| Gustave Gilbert | |||||||||||
| Birth Name: | Gustave Mark Gilbert | ||||||||||
| Birth Date: | 30 September 1911 | ||||||||||
| Birth Place: | New York City, US | ||||||||||
| Death Place: | Manhasset, New York, US | ||||||||||
| Spouse: | Matilda Gilbert | ||||||||||
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Gustave Mark Gilbert (September 30, 1911 – February 6, 1977) was an American psychologist best known for his writings containing observations of high-ranking Nazi leaders during the Nuremberg trials. His 1950 book The Psychology of Dictatorship was an attempt to profile the Nazi German dictator Adolf Hitler using as reference the testimonials of Hitler's closest generals and commanders. Gilbert's published work is still a subject of study in many universities and colleges, especially in the field of psychology.
Gilbert was born in the state of New York in 1911, the son of Jewish-Austrian immigrants. He won a scholarship from the School for Ethical Culture at the College Town Center in New York. He attended the City College of New York where he majored in German before switching to psychology. In 1939, Gilbert obtained his PhD degree in psychology from Columbia University. Gilbert also held a diploma from the American Board of Examiners in professional psychology.
During World War II, Gilbert was commissioned with the rank of First Lieutenant. Because of his knowledge of German, he was sent overseas as a translator.
In 1945, after the end of the war, Gilbert was sent to Nuremberg, Germany, as a translator for the International Military Tribunal for the trials of the World War II German prisoners. Gilbert was appointed the prison psychologist of the German prisoners. During the process of the trials Gilbert became, after Douglas Kelley, the confidant of Hermann Göring, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Hans Frank, Oswald Pohl, Otto Ohlendorf, Rudolf Höss, and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, among others. Gilbert and Kelley administered the Rorschach inkblot test to the 22 defendants in the Nazi leadership group prior to the first set of trials. Gilbert also participated in the Nuremberg trials as the American Military Chief Psychologist and provided testimony attesting to the sanity of Rudolf Hess.
Gilbert also administered IQ tests to the Nazi leadership. Hjalmar Schacht scored highest with 143 points, followed by Arthur Seyss-Inquart and Göring. Julius Streicher scored lowest with 106 points.[1] [2]
In 1946, after the trials, Gilbert returned to the US. Gilbert stayed busy teaching, researching, and writing. In 1947 he published part of his diary, consisting of observations taken during interviews, interrogations, "eavesdropping" and conversations with German prisoners, under the title Nuremberg Diary. (This diary was reprinted in full in 1961 just before the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.)
The following is a famous exchange Gilbert had with Göring from this book:
In 1948, as Head Psychologist at the Veterans Hospital at Lyons, NJ, Gilbert treated veterans of World Wars I and II who had suffered nervous breakdowns.
In 1950, Gilbert published The Psychology of Dictatorship: Based on an Examination of the Leaders of Nazi Germany. In this book, Gilbert made an attempt to portray a profile of the psychological behavior of Adolf Hitler, based on deductive work from eyewitness reports from Hitler's commanders in prison in Nuremberg.
In September 1954, while he was an Associate Professor of Psychology at Michigan State College, Gilbert attended the 62nd Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association in New York. Gilbert was part of a four-person panel discussing "Psychological Approaches to the Problem of Anti-Intellectualism."
In 1961, when he was the chairman of the psychology department of Long Island University in Brooklyn, Gilbert was summoned to testify in the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Gilbert testified on May 29, 1961, describing how both Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Rudolf Höss tried in their conversations with him to put the responsibility for the extermination of the Jews on each other's doorstep. Nevertheless, Eichmann appeared in the accounts of both men. Then he presented a document, handwritten by Höss, that surveys the process of extermination at Auschwitz and different sums of people gassed there – under Höss as commandant and according to an oral report by Eichmann. The court decided not to accept Gilbert's psychological analyses of the prisoners at Nuremberg as part of his testimony.[3]
In 1967, Gilbert convinced Leon Pomeroy, then a recent graduate from University of Texas at Austin, to build a clinical doctoral program in the field of psychology at Long Island University. At the time, Gilbert was serving as chairman of the psychology department of Long Island University in Brooklyn, New York.
Gilbert died on 6 February 1977.
Gustave Gilbert has been portrayed by the following actors in film, television and theater productions;[4]
Also, the character "Abe Fields" in Michael Koehlmeier's 2008 book Abendland ("Occident") who is based on Gustave Gilbert (see the interview with the author [5] in the Austrian paper Der Falter of 15. 8. 2007). In the book, Abe Fields sits in on the trials as psychologist and speaks to the defendants.