Student and youth rebellions broke out across the world in the middle and late 1960s, and the West German experience certainly shared common features with them. The Nazi past, however, was a distinguishing feature, adding an intensified measure of distrust of West German institutions and older West Germans for the sixty-eighters. The danger of integrating the ex-Nazis about which Kurt Nemitz had warned in 1955 had come to pass. “The cooperation of the young people under the auspices of the state-bearing organizations and groups will not be possible through political arguments alone; ultimately, the young generation will be convinced only through the radiance, example, and integrity of the leading personalities of our democracy. Here lies the greatest danger that can grow from the renazification.” Students had been concerned by the presence of ex-Nazis among the German professorate, and it was often on student initiative that the well-known public lecture series on the German university under Nazism in the mid-1960s were organized and published.

It was no surprise, then, when Helmut Schelsky observed with trepidation in 1965 that “judging by its literary expressions, it appears that for the current academic youth the year 1933 is closer than the year 2000.” Two years later, the politically active students on the left shared the fears of the redemptive republicans among the forty-fivers that the absence of an effective parliamentary opposition, the proposed emergency laws, and technocratic university reform signaled the beginning of the end for German democracy.