Comprising ten notebooks, it is considered by leading historians as "an important piece of historical literature.

"[1] The editors of the German magazine Der Spiegel called it "an image of Nazi Germany that has never existed before in such a vivid, concise and challenging form.

The amount of material and possible transcription efforts dissuaded publishers from the project for many years, until in 2005 when former US president George H. W. Bush, who had been a combat pilot in World War II, arranged for the diary to be exhibited in his presidential library, which brought the diary to the public.

The first exhibit was at the George Bush Presidential Library in April and May 2005 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day, which took place on May 8, 1945.

[6] In 2011 the diary was published in its original language by Wallstein Verlag in Göttingen, Germany, under the title, Vernebelt, verdunkelt sind alle Hirne, Tagebücher 1939-1945.

In 2018 Cambridge University Press published the English translation, My Opposition: The Diary of Friedrich Kellner -- A German against the Third Reich.

Concerned for his family's safety, Kellner moved to the town of Laubach in Hesse, where he found employment as administration manager of the courthouse.

When Hitler ordered the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, Kellner began his diary, risking his life to record the crimes of the Third Reich.

After using his diary to help remove former Nazis from positions of power in the region, he returned the notebooks to their hiding place and worked to reestablish the Social Democratic Party.

"[12] Opportunities for publication were enhanced when former president George H. W. Bush, who had been a combat pilot in World War II, arranged for the diary to be exhibited in his presidential library in 2005.

Unlike the typical diary, the main focus of My Opposition is not on the Kellners' personal lives, their daily tribulations and how they managed to survive during the war.

Yet there are a number of entries to that effect, such as this one written on 13 May 1941: We are experiencing an almost unbearable shortage in many of our daily necessities and already there is talk about coming reductions in meat and bread rations.

[13]And this entry on 20 January 1943 about the courthouse constable, who had been assigned by the SS to keep his eye on Kellner's activities: This Nazi terrorist has a towering rage against non-Party members who manage to achieve things for themselves.

To trample democracy with one’s feet and give power to a single man over almost eighty million people is so terrible one can really tremble over the things that will come.

He pointed out that the world's intelligentsia, university professors and professionals in medicine and law, were willing to accept the National Socialist propaganda.

He had the great unbelievable luck to meet with weak and vacillating opponents, cowardly people who knew nothing of idealism or had a feeling for solidarity, who did not possess honor and love for freedom," he wrote on May 3, 1942.

In an entry dated 12 November 1940, he wrote: Chamberlain and the entire subsequent government carry the blame for not having taken equivalent steps when they discovered Germany's preparations for war.

On 25 June 1941, a few days after Operation Barbarossa and six months before Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, he wrote: When will this insanity be brought to an end?

I would like to assume that at least some men in the world are energetically working to do for humanity what all the other statesmen--through unbelievable short-sightedness--neglected or failed to do.

[18]In the same entry he angrily wrote: Even today there are idiots in America who talk nonsense about some compromise with Germany under Adolf Hitler.

On 26 October 1941 he wrote: In Nantes and Bordeaux in France, two German officers were shot by unknown culprits.

[23] Friedrich Kellner's diary counters such suggestions: A soldier on leave here said he personally witnessed a terrible atrocity in the occupied part of Poland.

Ninety-nine percent of the German people, directly or indirectly, carry the guilt for the present situation.

[24]Kellner also recorded the miscarriages of justice within Germany itself, where the Nazis' disregard for laws and human life took its toll upon the citizenry.

All media—literature, music, newspapers, and radio broadcasts—were censored, in an effort to reinforce Nazi power and to suppress opposing viewpoints and information.

On 14 April 1943, upon reading that the People's Court of Justice in Vienna had imposed the death sentence on a man accused of listening to a non-censored overseas radio broadcast, Kellner cut the article from the newspaper and wrote next to it: Ten years in prison for a "radio crime"!

Plus millions of people fully believed in the National Socialist philosophy and were influenced by the Führer's radio broadcasts and the detailed manipulations of Party propaganda.

Today our opponents are at the Rhine in the West, and at the Oder in the East, and still I do not believe a collapse can be brought about by a popular uprising.

[27]Museum exhibits Museum and library offers to house the diary[34] CCI Entertainment, a Canadian film company, produced a documentary film entitled, My Opposition: The Diaries of Friedrich Kellner, which interweaves the stories of Kellner and his American grandson, using reenactments, photographs, and archival footage.

It was screened in November 2008 at the Dag Hammarskjold Auditorium at United Nations Headquarters in New York in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht.