Eric Zillmer

No. It wasn't a forensic evaluation, although the prosecutors did ask about Rudolf Hess. Hess was the one who had traveled to Great Britain on his own terms, crashed his plane, and had been brought back to Nuremberg for trial. They asked the prison psychiatrist, Major Douglas Kelley, and the prison psychologist, Lieutenant Gustave Gilbert, if Hess was competent to stand trial because he was acting so unusually. They declared that he was. Kelley and Gilbert administered the Rorschach tests on the side, believe it or not, because they wanted to later publish works on the Nazi personality. The tests were never ordered in the court and they were never used. That's why they never became part of the official court recordings.

A personal vendetta between Kelley and Gilbert kept these records from being published. Gilbert spoke fluent German but really didn't know the Rorschach test, so he tried to get the raw data at Nuremberg and worry about interpreting them later. Kelley knew the Rorschach very well but didn't know any German and needed a translator. He wrestled with depression after the trials and never really had the energy to interpret them. In 1958 he committed suicide. Gilbert, on the other hand, was very ambitious and recruited other psychologists to interpret the tests for him. That's how I got the records for our book, because he sent them out to ten other psychologists and they ended up in some of their archives. The Eichmann protocol, collected by Kulcsar before the 1962 trial in Jerusalem, however, has been analyzed repeatedly by several psychologists.

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