During the summer of 1967, Fritz Bauer, a famous public prosecutor for a provincial court, inveighed against, as he put it “a West German nightmare,” stating that “a ghost is making its rounds in West Germany—the ghost of rising youth delinquency.”¹ In January of 1973, the news magazineDer Spiegelquoted the North Rhine-Westphalian minister of the interior Willi Weyer, who had said that juvenile delinquency² has “risen in an alarming way.” Moreover, in the same article the magazine reported an “over-proportional rise in violent crime” committed by young people.³ Looking for reasons why since the mid-1960s the threats...