Gustave Gilbert

Gustave Mark Gilbert ( born 1911 in New York; † February 6, 1977 in Manhasset, New York) became as American prison psychologist at the Nuremberg trial of the major war criminals of Nazi international notoriety.

Life

Gustave M. Gilbert was born to Austrian- Jewish immigrants in New York. In 1939 he received his doctorate at Columbia University in psychology. During World War II he was employed with the rank of First Lieutenant as an employee of the intelligence service of the U.S. Army in Europe.

Due to his knowledge of German, he was 1945-1946, now called the rank of captain, as a translator and prison psychologist at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. He was in charge there, the defendants in the first major war criminals and was able to discuss in depth with Nazi officials like Hermann Goering, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Hans Frank, Rudolf Hess and Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Gilbert his interlocutors were thereby after some time to realize, as a Jew, what the respondents but apparently not impressed. About his encounters with the accused Nazi figures reported Gilbert in 1947 in his Nuremberg Diary, which was read worldwide.

1954 Gilbert was an associate professor at Michigan State College, 1961 Head of the Psychology Department at the Long Iceland University in Brooklyn, New York. At the 5th Inter-American Congress of Psychology, he was in Mexico City for President -elect elected 1957 ( the next president). On 29 May 1961 he reported as a witness in the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, as the familiar with his highest- Nuremberg defendants had the activities of Eichmann described.

Gustave M. Gilbert was involved in several films about the Nuremberg Trials, among other 2000 in a Canadian- American and 2006 in two British television productions, 2005 in the German TV production Speer und Er ( Director: Heinrich Breloer ).

Gustave M. Gilbert, who held a senior medical position in Nuremberg, put the projective psychological tests Rorschach test one at the accused. Later represented Miale and Selzer (1975, 287 ) due to their interpretation of the Rorschach test, the opinion that the " Nazis do not psychologically normal or healthy " were human beings: " This seems generally to act to individuals who undeveloped, manipulated and in their relations with others are hostile. " another commission of inquiry consisting of 15 Rorschach experts, found no consistent personality differences between the responses of the Nazis and those of the comparison subjects. " ( Zimbardo, 1983)

Writings

• The Nuremberg Diary, Farrar, Straus & Co, New York 1947 in German: Nuremberg Diary. Conversations of the defendants with the court psychologist. Series: The Time of National Socialism. Translator's Margaret Carroux Karin Krauskopf & Lis Leonard. Fischer TB, Frankfurt 1962, ISBN 3-436-02477-5,