Personnel selection between aptitude tests and character assessment. The changing expertise of military psychologists in Germany, 1914-1942

This article traces the changing methodological principles in the process of the institutionalization of German military psychology. The paper argues that during the development of selection procedures for officer cadets, military psychologists shaped their tests along the general lines of personnel policy in the Weimar Reichswehr. Furthermore did the content and form of the tests match with the requirements and administrative structures of decision making in the army. This explains why the implementation of scientific procedures into the traditional methods of selecting the army's elite did not affect the social composition of the officer corps until the massive expansion of the German army during the late thirties. However, the impact that German military psychology - as the most important field of psychological practices in the thirties and forties - had on the formation of the discipline challenges the linear view of a simple application of theoretical knowledge to practical problems.