autumn when Hitler decided to launch a nationwide pogrom. Late in the evening of Nov. 9 and throughout the next day, in hundreds of cities and villages, local bands of Nazi Stormtroopers led a willing populace in attacks against their Jewish neighbors.
More:
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/When-a-little-Lutheran-lady-stood-tall-on-14821370.phpKellner is a retired English professor who taught at the University of Massachusetts and Texas A&M University. The grandson of Friedrich Kellner, he published the diary in its original language in Germany in 2011 and is the editor and translator of the English edition, My Opposition: The Diary of Friedrich Kellner —A German against the Third Reich, Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom, 2018.
