The Dead German Story

This came up in the German news yesterday and lays out a complex landscape from which Germans tend to react in different ways.

Months ago....at a bank operation in Essen-Borbeck (northwest Germany....urbanized region outside of Essen).....this older guy collapsed (83 years old).  No one has ever talked to why he collapsed....maybe a heart attack....maybe a blood sugar issue...but this part of the story has always been left out.

So he's laying there with no movement.

A couple and a guy (not associated with each other) enter into this area which has a surveillance camera after the collapse.  They walk around the guy, and proceed to do their business with the ATM machine or the bank receipt machine.  Then they walk out....without calling for help or rendering aid.

Reason?  They would be asked later and then just refused to cooperate with the cops.

Cops review the tapes and figure out who the three were.  Court episode starts up because of the non-rendering of aid (it's actually written in law that you have to provide some kind of help).

The guy on the ground?  He eventually was reported for an ambulance....made it to a hospital....then died a week later.  Some accounts suggest that he might have died more so from the impact of the floor to his head, than the collapse itself.  It was the 4th customer to enter the bank....that eventually called for a ambulance.

The German judge?  He decided the verdict yesterday.  All three of the individuals said they thought the guy was a sleeping homeless guy.  The judge didn't believe their story.  The woman's fine? 3,600 Euro....one guy was to pay 2,800 Euro, and the 2nd guy was to pay 2,400 Euro.  Why a different fee for each?  The judge didn't give any wisdom to that angle.

As you read through the whole court episode....one odd aspect comes out....a medical expert noted that timing here didn't really matter.  The guy on the floor with the concussion could have been helped with the first folks to enter the bank area, and help arriving twenty minutes earlier....but it didn't matter....the guy would have died anyway, period.

Yeah....all this court action....all this dramatic stuff by the German court system.....fines for the three individuals....but the old guy would have passed away anyway.

One of the first fifty-odd things I learned in 1978 upon arriving in Germany is that people have a general tendency to avoid getting into messy events that don't involve them.  German law dictates that on the autobahn....if an accident occurs, you must stop and render aid.  You have no choice about this.  If you asked a hundred Germans...a pretty fair percentage would admit that they'd really prefer NOT to engage in some emergency with folks they don't know.

In this case?  On an average day around Wiesbaden....you'd probably come across at least twenty homeless folks laying around on the street or park areas.  Should you call the cops on each one of them in fear that they've collapsed?  Well....no.

In Frankfurt? I'd take a guess that in a eight-hour period of walking around....I would probably find well over a hundred individuals just laying on the street.  Most of them sleeping off some alcohol episode or getting over their heroin-high. Calling the cops or some ambulance?  At least with the ambulance crews....they'd react and show up....but it'd just be some rescue event that they'd repeat in two weeks with the same guy again.

In the case of these three individuals with the fines?  I think all three will go to a higher court, and the fines will be dismissed eventually.  If the judge had assigned the same value to all three....it might have some wisdom attached.  In this case, I think that each of the three gave some verbal commentary that disagreed with the judge in some manner, and he handed out the fines based on the words and nothing else.