Sakheim, George A. (32861841): Difference between revisions

George worked as a career was as Clinical Psychologist. He served as member of IPW Team 13. [[Sakheim, George A. (32861841)|George Sakheim]] was a Ritchie Boy. He passed away December 5, 2019. He kept a journal and never stopped testifying about the experience. Sakheim, 96, of Gwynedd, a translator at the Nuremberg Trials who came face to face with some of Nazi Germany’s most notorious war criminals, died Thursday, Dec. 5, of pneumonia at Abington Lansdale Hospital. Sakheim had just served two years in the Army in Europe and was stationed in Paris, expecting to go home, when he saw a flier asking for German-speaking interpreters to work at the approaching Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. “I had a conflict, because I really was anxious to get back to college, but then something in me, even at 22, realized that this was going to be historic, it was going to be exciting and unique,” he told the Jewish Exponent in a 2015 article marking the 70th anniversary of the trials. Sakheim volunteered and was immediately flown to Nuremberg. For the next seven months, he had the extraordinary chance to see and hear Nazi leaders, including Field Marshal Hermann Goering and Rudolph Hoess, commandant of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp. Sakheim did much of his work from an adjoining room, but when in the courtroom, he recorded his impressions in a journal. One was to hold the perpetrators accountable for atrocities committed against the Jews. “The second,” he was quoted as saying in the Exponent, “had to do with [[Jackson, Robert C. (01324021)|Robert Jackson]], the chief U.S. prosecutor for the trials, saying these trials exist so that something like this will never happen again.” Born in Hamburg, Germany, Dr. He graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School and had just enrolled at Columbia University when he was drafted into the Army in March 1943. Because he could speak German, Dr. Sakheim was sent for military intelligence training. His division helped with the storming of Normandy on D-Day Plus 7, and he was present at the liberation of concentrations camps at Aachen and Cologne. He recalled seeing Allied generals shaking their heads and pressing handkerchiefs to their noses to mask the smell of unburied bodies. After an internship at Bellevue Hospital in New York, he earned a Ph.D in clinical psychology at Florida State University in 1954. Sakheim worked as a psychologist for many years in Maine and then New York. Later, he created a tool to quantify risk factors for juvenile arsonists. He wrote the 1994 book Firesetting Children. Sakheim was active in the civil rights and anti-war movements.