In the longer continuity of German history, the year 1945 will always, in part, represent the “Stunde Null” (zero hour), of catastrophic military defeat and complete moral disgrace and bankruptcy following Nazism and the Holocaust.1 The term “Stunde Null” evokes the need for a new beginning, a moral and political break with disastrous and ultimately criminal national traditions. Yet, because the Third Reich lasted only twelve years, and because there were non- and anti-Nazi traditions and leaders that survived in inner and external emigration, the postwar rejection of Nazism took the form of multiple restorations of these still extant German political traditions. In the first postwar years, the turn away from Nazism in both Germanies, as well as the break with totalitarian dictatorship in general in Western Germany, was taken by political leaders who had been active in Weimar politics and who returned to take center stage in German politics after 1945.2 To be sure, they were all deeply affected in their lives and thinking by the Third Reich. But what changes it did bring about in their political views amounted to rearrangements and different emphases of long-held convictions rather than to wholly new beginnings.
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