The driving and most important force within this movement was the Socialist German Student Union, SDS for short.

As elsewhere, the German movement grew out of dissatisfaction with the gap between the emancipatory and egalitarian rhetoric of the student movement and the continued denigration and marginalization of women within that movement. On 2 June, the SDS organized a march in Berlin in front of the opera, where the Shah was attending a performance, to protest the hypocrisy of the democratic German Federal Republic supporting a brutal dictator. This university association, banned from the SPD in 1961, formulated the ideas and developed the concepts of the revolt and personified it, especially in its charismatic speaker Rudi Dutschke, as did no other grouping.

Thomas closes with a discussion of the women's movement that began developing in the late 1960s. commitment to social change that motivated the student movement in the 1960s did not end with the coming of the 1970s. In addition to troubling economic and environmental problems for which no easy solutions were available, West Germany and its politicians had to contend with two new sources of social unrest: the student movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and left-wing terrorism, which originated in the late 1960s, but which had its greatest impact in the 1970s. In Georgia, as across the nation, new organizations formed to address the concerns and fight for the rights of previously ignored or marginalized groups of people. The German student movement did not cohesively pick up until June 1967, however, when the Shah of Iran visited the Federal Republic of Germany. Germany '68 Movement brought lasting changes to German society.