Education
He studied law in Munich before fleeing Germany with his family in March 1933 at age 19 to escape Nazi persecution.
He studied law in Munich before fleeing Germany with his family in March 1933 at age 19 to escape Nazi persecution.
At different points in his career, Kellen analyzed postwar German soldiers, defectors from behind the Iron Curtain, captured Viet Congress, and terrorists. He was among the first intelligence analysts to conclude that, contrary to prevailing United States. administration assessments, enemy morale in the Vietnam War was in fact high and that the war was not winnable. While at the Research and Development Corporation Kellen co-authored an open letter to the United States. government urging withdrawal of troops.
After living in France, the Netherlands and Yugoslavia, Kellen traveled to the United States.
He arrived in New York in 1935 and moved to Los Angeles, becoming an American citizen under the name Konrad Kellen. From 1941-1943, Kellen was the private secretary to author Thomas Mann.
Kellen also worked for Radio Free Europe, interviewing defectors from behind the Iron Curtain to study life under the Soviet regime. A chance meeting in postwar France with Marc Chagall"s daughter led to Kellen carrying some of the artist"s paintings with him on his return to the United States.
In the early 1960s he worked at the Hudson Institute think tank with military strategist and futurist Herman Kahn.
In the mid 1960s, Kellen joined the Research and Development Corporation. He was among the first to conclude, in 1965, that the Vietnam War was unwinnable. In 1972, months before the United States. pullout pursuant to the Paris Peace Accords, investigative journalist Jack Anderson cited the open letter authored by Kellen as authority for the assertion that communist military morale in Vietnam was high
Kellen went on to become an analyst of terrorism, his reports from the late 1970s and early 1980s identifying trends in terrorism that manifested a decade later.
Kellen wrote research papers and newspaper commentaries, as well as books including the biography Khrushchev (1961) and The Coming Age of Woman Power (1972), a study of male-female relationships. In 2003 he published his autobiography, Katzenellenbogen, named after his original family name.
He lived in retirement in Los Angeles, dying at his home in its Pacific Palisades district. In 2013, six years after Kellen"s death, journalist and author Malcolm Gladwell noted Kellen"s life and career were based on his ability to listen, citing him as "a truly great listener" for his ability to listen without filtering what he heard through the biases of the times.
After the war, Kellen remained in Germany as a political intelligence officer with the occupation forces as part of the denazification initiative, his duties including interviewing German soldiers to find out why they kept fighting for Hitler long after it was clear that their war was lost.