Gustave Gilbert - Later Life

Later Life

In 1948, as Head Psychologist at the Veterans Hospital at Lyons, 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 29 May 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 commandment 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.

In 1967, Gilbert convinced Leon Pomeroy, Ph.D., 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.

Gustave Mark Gilbert died on 6 February 1977.