An overall interesting book. It has some issues regarding tedious details/moments but it's definitely worth reading.

There are any number of literary treatments of the descent of one man into madness. Those, more than anything, are what Friedrich Kellner’s wartime diaries reminded me of. Kellner is a mid-level civil servant in 1930’s and 40’s Germany, living and working in a small town near Frankfurt. And everyday he watches in disbelief as society and civilization around him crumble into madness. You can almost feel him struggling to keep a handle on his own sanity, while he tries to navigate and survive a brutal regime.


=== The Good Stuff ===

* I have read a number of wartime diaries, including those of citizens, concentration camp inmates and soldiers. This one was one of the best. Friedrich Kellner was a dedicated diarist recording his everyday thoughts from 1939-1945. The diaries have been edited and translated by his grandson, Robert Scott Keller. While no doubt some detail and nuance has been lost during the translations, the end result is a staggering account of the incredible changes in Germany during this time.

* The most fascinating parts of the book, at least for me, were the interaction of Kellner with ordinary citizens of his small town. Even as the American artillery was dropping into the town, the dedicated Nazi followers were sure that Hitler was just biding his time, waiting to unleash his master strategy for victory.

* I took the diaries at face value, and assumed that they were written on the date indicated. Still, it is hard not to be amazed at how prescient Kellner could be. For example, he seems to have clearly foreseen the German invasion of the USSR several months before it happened. That is quite a feat for someone whose only news is either Nazi-controlled propaganda, or the occasional foreign broadcast (listened to under penalty of death). There were numerous other, equally amazing predictions, including some on post-war Europe.


=== The Not-So-Good Stuff ===

* Much of the book contains Kellner’s musings over the content of German news broadcasts. Specifically, he can’t help but comment on the obvious lies and half-truths that are being distributed. While these can be quite enlightening, and you can’t help being impressed by his courage in committing these thoughts to paper, they can become a bit tedious.

* Kellner seems very well informed. Obviously ,he has some other source of news beyond the government-controlled German press. I would have liked to see some explanations of this.

* Perhaps my biggest concern with the book is the accuracy of the translation. I don’t for a second believe that Robert Scott Kellner purposely mis-translates the original diaries, or makes any conscious attempt to mislead the reader. But the diaries are written in an older-style German, meaning there are essentially two translations. The first is from old to modern German, and the second from modern German to English. I wonder if some of the remarkable predictions were unconsciously helped along through the translation by the author’s knowledge of what really happened.


=== Summary ===

This is one of those books that will pick you up and shake you. Watching the local needlepoint group turn into blood-thirsty racists right before your eyes has to be a terrifying experience. Kellner does a masterful job of describing how a reasonably liberal and democratic Germany morphs into one of the most repressive and violent regimes in history, and of its fall from power.

But perhaps the most interesting thought of the whole book is regarding what the German population knew about the holocaust. In the author’s own words: “If an ordinary person such as Friedrich Kellner, a mid-level official with a high school education, living in a small country town away from any major city could know so much of what was happening in the supposedly secretive Third Reich, then people everywhere had to have known far more than they admitted of the brutality and genocide waged by their forces in every precinct of a ravaged Europe”.