On Oct. 20, 1945, Gustave Gilbert arrived in Nuremberg, Germany, to begin what was perhaps the most compelling assignment ever given to an American psychologist — working for the International Military Tribunal at the first Nazi war crimes trial. Fluent in German, Gilbert was given the assignment to work as a morale officer and translator. Nuremberg was a high-stakes affair, and the Allied powers wanted the trial to proceed in an orderly and dignified manner. Gilbert's job was to keep the prisoners — Hitler's leading henchmen — in a reasonably calm, rational state.
With the approval of his superiors, he quickly recast the position as "prison psychologist" and began studying the prisoners as well. Gilbert used all the standard psychological tools of the day — intelligence tests, Rorschach and Thematic Apperception tests. However, his preferred method was casual conversation. Gilbert befriended the prisoners, visiting them in their cells daily and chatting with them at meal times. At the end of each day, he wrote about these conversations, providing a fascinating window into the thoughts and motivations of the prisoners as they faced what they all knew was a likely death sentence.
Opportunity and military duty
Gilbert was an unlikely figure to be thrust into the 20th century's most extraordinary legal spectacle. He was the son of Austrian-Jewish immigrants, born in New York City in 1911. He had an impressive academic pedigree, albeit one far removed from considerations of forensic psychology and genocide. Gilbert received a PhD in experimental psychology from Columbia University in 1939, and as a graduate student published empirical studies on psychophysics and the relationship of feeling to memory.
With America's entry into World War II, Gilbert was commissioned as a first lieutenant in the Army. He spent the first part of the war as a personnel consultant in a U.S. training center before being sent to Europe, where he served as a military intelligence officer interrogating captured German officers at the Battle of Bulge and later in Berlin.
At the war's end, he was given the assignment in Nuremburg. The trial involved a complex range of broad political and legal considerations concerning Germany's place in postwar Europe, the establishment of a legal basis for crimes against humanity and the emergence of a postwar international order of multilateral organizations. But American officials were inclined to see the trial as a kind of psychological laboratory, an intellectual opportunity for the world to clinically dissect barbarism in its most extreme form. The American press corps framed the trial as a mental examination as much as it was a judicial proceeding. As a young and ambitious psychologist, Gilbert quickly realized that Nuremberg was an opportunity as well as a military duty. His unique and largely self-created role as prison psychologist was widely reported by the American press.
Throughout the trial, Gilbert made no secret of his desire to turn his experiences into a book. After returning to the United States in 1947 he published "Nuremberg Diary," which gave an account of his interactions with the prisoners. Although the book contained some psychological terms, Gilbert kept the theorizing and psychological jargon to a minimum. His conversational approach played well with the public, and the book was favorably reviewed in newspapers nationwide.
Ironically, the very qualities that recommended "Nuremberg Diary" to qualitative psychologists and the general reader undermined Gilbert professionally. In 1947, academic reviewers were less interested in a behind-the-scenes look at the Nuremberg prisoners than they were in a "big reveal" — a moment where science could put its finger on the pulse of Nazism and concisely demonstrate how it all worked.
Gilbert responded to his critics in "The Psychology of Dictatorship" (1950), a more academically ambitious book. His principal argument drew heavily on the work of Erich Fromm, who maintained that Hitlerism was the product of the social and economic anxieties of a people long used to order. The overall reaction to the book was mixed. Many outside psychology found Gilbert's blending of psychoanalysis and social psychology unconvincing.
Back to court
During the late 1940s and 1950s, Gilbert taught clinical psychology and did research at Princeton University, Michigan State University and Long Island University.
It wasn't long before Gilbert's Nuremberg experience beckoned again. In 1961, Gilbert was called to Israel to testify as an expert witness at the trial of SS Lt. Col. Adolph Eichmann. Gilbert was brought in to provide information to the court concerning what the Nuremberg defendants had said about Eichmann. With intense, worldwide interest in the Eichmann trial, the American press focused once more on Gilbert, dramatically framing his testimony as a "duel of glares" between an American psychologist and the SS defendant. Although Gilbert had anticipated being asked for his expert opinion on the motivational structure of the Nazi mind, his testimony was limited to the facts about what Nuremberg prisoners had said about Eichmann.
Soon after the trial, Gilbert's status as the psychologist of the Nazi mind was eclipsed by a young psychologist who had begun work on an experiment at the same time Gilbert was on the witness stand in Israel. Stanley Milgram began preparations for his obedience experiments, initiating a laboratory-based research program that purported to explain the Holocaust. In the science-minded zeitgeist of the 1960s, turning ordinary Americans into "virtual Nazis" in a laboratory proved to be much more compelling than talking to real Nazis in a prison. Milgram quickly became an expert on "malevolent authority" and one of the most famous psychologists in the world. Gilbert faded into relative obscurity.
Though largely ignored by psychologists, Gilbert's qualitative work lives on in the fields of history and cinema. "Nuremberg Diary" remains a key reference for historians of World War II and the dramatic confrontation between American psychology and the Nazi mind has been immortalized in four TV docudramas on the Nuremberg trial.
Ian Nicholson is a professor of psychology at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada.
