Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 67, No. 1, 2011, pp.

205--224

How This Was Possible: Interpreting the Holocaust

Susan Opotow∗
John Jay College of Criminal Justice and The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Moral exclusion occurs when individuals or groups are seen as outside the bound-
ary in which moral values, rules, and considerations of fairness apply. It can
render violence and injustice normal and acceptable. This talk describes research
conducted at the House of Wannsee Conference, a cultural institution near Berlin,
where the liquidation of Europe’s Jews was planned in 1942. Now a commemo-
rative site and education center, this institution’s interpretive strategies increase
visitors’ knowledge about past exclusionary processes. The House of Wannsee’s
interpretive strategies emphasize the role of occupational groups in society. Con-
sistent with that focus, this talk discusses psychology at two points in time: Gestalt
psychology, which flourished in Germany from 1920 to 1933, and psychology
from 2002 to the present in light of contemporary concerns about psychologists’
involvement in detention and torture.

It is an honor to speak with you today as President of the Society for the
Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI). The Presidential Address is an

∗ Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Susan Opotow, John Jay Col-
lege of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, 899 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY [e-mail:
sopotow@jjay.cuny.edu].
I thank Dr. Morton Deutsch, Dr. Michelle Fine, Dr. Wolf Kaiser, and Dr. Norbert Kampe for their
helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Dr. Kaiser, Dr. Kampe, and Ms. Gaby Müller-
Oelrichs welcomed me to the House of Wannsee Conference. I am most appreciative of their interest
in and assistance with this research. I thank Ms. Lore Kleiber for her insightful essay on Holocaust
education. Any errors of fact or interpretation in this text are my own. Support for this project was
provided by a PSC-CUNY Award, jointly funded by The Professional Staff Congress and The City
University of New York.
205

C 2011 The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues
206 Opotow

opportunity for the president, engaged in the Society’s administrative matters for
a year, to turn to scholarship, and it signals that a new president will soon assume
leadership of the Society. Thank you for coming to my talk today. It will describe
my ongoing work on the limits on the applicability of justice (Opotow, 1987,
1990, 1995).
Exclusion from the scope of justice, or moral exclusion, occurs when indi-
viduals or groups are seen as outside the boundary in which justice applies. As a
result, moral values and rules and considerations of fairness do not apply to those
outside the scope of justice. They can seem undeserving of rights and resources
and as eligible targets of harm and exploitation. Harm inflicted on them can seem
appropriate and even necessary to bring about some alleged “greater good.” In the
Third Reich’s Final Solution to the Jewish Question in 1942, the Disappearances
in Argentina’s Dirty War from 1976 to 1983, the Rwandan Genocide in 1994, and
many other places and times, aggressors have harmed and killed victims desig-
nated as outside their scope of justice. Moral exclusion can normalize violence and
injustice through exclusionary laws, rules, processes, and outcomes that can then
be accepted as the way things are or ought to be. Because the normalization of an
exclusionary ethos can renders injustice invisible, it can be more difficult to detect
moral exclusion in our everyday lives than to recognize it long ago or far away.
Today’s talk describes research I conducted at a societal institution that ex-
amines Germany’s National Socialist Party (also known as “Nazi”). The House
of Wannsee Conference situated near Berlin is the place where the liquidation of
Europe’s Jews was planned in 1942. Now a commemorative site and education
center, its interpretive strategies increase visitors’ knowledge about the past. Their
approach speaks to moral exclusion and moral inclusion as the scope of justice
in Germany has shifted markedly since 1933 when the National Socialist Party
assumed political power. Consistent with the House of Wannsee’s interpretive
strategies that emphasize the role of occupational groups in Germany’s past, the
article concludes with a discussion of our occupation, psychology, at two points
in time: Gestalt psychology, which flourished in Germany from 1920 to 1933, and
controversy from 2002 to the present concerning American psychologists’ role in
detention and torture.

Moral Exclusion

When I began research on moral exclusion, among my first empirical findings

was a Scope of Justice Scale consisting of three attitudes toward others: (1)
believing that considerations of fairness apply to them; (2) willingness to allocate
a share of community resources to them; and (3) willingness to make sacrifices to
foster their well-being (Opotow, 1987, 1993). This scale defines moral inclusion
and operationalizes it for research. It echoes Rawls’s (1971) description of justice
as fairness, and it is consistent with justice as the fair allocation of resources as
described in research on distributive and procedural justice (Deutsch, 1975, 1985;
How This Was Possible 207

Lind and Tyler, 1988; Thibaut & Walker, 1975). It is also consistent with norms for
acting benevolently toward others and norms of civility in everyday life. Inclusion
in the scope of justice is fundamental. For those outside the scope of justice,
distributive and procedural justice can seem irrelevant (Opotow, 1987, 1990).
The Scope of Justice Scale has good psychometric qualities (Opotow, 1993)
and I have used it in quantitative and qualitative studies of moral exclusion (e.g., re-
garding environmental degradation, public schooling, and postwar reconstruction).
These studies suggest that that moral exclusion and inclusion are not mutually ex-
clusive, but are end points on a continuous dimension with intermediate points
such as “conditional inclusion” (Opotow, 1995). These studies also suggest that
moral exclusion and moral inclusion can occur simultaneously in the changing
conditions after war so that inclusion can occur in some spheres while exclusion
occurs in others (Opotow, 2008a). Finally, these studies suggest that moral exclu-
sion and moral inclusion differ temporally: moral exclusion can gain in scope and
intensity quickly, while the institutionalization of moral inclusion can be a longer
and more fragile process (Opotow, 2008b).

Changes in the Scope of Justice

My research examines change in the scope of justice and asks: What social
psychological contexts shrink or widen the scope of justice? Under what condi-
tions does extreme moral exclusion give way to an inclusionary ethos? To examine
this, I have theorized moral exclusion as a construct with a range of manifestations
that vary on three dimensions: extent, from narrowly focused within a society to
widespread; severity, from mild manifestations to blatant; and expression, from
passive to active behavior (Opotow, 2001). Table 1 presents these three dimensions
as dichotomies, yielding eight cells that map the topography of moral exclusion.
While the outward presentation of moral exclusion—its phenotype, using Lewin’s
(1935) terminology (Danziger, 1990)—varies from less to more severe, I argue
that all eight cells in Table 1 share an underlying genotype—the psychological
dynamics beneath outward action. In each cell, those excluded from the scope of
justice are seen as: psychologically distant, undeserving of constructive obliga-
tions, and eligible for harms that would be unacceptable for those inside the scope
of justice (Opotow, 1990, 1995). Thus, my research is directed at the genotype,
but is also attentive to the phenotype to identify contexts in which the scope of
justice undergoes change. Table 1 delineates a topography of moral exclusion
in which the descent from Cell 1 to Cell 8 can be a slippery slope that is dif-
ficult to reverse. My research on the moral inclusion of African–Americans in
the United States after the Civil War supports this, indicating that inclusionary
gains were difficult to achieve and sustain (Opotow, 2008b). This suggests that it
can be faster and easier to slip into increasingly harsh, wider, and blatant moral
exclusion than take the reverse route and adopt an increasingly inclusionary ethos.
To study the shift from moral exclusion to moral inclusion, I situate my current

Passive engagement:
Active engagement
Perceptions of those excluded
Source. (Opotow, 2001).
208
Table 1. Dimensions of Moral Exclusion
Subtle Manifestations Blatant Manifestations
Narrow in Extent Wide in Extent Narrow in Extent Wide in Extent
1 2 3 4
Ignoring or allowing Ignoring or allowing Ignoring or allowing violent Ignoring or allowing
rudeness, intimidation, systematic violence (e.g., acts directed at particular systematic violence (e.g.,
and derogation (e.g., sweatshops) subcultures (e.g., hate violations of human
bullying and sexual crimes, witch hunts) rights, ethnic cleansing,
harassment) mass murder)
5 6 7 8
Devising or executing Devising or executing Devising or executing Devising or executing
rudeness, intimidation, systematic violence (e.g., violent acts directed at systematic violence (e.g.,
and derogation (e.g., sweatshops) particular subcultures violations of human
bullying and sexual (e.g., hate crimes, witch rights, ethnic cleansing,
harassment) hunts) mass murder)
Invisible, nonentities Expendable, less than Reprehensible, vermin, a
human contaminating danger, a
plague
Opotow
How This Was Possible 209

research in contemporary cultural institutions in Germany. In them, I examine how

museum professionals present an exclusionary past to visitors and the potential of
their approaches to promote an appreciation of inclusionary values.

Museums as Sites of Exclusionary Memory and Inclusionary Possibility

From 1933 to 1945 the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (commonly
abbreviated as Nazi) led by Adolf Hitler ruled Germany with a totalitarian political
system that morally excluded and murdered Jews, Gypsies, mentally and phys-
ically disabled persons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, Social Democrats,
Communists, partisans, trade unionists, Polish intelligentsia, and others. The death
toll, estimated at 17 million people, included 6 million Jews and about 11 million
other people deemed political enemies or lebensunwertes Leben (life unworthy
of life). Anti-Semitism played a central role in National Socialist’s exclusionary
political policy.
I visited Berlin in January 2009 to study contemporary museums, memori-
als, documentation centers, and commemorative sites (“museums”) to examine
how they interpret the past to foster a deeper understanding of injustice and
state-sponsored violence. I was interested in interpretive strategies that foster vis-
itor engagement with this past. In historical museums, interpretive strategies are
the choices that museum professionals make to lead the public through a narra-
tive about the past. These strategies include choice of material that will engage
visitors’ interest in and promote their understanding of a topic. My focus was on
interpretive strategies describing conditions that gave rise to the Holocaust and its
outcomes.
Germany’s historical museums on National Socialism educate visitors
and contribute to a national discourse about the meaning of World War II in
Germany. They address national trauma that results from having perpetrated,
waged, and lost a war with genocidal goals and an industrialized approach
to achieving them. Situating this discourse within state-supported cultural
institutions resonates with Lewin’s (1943) interest in public contexts as sites of
commitment—in this case, Germany’s commitment to remember and understand
its World War II past (International Task Force, n.d.). When this remembering
contends with national history, the psychological concept, memory, is writ large.
In the United States some museums have focused on past moral exclusion in
exhibitions on the institutionalized racism and violence of slavery, emphasizing
how these practices took hold in particular times and places (cf., Slavery in
New York, 2005). Doing so reveals to the public that ordinary practices that
were widely accepted at one time inflicted immeasurable injury on individuals,
families, communities, and the larger society. When historical museums address
moral exclusion by interpreting the past for contemporary visitors, they recall what
some might choose to forget, contradicting and disrupting prior discourses about
what happened and how that had been possible. This can foster understanding,
210 Opotow

discussion, and deeper knowledge so that people in contemporary society can

learn from past injustice and violence that was widely supported.

Commemorative Sites and Moral Exclusion

More than six decades have passed since World War II ended in 1945. Charged
with interpreting a violent and traumatic past to the public, Germany’s cultural
institutions have developed impressive interpretive strategies on moral exclusion
and its antecedents, progression, and outcomes. They continue to refine their
approach in exhibitions and education programs addressing causes, progression,
and outcomes of historic moral exclusion in light of the wider scope of justice that
has evolved since the end of World War II.
Commemorative sites differ from each other in their mission, resources, type
of locale, and interpretive strategy. All address the questions, what, who and why
similar to contingencies in psychological research on justice (Opotow, 1997).
Visitors may come with little or fragmentary information about the past, so all
sites address what happened? To do so, they present a narrative describing the past
with historic objects, wall texts, graphics, and audio and visual material. These
approaches convey the progression, technologies, or effects of oppression, such
as a canister of Zyklon B gas used in the gas chamber or piles of victim’s shoes,
each molded around the foot of a person whose life was cut short.
To answer the question who some museums focus on a specific subpopulation
such as the Monument to Homosexual Holocaust Victims that opened in Berlin in
2008. Who can describe those who suffered as well as grand architects of harm and
the mid- or low-level functionaries of the political system. Who can also include
witnesses still living with traumatic memories as well as younger generations
seeking to understand harm inflicted on individuals, groups, and society in the
past. A final question is why? What gave rise to such extreme, exclusionary goals
and extraordinarily deadly means to achieve them? This is a key moral question
that still haunts and that visitors must ask if people in the present are to understand
the past and the human capacity for doing harm. One commemorative institution
that addresses these three questions and especially the question, “why did this
happen?” is the House of Wannsee Conference.

The House of Wannsee Conference

The House of Wannsee Conference, an hour from Berlin by S-Bahn and bus,
commemorates an extraordinarily exclusionary event: a 90-minute meeting on
January 20th, 1942 when 15 men approved a plan to liquidate Europe’s 11 million
Jewish people at a businesslike, polite meeting followed by cognac. The meeting
discussed a proposed plan of action, The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem.
Convened by Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Nazi security service and chief of
the German security police, it included high-ranking governmental officials. The
How This Was Possible 211

proposal they approved—to move Europe’s Jews eastward and liquidate them—
was brutal, deadly, and effective. By the end of World War II six million Jews had
been murdered.
Historian and House of Wannsee Conference Director, Dr. Norbert Kampe,
describes the mission of the House of Wannsee Conference as dealing with this
history:
The legacy of the Wannsee Conference is to . . . show that in January 20th 1942, the whole
German state was willing to cooperate in the project of deporting all European Jews [with]
the knowledge that they would not survive the end of the war.

I visited the House of Wannsee Conference in January 2009 to view the

exhibition and speak with three senior staff members whose goal it is to educate
individuals and a nation about micro-processes of moral exclusion.

The House

The Wannsee Conference took place in an elegant villa situated on a lake. The
contrast could not be greater between this idyllic venue and the murderous plan
set in motion here. Today, visitors arrive at a locked gate, ring for admittance to
the landscaped grounds, and once inside the villa, they are greeted by a warm staff
and exhibition space that preserves this landmarked building while also teaching
about its past (see Photo 1).

Photo. 1. Villa exterior (Photo: Author).

212 Opotow

Designed in 1914–1915 for a manufacturer and bought by an industrialist

in 1921, the villa and its grounds were purchased in 1940 by the Reich Security
Main Office, headed by Heydrich to create a Schutzstaffel (SS, Security Service)
guesthouse-retreat for National Socialist leadership and guests from abroad. After
1952 it was used as a hostel by schools from the Newkölln district of Berlin.
In 1966, Joseph Wulf (1912–1974), an Auschwitz survivor and chronicler of
the Holocaust, sought official designation for the House as an “International
Documentary Centre.” His proposal did not gain governmental support, but the
historical significance of the villa was appreciated two decades later. In 1992,
50 years after the 1942 conference, the House of Wannsee Conference opened as
a memorial and educational site supported by the state of Berlin and the German
federal government. The House of Wannsee Conference catalogue (Haupt, 2007)
describes the guesthouse as:
a site of perpetrators. For this reason, the memorial and educational site House of the
Wannsee Conference focuses on the antisemitism and racist ideology and policies of the
perpetrators before and after 1933 as well as the role of different authorities in organizing
the genocide during the war. (p. 1)

Mrs. Gaby Müller-Oelrichs, who directs the Joseph Wulf Library and Media Center
at the House of Wannsee Conference, emphasizes the importance of having this
authentic site for visitors who come from all over Germany. Located on the House’s
second floor, the library has a specialized collection of books, articles, videos,
microfilms on National Socialism, anti-Semitism, and the Jewish genocide. It is
the largest Holocaust library in Germany and contains more than 50,000 volumes
in German and other languages, including material for all levels of interests from
children to scholars. To facilitate research, the library has developed a specialized
classification system on Holocaust-related topics that serves as a framework for
similar memorial libraries.

The Exhibition

The House has 15 exhibition rooms set in the villa’s refined interior space.

Photo. 2. Exhibition (Photo: Author).

How This Was Possible 213

Gardens that surround the villa remain visible while viewing an exhibition
that narrates the progression of anti-Semitism in Germany from the antecedents
of the Final Solution to its implementation. Exhibited materials are reproduc-
tions dispensing with the need for barriers or guards. As a result, the material is
accessible and the visitor’s experience with the material is personal (see Photo 2).
The exhibition consists of photographs, posters, statistical charts, and mem-
oranda that reveal the socio-political realities of the 1930s and 1940s that turned
anti-Semitism to murder and “mass murder to genocide” (Roseman, 2002, p. 6).
As anti-Semitism became increasingly widespread, blatant, and active, the exhi-
bition suggests that the extreme forms of moral exclusion represented in Cells 7
and 8 of Table 1 can be further differentiated into three levels: (1) exclusion within
society (i.e., barred from professions, law, medicine, university; the seizure and
Aryanization of businesses; and forcible relocation into ghettos), (2) exclusion
from society (i.e., forcible deportation; destruction of homes, communities, and
synagogues), and (3) annihilation—exclusion from life (i.e., murdered on arrival
or later; undernourished and inadequately clothed; worked to death) (see Table 2).
Although the subject matter of the exhibition is brutality on a mass scale,
material is selected to be acceptable to a wide audience. Dr. Kampe, who led the
redesign of the House’s exhibition completed in 2000, describes a photograph of
a number of women stripped of their clothing and about to be shot:

In room number five, [there is a scene] where the Einsatzkommando [Operational Com-
mand] is killing women in Dubossary, Moldavia. One of the German policeman probably
made this series of photos. I have chosen this photo. You cannot see the naked victims but
you can clearly see the situation. There is some grass or plants preventing you from clearly
seeing the naked women and children. I do not want to suppress how terrible this was, but
you must not confront people. Everybody is able to deal with such material in a book with
pictures, but [my concern is with] situations in which a class group of students could not
avoid seeing graphic photos.

Thus, the exhibition balances the need to display evidence of the Holocaust
with respect for victims of National Socialist violence and the sensibility of visi-
tors, many of whom are youths.

Table 2. Extreme Moral Exclusion

Exclusion within Society Exclusion from Society Exclusion as Annihilation

Barred from professions Forcible deportation Murder on arrival

Aryanization of businesses Homes, businesses, and Starvation and inadequate clothing
synagogues looted
and destroyed
Forcible relocation into ghettos Slave labor in camps Worked to death
214 Opotow

Conference Room

Just before the Conference Room, there is a room with information on each of
the governmental departments present at the conference and their role in persecut-
ing Jews. The main room in the villa is the Conference Room that displays minutes
of the January 20, 1942 meeting as well as photos and biographies of Conference’s
15 attendees that represented the government. As Dr. Kampe describes:

The main aspect in this house [is to show] the step by step radicalization process . . . Some
leading figures of the German government who had never been anti-Semites, who had a
good education, who had a Christian family background, and had never done harm to any
person in their life attended such a conference and had no problem accepting all this.

The biographies and photos of attendees of the 1942 Conference offer visitors
information on individuals who grew up with ordinary backgrounds and worked
within the German government. This interpretive strategy that humanizes atten-
dees has the potential to be disturbing. It indicates that a group of educated men,
operating as governmental professionals within established procedural rules and
with good manners, can agree to mass murder. Thus, rather than demonize Con-
ference attendees or place all responsibility for genocide onto high-level leaders
(e.g., Hitler, Himmler, or Heydrich), this exhibition suggests the importance of
individuals, governmental agencies, the political system as a whole, and the larger
society in supporting genocide as social policy.
After the war, only one copy of the meeting’s minutes survived to reveal de-
tails about this meeting with criminal intent. When Martin Luther, Undersecretary
of the Foreign Ministry, was imprisoned during the war, his files, which included
a folder on anti-Jewish policies that contained the minutes, had been brought to
a shelter for safekeeping. They were spared from an order by National Socialist
leadership to destroy office files. Years later, Adolf Eichmann’s (1961) courtroom
testimony in Jerusalem provided additional descriptive information on the confer-
ence. These pieces—the house, the minutes, and the testimony—provide evidence
on the process that led to genocide in a cultural institution that has developed an
influential interpretive strategy about the Holocaust and how it happened.

The House of Wannsee Interpretive Strategy

Schools, trade groups, and others in Germany visit the House of Wannsee
Conference to see the exhibition and conduct research on the Holocaust in the
library. The staff helps groups choose research questions and work with docu-
ments; they prepare seminars and lectures, and moderate discussions. The staff is
dedicated to this work, and values remembrance of the National Socialist past. As
Dr. Kampe describes:
How This Was Possible 215

Many of our permanent staff and 30 freelancers were, in their young days, active in
Aktion Sühnezeichen/Friedensdienste (Action Reconciliation/Services for Peace), a Protes-
tant organization founded because of what happened during the Nazi time . . . If you have
committed a sin you have to do something morally compensating. This is a special group
who had been willing to give one year of their life because they felt it was necessary to do
something because of the German past.

Because the Holocaust is an overwhelming and emotionally fraught topic, the

task of reflecting on it poses a number of pedagogical challenges. Some youth
and adults come to the House as individuals or in school, professional, or trade
groups without knowing their own family’s history. It was and remains common
for parents and grandparents to “keep quiet” about the past (Ms. Müller Oelrichs).
Another challenge comes from students who ask “why do we still have to study
these old things?” As Deputy Director, Education Director, and international
expert on Holocaust education Dr. Wolf Kaiser describes, the answer can start
with individuals:
SO: So how do you answer the question?
Dr. Kaiser: We can study how such a process of exclusion and injustice causes catastrophic
results. We can study details—where it starts, where people give in [For example] the state
secretary of the judiciary, Schlegelberger [was] a conservative who joined the Nazi party
only because he had to if he wanted to stay in office, but more and more he took active part
in establishing this Nazi system. So you can see [where it starts] on this level and you can
see it on the very simple level of the policeman or the prison camp guards and so on.

The House has developed an interpretive strategy for its group seminars that
examine the progression of genocide at the level of the occupational group. As
Dr. Kaiser describes:
From the educational point of view, the process is more important than the result . . . [We]
relate this process to the actual, professional, vocational practice of participants. This
means that we’re working with different vocational groups and study with them, on the
basis of primary source material, the history of their profession during the Nazi period. In
other words the way their colleagues—so to speak—collaborated in this process . . . Among
these professional groups the most important ones are those from medical [professions], in
particular nurses, and soldiers . . . [Also] the judiciary, prison guards, [and] people who are
working there as psychologists.

Utilizing their experiences in professions, The House of Wannsee Conference

approach emphasizes to visitors that genocide policy was promoted in different
ways by various occupational groups. Dr. Kaiser explained that “almost every
occupational group and every institution took some part in the discrimination
and exclusion of the Jews, whose lives were written off as Ballastexistenzen
[undesirable encumbrances; superfluous existences].”
Social science research typically utilizes demographic variables such as gen-
der, age, ethnicity, and income level to differentiate among participants. Because
many occupations are loosely segregated by age, gender, ethnicity, educational
level, class, etc., occupation is an interesting social category. Occupational group,
216 Opotow

as a unit of identity, locates individuals within the activities they would ordinarily
perform within their society and norms generally associated with those activi-
ties (Vygotsky, 1978). Occupation is therefore a complex marker of identity that
influences how people orient themselves to others based on their profession’s
normative contribution to society. At the House of Wannsee Conference studying
the past in occupational groups allows visitors to imagine the specific activities
of people situated similarly to themselves, and who acted within the constraints,
conventions, and demands of their occupation during National Socialism. Doing
so permits visitors to place themselves within a period of time that can seem
unimaginable today and understand it from an informed, insider’s perspective.

The Seminar for Apprentice Hairdressers

To illustrate how this pedagogy expands visitors’ understanding of exclusion-

ary processes that can lead to genocide, I briefly describe a seminar for apprentice
hairdressers conducted by Ms. Lore Kleiber, a staff member at the House of
Wannsee Conference, who specializes in working with visitors 18 years and older.
She describes teaching and learning from the perspective of an expert practitioner
in her essay, “History of hairdressers: Physical culture & aesthetic norms in Nazi
Germany,” posted on the website, Learning from History:
Eighteen second-year apprentice hairdressers (sixteen female and two male), accompanied
by their social studies teacher, visited the Memorial and Educational Site House of the
Wannsee Conference for the first time. Classes of apprentices from the same school had
previously visited the House of the Wannsee Conference to see the permanent exhibition.
This was, however, their first full-day study program. (Kleiber, n.d.)

Working with staff as a group, the apprentices developed two questions to

study during their House of Wannsee Conference seminar:

(1) How and through what methods were Germans conditioned to use and accept
physical stereotypes as part of racial segregation?
(2) How was the concept of race visualized?

House of Wannsee Conference staff selected visual documents and media in

response to the apprentices’ questions, as Ms. Kleiber describes:
Today, we interpret the attribution of negative Jewish physical characteristics, the use of
the Star of David, and later on the tattooing of prisoners with numbers, as a gradual
process toward physical annihilation. The significance of propaganda photographs and the
stigmatization of Jews as “racial aliens” were explored in the exhibition.

Material from the exhibition and the library’s archives revealed how physical
appearance, including marking the body with tattoos and particular clothing and
hair styles, were part of a gradual process that normalized annihilation.
How This Was Possible 217

The apprentices viewed a segment of Claude Lanzmann’s film, Shoah (Les

Films Aleph-Historia Films, 1985) in which a barber, a survivor of the Tre-
blinka Concentration Camp, is overwhelmed by memories as he describes cutting
women’s hair before they were killed in gas chambers. This casts the career of a
barber/hairdresser in a totally new light for the apprentices, one that had previously
been inconceivable to them. The apprentices then requested information on the
process of annihilation in killing centers and on reutilization of parts of human
beings, especially hair. They studied newspapers and magazines from the Nazi
period to understand how the setting of aesthetic norms promoted racist thinking
in Nazi Germany.
Archival photographs the apprentices used in their research vividly illustrate
the relationship between the aesthetics of hair, anti-Semitism, and moral exclusion
(see photos on the website, Learning from History [Kleiber, n.d.]). A 1937 photo-
graph of a woman’s head with a fiberglass set of hair color samples illustrates the
practice of categorizing people by their hair color. National Socialist aesthetics
valued Aryan physical characteristics. They calibrated hair color to differentiate
people who had valued characteristics from those who do not. In a 1938 photograph
entitled “Anti-Semitic measures: ‘Excluded’,” three women, presumably Jewish,
wear placards reading, “I have been excluded from the national community” and
are having their hair shorn in public in Linz. A 1942 photograph of the V. Heeb
barber shop in Hanau has photographs of women with wavy blonde hair styles in
the shop window. These styles were in favor during National Socialism. A sign,
“Jews not admitted,” is also displayed along with the photos in the storefront.
Because hairdressers are attuned to style and its meaning in social contexts,
they could see how the body, hair, and outward appearance influenced others’
evaluations of them. Their professional sensitivity to the social meaning of aes-
thetic norms, along with the House’s exhibition, archival, and media materials,
enabled them to find their way into the societal workings of exclusion and geno-
cide. They could see how the narrowing of the scope of justice, embodied in hair
and other physical characteristics, prepared the way for and ultimately were part
of the killing process.
In their closing session, student workgroups presented collaborative collages.
One dealt critically with the Nazi image of women based on an analysis of married
life as portrayed in Nazi advertisements. The apprentice hairdressers, Ms. Kleiber
reports, were surprised by their accomplishments. Through their occupational
identity, they developed a deeper understanding of life under National Socialism
that revealed the pervasiveness of exclusionary norms and standards that had
meaning for well-being, including life and death. The apprentices’ occupational
identity allowed them to understand that ordinary people doing ordinary things,
like how they colored or wore their hair, or more extraordinary things, like shaving
off someone’s hair in public to humiliate them, played a role in the exclusionary
process that led to genocide.
218 Opotow

Discussion: Denial, Perception, and Justice

The House of Wannsee Conference’s interpretive strategy can be analyzed in

terms of denial and, consistent with their emphasis on occupational groups, with
attention to psychology at two points in time: Gestalt psychology in Germany in
the 1920s and 1930s, and ethical concerns about psychology’s role in detention
and torture from 2002 to the present.
Denial, a form of selective inattention toward threat, is “a defense mecha-
nism consisting of an unconscious, selective blindness that protects a person from
facing intolerable deeds and situations” (Corsini, 1999, p. 263). Among these
might be the severity and scope of harm inflicted on people during the Holo-
caust. In research on the function of denial in moral exclusion, Leah Weiss and
I found that denial promotes exclusionary thinking by: (1) minimizing the extent
of harmdoing, (2) devaluing those harmed, and (3) exonerating one’s own role in
fostering harm (Opotow & Weiss, 2000). Applying this typology to the House of
Wannsee Conference suggests that their pedagogy fosters visitor engagement in
understanding the process of the Holocaust and its catastrophic results by reducing
these three kinds of denial. They address denial of the extent of harmdoing and
justifications for devaluing those harmed with evidence presented in its exhibi-
tion, library, and archives. Their pedagogy subjects denial of one’s own role in
harmdoing to critical scrutiny through the use of occupational proxies. By identi-
fying with people in one’s own occupation during National Socialism, visitors are
able to envision the role their historical counterparts could have played during the
Holocaust. By examining traces of one’s occupation in the historical record (e.g.,
articles, photographs, advertisements, documentaries, and other material), visitors
can see the working of moral exclusion on the job and in everyday life. Visitors’
efforts, a behavioral commitment to engage with difficult material, can emphasize
to them that in our lives and work, we do things that have moral importance at the
societal level. Addressing and reducing these three kinds of denial help visitors
understand that a narrowed scope of justice that fostered such violence in the past
has relevance in society today.
Denial can occur in societies as well as in individuals, and denying that the
Holocaust occurred has been illegal in Germany since 1985 and carries criminal
penalties. Historian Wolfgang Benz of the Center for Research on Antisemitism
in Berlin argues that a person who claims that the Holocaust was a lie deserves
punishment because he “engages in incitement of the masses, because he slanders
the memory of those murdered, because he slanders our fellow citizens.” (No
room for Holocaust Denial in Germany, 2005).
The passage of time since the end of World War II also plays a role in reducing
denial. More than six decades have passed. This temporal distance from the past
allows the apprentice hairdressers to see what might have been more difficult for
people, fully immersed in life under National Socialism, to have seen: how styles
How This Was Possible 219

and norms serve as markers of inclusion and exclusion. The House’s interpretive
strategies utilize the contrast between the past and the present to good effect.
The difference between the scope of justice of the past and the present permits
visitors to see that moral exclusion can be extreme and yet be considered normal,
acceptable, and even correct. This contrast is used as an interpretive tool to reveal
what is ordinarily invisible—that the prevailing scope of justice today influences
how we perceive and act toward others.
The resources of the House of Wannsee Conference—an authentic and ele-
gant site, a skilled and committed staff, and a meticulously assembled exhibition
and library—are interlocking pieces of an inclusionary interpretive project de-
signed to give visitors a deeper understanding of genocide. There is also the hope
that visitors will carry forward knowledge about moral exclusion in the past
to their present circumstances. As Dr. Kampe describes the mission of the
House:

Remember that we are dealing with the question of how this was possible. Do they remember
that there was a step by step radicalization? Do they remember that there was no killing in
1933 but a lot of things happened before the society and even the SS was able to do such
terrible things?

This interpretive strategy encourages visitors to struggle with profound ques-

tions about moral exclusion and harm doing on a vast scale as they consider the
past in occupational groups whose work today also has moral import. As Dr.
Kaiser noted, these especially include the medical professions, the military, the
judiciary, and people working in prisons today, including psychologists. Prompted
by the House’s interpretive strategy that focuses on occupational groups, I discuss
our profession, psychology. I first consider Gestalt psychology, founded in the
early 1920s in Berlin and shortly after the Wannsee villa was built. I then discuss
ethical concerns about psychological practice in the United States today.

Gestalt Psychology

Gestalt Psychology, with its emphasis on people’s experience, perception,

and the relation of parts to the whole offers an apt theoretical frame to reflect
on the interpretive strategy of the House of Wannsee Conference. Centered at the
Psychological Institute at the University of Berlin (now Humboldt University of
Berlin), Gestalt Psychology flourished from 1920 to 1933. My doctoral advisor,
Morton Deutsch (SPSSI president, 1960–1961), was a student of Kurt Lewin
(SPSSI president, 1941–1942), a researcher and professor at the Psychological
Institute.
Gestalt Psychology has contributed theoretical principles and innovative
methods to psychology that remain influential today. Characterized by theoretical
parsimony, rigor, and empirical creativity, the fundamental principle of Prägnanz
220 Opotow

(pithiness) integrates Gestalt Psychology’s laws of proximity, similarity, closure,

continuity, and common fate. Historian Mitchell Ash (1998) describes Gestalt
research on perception as based on the proposition that: “objects we perceive are
always located in what would now be called self-organizing systems—constantly
changing dynamic contexts of situation, of which phenomenal selves, too are parts”
(p. 2). Gestalt Psychologists Kurt Koffka, Wolfgang Kohler, and Max Wertheimer,
he states, “defended a conception of psychology as a science of subjectivity
rather than of behavioral and social control” (p. 11). Rooted in both experimental
psychology and philosophy, Gestalt Psychology concerned perception, people’s
experience, and the soul. Kurt Lewin worked on such Gestalt topics as action and
emotion, but he did so in both a theoretical and practical way “that would bring it
to bear on contemporary problems in the workplace and the school” (Ash, 1998,
p. 263).
Gestalt Psychology’s emphasis on how elements are organized in relation
to each other, subjective meaning, and importance of lived experience in con-
stantly changing dynamics resonates with this study of interpretive strategies at
an historical site of injustice. Key elements of the House of Wannsee Conference,
including its venue, staff, exhibition, library, and interpretive strategies, form a
self-organizing system attuned to situational dynamics and people’s lives. Building
on visitors’ experiences, their interpretive strategy offers visitors a way to engage
with difficult topics they may ordinarily chose to avoid. Their approach evokes
Gestalt theory’s emphasis on perception in two prominent contrasts—the scope
of justice during National Socialism and at present, and the role of the villa in
1942 and its role as commemorative site since 1992. These interpretive strategies
are consistent with Prägnanz and the Gestalt emphasis on parsimony, rigor, and
empirical creativity along with Lewin’s practicality.
Gestalt Psychology had international influence from its founding in the early
1920s until 1933 when Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor. Many of its profes-
sors and graduate students were politically liberal. Several, Max Wertheimer and
Kurt Lewin among them, were Jewish. When early National Socialist legislation
in 1933 euphemistically called “The Law for the Reestablishment of the Profes-
sional Civil Service” required removal or forced retirement of non-Aryan (i.e.,
Jewish) and politically unreliable state officers, including professors, Wertheimer
and Lewin assessed what their future would be in Germany and emigrated to the
United States (cf., Lewin, 1986). Kurt Kohler remained for 2 years, publically
challenging Nazi rules, before emigrating to the United States as the political
environment became increasingly harsh and restrictive (Henle, 1978).
Weakened by emigration and increasing political repression, German psy-
chology gave way to studies congenial to Nazi goals: research on race, eugenics,
and character to support Nazi population policies and their ideologies of worthi-
ness and worthlessness. They guided personnel assessments for the Wehrmacht
(Germany’s unified armed forces from 1935 to 1945) and population liquidations
How This Was Possible 221

to achieve the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. German psychologists who
remained, some weakly and others more strongly, supported Nazi goals. Some
sought to protect academic freedom, but as Ash (1998) notes, “professors were
expected at the same time to be loyal servants of the state . . . [and] that social
situation set the parameters that defined freedom and morality—a lesson that can
be extended to other times and places” (p. 361).

Contemporary Psychology and the Limits of Justice

And so we come to today, a time when some psychologists have expressed

opposition to the participation of their American colleagues in the design and
supervision of detention and interrogation activities in sites connected with the
War on Terror (Opotow, 2007). These psychologists’ activities are consistent with
the definition of torture as defined by the Convention against Torture and other
Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment (United Nations, 1984, 1987):

severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for
such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession . . . when
such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquies-
cence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.

They also violate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Na-
tions, 1948), a declaration adopted in response to the horrors of World War II. The
New York Times describes these activities as an affront to our fundamental values
because prisoners cannot legally defend themselves and are subject to torture “that
can be repeated until it produces the answer the Pentagon wants” (Gitmo, 2007,
p. A22). America’s secret prisons, kangaroo courts, and indefinite detention of
prisoners without charges are, The New York Times has argued, a “national dis-
grace” (Terrorism, 2007). These practices of harmdoing are justified by exclusion
of detainees from the scope of justice. As a consequence, considerations of fair-
ness do not apply to them and they are eligible for harm, cast as appropriate and
necessary to foster some greater good, violating widely accepted standards of
fairness and international law (Opotow, 1990, 1995).
As the House of Wannsee Conference’s interpretive strategy conveys to vis-
itors, safeguarding the ethical integrity of our work is an important professional
responsibility. Exclusionary policy, states Dr. Wolf Kaiser, is operationalized by
“actual, professional, vocational practice.” The House’s visitors examine occupa-
tional activities that fostered violence, collusion, indifference, and silence in the
past. Their interpretive strategy, designed to render moral exclusion and social
injustice visible, offers visitors a deeper look at the past that can reveal moral
exclusion in the past and can suggest the importance of an inclusionary ethic in
contemporary social relations.
222 Opotow

In 2007, the SPSSI issued a position statement, “The use of torture and
other cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment as interrogation devices” (Costanzo,
Gerrity, & Lykes, 2007a; also see Costanzo, Gerrity, and Lykes, 2007b), describ-
ing activities at detention sites for the War on Terror as professionally unethical
and ineffective as a means to foster security. The same year, the Society published
an issue of its policy journal, Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy (ASAP)
(2007), with papers presenting a range of perspectives. Some papers described
their colleagues’ detention and interrogation activities as an egregious violation
of human rights while other papers argued that psychologists act within ethical
guidelines. In 2008, in an initiative supported by a number of American Psycho-
logical Association divisions including SPSSI, American Psychological Associ-
ation’s membership passed a referendum prohibiting psychologists’ involvement
in interrogations that violate the U.S. Constitution or international law. However,
controversy continues as this is written. As some psychologists note with concern,
the American Psychological Association has yet to respond to 13 health and hu-
man rights organizations that call for an independent scrutiny of its organizational
practices (cf., Soldz, 2009).
Writing in 1941 during World War II, Kurt Lewin emphasized that profes-
sional societies depend on cooperation to achieve their goals. Referring specifically
to the SPSSI and its members, he stated, “science and research is not a product
of isolated individuals . . . but is a cooperative endeavor deeply connected with the
culture of the people in which it occurs” (1941, reprinted in Gold, 1999, pp. 344–
345). Lewin’s emphasis on cooperation is relevant to professional societies as well
as to the cultural institutions that address past injustice. Societal and cultural insti-
tutions embark on an inclusionary project when they direct the public’s attention
to violence and injustice that might be otherwise invisible or ignored.
At this moment, a pivot point between the SPSSI’s past and its future, I note,
with pride, the inclusionary importance of SPSSI’s commitment to social justice, a
commitment rooted in the history of the Society. In its members’ work on detention
and torture and in work on key social issues including unemployment, poverty,
health, education, and the environment, the SPSSI seeks to foster moral inclusion
within the profession and in the larger world in which we work and live.

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SUSAN OPOTOW is Professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and The
Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her research concerns the social
psychology of injustice, specifically inclusion in and exclusion from the scope
of justice. She was president of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social
Issues (2008–2009) and the recipient of the 2008 Morton Deutsch Conflict Res-
olution Award. She is editor of Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology,
Fellow of the American Psychological Association, Secretary of the International
Society of Justice Research, recipient of the 2011 Lynn Stuart Weiss Award from
the American Psychological Foundation, and a member of the Committee on
International Relations of the American Psychological Association.