It is often claimed that the end of the Adenauer era inaugurated a new phase in West German Vergangenheitsbewältigung. After a transitional phase under chancellors Ludwig Erhard and Kurt-Georg Kiesinger, historians have pointed to Willy Brandt’s chancellorship and the legacy of the 1968 movement as turning points in the political culture of the Bonn republic. With that change in political culture, scholars have also noted transformations in the “public use of history.” By publicly communicating a more “empathic understanding of historical truth,” which opened West German memorial culture to the sufferings of Nazism’s non-German victims, the new generation of politicians emerging with Brandt created a crucial precondition for “forgiveness and social peace.” It was a milestone on the road towards the full “normative internalization” of the Nazi past into West German memory. In the long run, National Socialism was “overcome” because it was the historical event of reference (Bezugsereignis) that had kept the “greatest relevance for the self-reflection of the political system.”