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One of the psychologists in Hitler's Wehrmacht was a remarkable man named Simoneit. He took to heart the principle that there is a world of difference between what a man says he will do and what he actually does. In selecting officer candidates, Simoneit would watch each candidate marching in formation and shouting orders to a platoon, listen to his talk in class and at table, and find out what was said of him by his fellow candidates and his superiors, by his friends and his enemies. Simoneit recollected all these observations and analyzed them in terms of the jobs for which the man was being considered. If the evidence form observing a candidate in a natural situation was inconclusive, Simoneit would arrange situations as nearly possible like those met in actual warfare, and see how the man behaved. As far as they could, he and his associates worked unobtrusively and unknown. The terrible effectiveness of the Nazi war machine owed much to the cold and calculating way in which Simoneit picked officers who led the Germans into battle.
When war broke out, the British were obliged to
select a large number of officers in a hurry.
In doing so they developed a system which
combined the best features of German
psychology, and in particular the techniques
of Simoneit, with the scientific, psychometric
approach of American psychology. This system
has come to be known as "assessment".
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