18-year-old Niclas Matthei has become known as the “Reporting Master” in his home country of Germany after snitching on thousands of parking offenders to the police.

Not all heroes wear capes! Some wear neon green overalls and ride bicycles around busy streets hunting parking offenders and snitching on them to the police as a hobby, and because they consider it the right thing to do. Niclas Matthei, a young man from the town of Gräfenhainichen, in Germany’s Saxony-Anhalt region, first made national news headlines earlier this year, when several prominent media outlets wrote about his unusual hobby -riding his bike around town, photographing illegally parked cars and sending the proof to the local police. He called himself “Anzeigenhauptmeister” or “Reporting Master” and he claimed that he only did his civic duty.

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An employee of the Pinakothek der Moderne art museum in Munich, Germany, reportedly hung up his own paintings next to works by Pablo Picasso or Franz Marc without asking anyone for permission.

The 51-year-old unnamed man was reportedly working in the museum technical department, which gave him access to the premises outside of visiting hours. He was thus able to casually drill holes into an empty wall and hang up his own paintings next to those of acclaimed painters from all over the world. It is unclear how long the paintings were up for between someone noticed that they weren’t supposed to be there, but according to a museum spokesperson, they couldn’t have been up for too long because “supervisors usually notice something like that immediately”. As for the man’s motivation, one can only assume that he believed showing his work in the museum would lead to future opportunities.

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A 17-year-old German teen has been living life as a modern nomad, leaving his parents’ house to live on trains and travel all over his country.

While most 17-year-olds are only just beginning to consider the idea of leaving the nest, Lasse Stolley has already been on his own for over a year and a half. Convinced that his school studies were already behind him, he convinced his parents to allow him to leave their home in Fockbek, Schleswig-Holstein to embark on a unique train-hopping adventure. It took a lot of convincing, but they eventually agreed, and for the last year and a half, the German teen has essentially been living on trains, traveling all over his home country, working as a self-employed coder during the day, and sleeping on night trains at night.

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A team of German scientists studied a 62-year-old man who deliberately got 217 Covid-19 vaccine shots over 29 months and found that he suffered from no negative vaccine-related side effects.

Many people wouldn’t get a shot of Covid-19 vaccine if their lives depended on it, but a German man decided to compensate for many of them by getting as many shots as he could. Over a period of 29 months, the unnamed 62-year-old from Magdeburg, Germany, got no less than 217 Covid-19 jabs, an average of four doses per day. He is what you could call a ‘walking experiment’, so after hearing about him from a newspaper, researchers from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg contacted him and asked if they could study him in the name of science. The man agreed, and the team recently published a number of intriguing findings in the Lancet Infectious Diseases Journal.

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An 80-year-old German man has been dubbed the world’s most frugal millionaire for living off food and stuff found in dumpsters despite owning several properties worth millions of euros.

Heinz B. looks like a homeless person with nothing to his name, but appearances can be deceiving. The German man may only have €15 euros ($16) in his bank account at the moment, but that’s only because he just withdrew 700,000 euros ($756,000) to buy a new home, his tenth. The 100,000 euros left over was transferred to a fixed-term deposit to generate interest. He might not look like much, but the octogenarian is worth several millions of dollars and knows how to increase his fortune. Besides, he claims to have been frugal his whole life, so he doesn’t really need money to get by. He is more than happy living on food found in dumpsters and hoarding all sorts of things other people throw away.

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A German museum employee was recently arrested for reportedly swapping several paintings with fake copies and selling the originals to fund a lavish lifestyle.

Due to Germany’s strict privacy laws, the identity of the 30-year-old former employee of the Deutsches Museum in Munich has not been disclosed to the public, but it has been reported that he admitted to replacing at least four paintings with copies in the period that he worked there (2016 – 2018). He allegedly sold the works of art at several auctions, using the money to pay off debts and then buy luxury goods, including a Rolls-Royce and expensive wristwatches. The auction house involved in the sale of three of the stolen paintings said that it “simply wasn’t possible to identify them as stolen property,” adding that it collaborated with authorities during the investigation.

“The defendant shamelessly exploited the opportunity to access the storage rooms … and sold valuable cultural assets in order to secure a high standard of living for himself and to show off,” the court heard from prosecutors.

The unnamed museum employee stole “Das Märchen vom Froschkönig” (The Tale of the Frog Prince) by Franz von Stuck, replaced it with a fake, and put the original up for auction. he told the auction house that the artwork had belonged to his grandparents or great-grandparents, and managed to earn almost 50,000 euros ($52,000) in cash, after the auction fees were deducted.

He subsequently swapped “Die Weinprüfung” (The Wine Test) by Eduard von Grützner and “Zwei Mädchen beim Holzsammeln im Gebirge” (Two Girls Collecting Wood in the Mountains) by Franz von Defregger and sold them at the same auction house, earning tens of thousands of euros. He also stole “Dirndl” by Franz von Defregger, and tried selling it through a different Munich auction house, but it did not sell.

In the end, the 30-year-old man managed to avoid prison time, but was handed a 21-month suspended sentence and ordered to pay back the museum more than $64,000. In its ruling, the court argued that it had taken into account the man’s confession and the fact that he showed ‘genuine remorse’.

“He said he acted without thinking,” the court ruling read. “He can no longer explain his behavior today.”

The employee’s thefts were discovered when a provenance researcher noticed that Das Märchen vom Froschkönig was “quite a clumsy copy,” despite being in the right frame, which suggested that someone had swapped it with a copy. Further investigation of the museum’s storage depots resulted in the discovery of the three other missing paintings.

“Our staff are all very reliable, but there is not much you can do if one employee harbors criminal energy. He had no previous record and there was no way of knowing he was capable of this when we hired him,” a spokesperson for the Deutsches Museum said.

The German city of Dresden is famous for the Baroque architecture that runs along the banks of the Elbe River, but there is one exception that stands out like a sore thumb – the iconic Yenidze building, aka the ‘tobacco mosque’.

Featuring clear oriental architectural elements of mosques and the famous Alhambra Palace of Granada, the Yenidze has been towering over Dresden’s Friedrichstadt neighborhood for over a century. At 62 meters (203 ft) tall, featuring 600 windows of various styles, and boasting an impressive glass dome, it would be one of the largest mosques in the world, but despite its appearance, the Yenidze is not, and has never been a mosque. For most of its existence, the Yenidze has operated as a tobacco factory and its unusual design was chosen both as homage to the Oriental origin of the tobacco processed here, but also a clever way to vend the rules on architectural restrictions in Dresden’s city center.

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The Ottomeyer Mammut is the largest plow ever made. It was created for the specific purpose of converting bogs into agricultural land and could cut channels in the ground to a depth of over 2 meters.

The bog areas of the Emsland district in Northern Germany, on the border with the Netherlands, had been determined uninhabitable since the 1700s, but in the early 20th century, the government of Western Germany decided that the region had fallen behind the rest of the country economically and needed to be converted into arable land. That was easier said than done, however, as the bogs had kept farmers away for hundreds of years, but the Germans had an ace up their sleeve – Otto Meyer, a brilliant engineer and inventor who specialized in steam tractors and difficult soil cultivation.

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Neuzeller Klosterbräu, a brewery in eastern Germany, claims to have devised a way to create a powdered beer that, when mixed with water, tasted almost exactly like the original liquid beverage.

The global beer industry is massive, but it’s also one of the least efficient in the world. Transporting large quantities of beer bottled in heavy glass bottles all over the world is expensive, but what if you didn’t have to? What if some of the world’s most famous breweries could just ship their products overseas in powdered form, and the company on the receiving end would just have to add water to it? German brewery Neuzeller Klosterbräu claims to have come up with a process to create any type of beer in powdered form, alcohol and carbonation included. All anyone has to do is add water and they are left with a regular beer.

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The town of Herringen, in central Germany, is home to a heap of sodium chloride (table salt) so massive that it has come to be known as Monte Kali. It is the world’s largest artificial salt mountain.

The origin of Monte Kali can be traced back to the year 1976, when potash salt started being extracted from mines around the town of Hessen. Back then, potash was used to make products like soap and glass, but today it is an important ingredient in several fertilizers, synthetic rubber, and even some medicines, so extraction intensified over the last few decades. The problem with potash is that mining it generates a lot of sodium chloride as a byproduct, so you need somewhere to store it. The company operating the mines started dumping all this salt a few miles from Herringen, and over the years it created a giant salt mountain locals named Monte Kali or Kalimanjaro (puns for Kalisalz, the German word for ‘potash’).

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A young German woman stands accused of premeditated murder after allegedly seeking out a doppelganger on social media and then brutally killing her in order to stage her own death.

When police in Ingolstadt, Germany’s Bavaria region, received calls about a dead woman in the car abandoned on the banks of the Danube river, they had no idea they were about to get involved in one of the most shocking murder cases in the country’s history. The body of a disfigured young woman was discovered on 16 August 2022 by an Iraqi-born couple who immediately believed it was their 23-year-old daughter, Sharaban. The body was found in their daughter’s Mercedes and despite the severe injuries to her face, she had the same general features and the same hair. However, a thorough autopsy soon proved that the body belonged to an Algerian beauty blogger, also 23, from the neighboring state of Baden-Württemberg…

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An elderly couple in Germany has taken their next-door neighbors to court over a very active rooster that allegedly crows about 200 times a day, making it impossible for them to rest.

76-year-old Friedrich-Wilhelm and his wife Jutta, a couple from Bad Salzuflen, in Western Germany, claim that they haven’t had a quiet day at home in a long time, all because of Magda, their neighbors’ rooster. The domestic bird allegedly starts crowing every day at around 8 am, and doesn’t stop until sundown, when the owners lock it up with their other chicken. After years of trying to reason with their neighbors about Magda, Friedrich and Jutta have taken them to court in order to resolve the matter.

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A museum in the German city of Wolfsburg recently removed a controversial art installation by English artist Damien Hirst after animal rights group PETA filed a complaint about it killing flies.

Flies are generally seen as annoying pests to be exterminated or at least kept at bay, but a controversial art installation featuring a fly-killing UV light has attracted the wrath of animal rights group PETA and sparked a heated debate about the rights of the flying insects. Titled “A Hundred Years (1990)”, the art installation by award-winning artist and entrepreneur Damien Hirst was recently removed from Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg after PETA filed a complaint claiming that it infringed on Germany’s Animal Welfare Act, which bans the killing or harming of animals without proper reason. Whether flies fall under that law or not is yet to be determined, but the decision has already sparked controversy in Germany.

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A young German has recently been found guilty of creating a fake COVID screening center and illegally pocketing 5.7 million euros ($6 million) in state payouts for tests that were never performed.

At the height of the Coronavirus pandemic in Germany, the demand for tests was so great that the state reimbursed centers for conducting COVID tests based solely on an invoice. Most private healthcare providers benefited greatly, but some managed to rake in small fortunes without actually providing any kind of service. Such was the case of a young German student who figured out that all he had to do was create a COVID test center on paper, and then invoice thousands of tests every day to collect sizeable payouts from the Government. The young man, who was only 17-year-old when he came up with the idea in 2020, managed to pocket a whopping $6 million without actually doing any work.

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A German Federal Court recently ruled that a man who broke his back by falling down the stairs from his bedroom on his way to his home office should be covered by his employer’s workplace accident insurance.

According to court documents published last Wednesday, Germany’s Federal Social Court ruled in favor of an unnamed area sales manager who broke his back in an accident that occurred in his home in 2018. The man was allegedly walking down the stairs from his bedroom on his way to his home office when he slipped on his spiral staircase and broke a thoracic vertebra. The plaintiff’s lawyer argued that his client, who typically starts his workday without eating breakfast, was headed for his home work station, which makes his accident work-related and should be covered by insurance.

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