Though there is little evidence that it was used in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the term “Stunde Null,” or “Zero Hour,” was often at the core of later West German narratives about 1945. As a concept it has been a much disputed one. For some, Germany's destruction, misery, and shame was so complete that a tabula rasa situation existed in the aftermath of the Third Reich, one in which a completely new set of institutions and values that could not in any way be rooted in the Nazi past had to be developed for German society. Linked to this was a determination to be, in West Germany, unambiguously on the side of “democracy” in the Cold War, which meant rejecting “totalitarianism,” the term frequently used to liken the Soviet Union (and the GDR) to Nazi Germany. Central to this narrative is the belief that the Western Allies were and are a force for unique good that refused to compromise with Nazism. A similar principle, whereby a pledge of allegiance to the new order was often sufficient to consign misdeeds from the Nazi period to the farthest recesses of both individual and collective memory, applied, mutatis mutandis, in the GDR.

Some have argued that this reading allowed many politicians, especially conservatives in West Germany, to behave almost as if they had no past. From the 1960s this interpretation was challenged by others who pointed to the continuities in personnel in postwar West Germany, not least in the judiciary and the teaching profession, as evidence of the continuity of German history.