The H

The West German university city of Freiburg (pop. 110,000) was a bad place for a child in late 1945. Bombs and artillery shells had cratered its streets, shattered its industry (mainly textiles and precision instruments), gutted its homes. Children roamed the rubble in wolf packs, raiding homes, stealing food and clothing for the black market. By 1947 Freiburg had a shockingly high juvenile-delinquency rate: scrawny, defiant boys, aged 12 to 18, were being brought before Freiburg's courts in batches of dozens at a time, sentenced and packed off to prison. Freiburg's citizens just shook their heads. But one man, Dr. Karl Haerringer, 44, chief judge of the city's juvenile courts, made up his mind to do something about the problem.

Soup & Beggars. Judge Haerringer began with a simple idea: "No 'bad' boy is really bad." He saw the delinquents as victims of Nazi education, of war-torn marriages, of complacency and defeat. The children, he said, had been "derailed" by World War II. His first move was to herd a gang of 40 delinquents off to a soup kitchen instead of jail. There each boy got a meal, a pair of shoes, some clothes the judge had scrounged. Then they talked, not about crime or war, but about sports, music, dancing and books. The boys began to relax. They came back for more talk night after night.

With that as a starter, Judge Haerringer really got busy. He helped the boys turn an abandoned theater into a civic center, hired professional musicians to play for them, asked local authors to give talks on the world's great literature, brought in actors to put on comedy skits. The judge haunted welfare groups, asking them to help him rustle up food and clothing. "There's no question," said one official, "that Haerringer is the most gifted beggar in town." Said the judge with a smile: "We have to do the giving before we have the right to ask anything of these youngsters."

Monuments & Dancing. Today, Freiburg's cops can look forward to quiet evenings. Judge Haerringer's boys' town now has 300 members, most of them on probation for petty theft. They proudly call themselves "the Haerringer Boys," have a spacious new civic center donated by the city. Instead of roaming aimlessly, the boys are split into groups of 15, are led by young men from Freiburg's Youth Office and university to visit historical monuments, factories and schools. Evenings, they enjoy table-tennis tournaments, musicals and dances with girls from the university.

Last week, on his way to Nebraska to visit Father Flanagan's Boys Town and see how the idea works in the U.S., Judge Haerringer could point to some impressive results. In seven years, some 600 Germans in trouble with the law have passed through his home; only one has been convicted of a second criminal offense. The judge knows that his project is no substitute for an adequate home life, and in some cases the boys coming before his bench must be sent away to a reform school. But many can be helped. Says Judge Haerringer: "Prophylaxis is easier and cheaper than therapeutics. The trouble with most of these children is that few of them have ever had any fun."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.