Notwehr in Germany: How Self Defence Works Under § 32 StGB

Notwehr is the German law of self defence, and it is set out in two sentences of § 32 StGB. § 32 Abs. 1 StGB provides that a person who commits an act required by Notwehr does not act unlawfully. § 32 Abs. 2 StGB defines Notwehr as the defence necessary to avert a present unlawful attack on oneself or on another.

Those two sentences are shorter than the equivalent rules in most common law systems, and they are also structured differently. The German provision asks whether the defensive act was necessary to stop the attack. It does not, on its face, ask whether the harm caused by the defence was in proportion to the harm threatened.

That is the point most often misunderstood by readers arriving from England, Ireland or the United States, where the language of reasonableness and proportionality does most of the work. German law reaches similar results in extreme cases, but it gets there through a different door, the requirement in § 32 Abs. 1 StGB that the act be geboten.

This page explains the structure of the provision, what each element means, the narrowing effect of Gebotenheit, the excess rule in § 33 StGB, how Nothilfe works, and how § 32 StGB differs from the necessity provisions in §§ 34 und 35 StGB. It describes the legal test. It does not assess any individual situation and it is not guidance on the use of force.

Information last verified on 20 July 2026. This page provides general legal information and does not constitute legal advice in an individual case.

The structure of § 32 StGB

German criminal law analyses an act in stages: whether it fulfils the definition of an offence, whether it is unlawful, and whether the person is culpable. Notwehr operates at the second stage. It is a Rechtfertigungsgrund, a ground of justification, so an act covered by § 32 StGB is not unlawful in the first place.

That has consequences beyond the criminal case. Because the act is not unlawful, there is nothing for another person to defend against by way of Notwehr in return, and the parallel provision in civil law, § 227 Abs. 1 BGB, uses almost identical wording to reach the same conclusion for private law liability.

The test breaks down into the elements the two sentences supply. There must be an attack; it must be present; it must be unlawful; the defensive act must be necessary; and, reading § 32 Abs. 1 StGB, it must be geboten.

A present unlawful attack

An Angriff means conduct by a human being that threatens a legally protected interest. The interest does not have to be physical integrity. Property, liberty, honour and the home are all capable of being attacked in the sense of the provision, which is why the wording of § 32 Abs. 2 StGB is not limited to violence against the person.

Gegenwärtig, present, is the element that does most of the practical work. An attack is present when it is immediately imminent, is happening, or is still continuing. What falls outside is the attack that has not yet begun in any concrete sense and the attack that is over.

That second boundary is where a great many disputed cases sit. Once the attack has ended, the situation is no longer one of Notwehr, and conduct after that point is assessed under the ordinary rules on offences. German law does not treat a completed attack as licensing a response, however understandable the impulse.

Rechtswidrig, unlawful, excludes defence against conduct that is itself justified. A person carrying out a lawful arrest, or acting in Notwehr themselves, is not mounting an unlawful attack, so a response to them is not Notwehr.

Erforderlichkeit, the necessity element

§ 32 Abs. 2 StGB requires the defence to be erforderlich, necessary. The assessment is made on the situation as it stood at the moment, not with the benefit of what became known afterwards.

A defensive act is necessary where it is suitable to end the attack and where no milder means that would have been equally effective was available at that moment. The two halves matter equally. A milder means that would not reliably have stopped the attack is not an alternative in the sense of the provision, because the person defending is not required to accept a risk that the defence fails.

This is the sense in which German law is often described as not requiring proportionality. There is no statutory instruction to weigh the value of the interest defended against the value of the interest harmed, which is precisely what § 34 StGB does require for its own separate situation. Notwehr is built around the idea that the legal order does not have to give way to unlawfulness.

It follows that a person facing a present unlawful attack is not required by § 32 StGB to run away. Flight is not a milder means within the necessity test in the way that a warning or a lesser degree of force can be, and German law does not impose a general duty to retreat. That is a statement about the structure of the provision, not a recommendation about how anyone should behave in a real situation, where safety and the criminal test are not the same question.

Gebotenheit, the limit

If necessity were the whole test, § 32 StGB would produce indefensible outcomes at the margins. The word geboten in § 32 Abs. 1 StGB is what prevents that.

German courts and commentary have long read Gebotenheit as a normative restriction that narrows Notwehr in a small number of recognised constellations. The usual groupings are a gross imbalance between the interest attacked and the harm caused by the defence, attacks by children or by persons plainly not responsible for their conduct, attacks within close personal relationships, and situations the person defending provoked in order to create the opportunity.

In those constellations the restriction is not that Notwehr disappears. It is that the person defending is expected to work through a graduated response where that is possible, avoiding the confrontation, then defending without serious injury, and resorting to more severe means only where the milder stages fail or are plainly hopeless.

The category that produces the most litigation is the gross imbalance. The classic textbook illustration is the use of lethal force to stop the theft of an object of trivial value, which the necessity test on its own would not obviously exclude but which Gebotenheit does.

Nothilfe: defending another person

§ 32 Abs. 2 StGB refers to averting an attack von sich oder einem anderen, from oneself or from another. Defence of a third party, Nothilfe, is therefore not a separate doctrine with its own conditions. It is the same rule applied to a different beneficiary.

Every element carries across unchanged. The attack on the third party must be present and unlawful, the intervention must be necessary, and it must be geboten. The person intervening does not need any relationship with the person attacked.

The civil law counterpart works the same way, since § 227 Abs. 2 BGB likewise covers an attack von sich oder einem anderen.

There is one recurring source of confusion. Detaining someone is not the same legal question as defending against them. The power of any person to make a provisional arrest of someone caught in the act, where they are suspected of flight or their identity cannot be established immediately, comes from § 127 Abs. 1 StPO, not from § 32 StGB. Self help to secure a civil claim is governed by § 229 BGB, which applies only where official assistance cannot be obtained in time.

§ 33 StGB: exceeding the limits

§ 33 StGB is one sentence long. Where the actor exceeds the limits of Notwehr out of Verwirrung, Furcht oder Schrecken, that is confusion, fear or fright, they are not punished.

Two features of that wording repay attention. The first is that it is a closed list of three states, traditionally described as the asthenic emotions. Excess driven by anger, indignation, a desire to punish or a wish to retaliate is not covered, even where the original attack was real.

The second is that § 33 StGB presupposes a genuine Notwehr situation whose limits were then overstepped. It addresses the person who was entitled to defend and went too far, not the person who was never in a defensive situation at all.

The consequence differs from § 32 StGB in a way that matters. § 32 StGB makes the act lawful. § 33 StGB leaves the act unlawful and removes the punishment, which is why the two provisions are not interchangeable even though they often appear together in the same case.

How § 32 StGB differs from §§ 34 und 35 StGB

Three provisions sit close together and are regularly mixed up, so it is worth setting them out side by side.

§ 34 StGB is the provision that contains an express balancing exercise. It applies to a present danger that cannot be averted otherwise, requires that the protected interest substantially outweighs the interest interfered with, taking account of the interests concerned and the degree of danger to them, and adds that the act must be an appropriate means of averting the danger.

§ 35 StGB works at the culpability stage instead. It applies to a present danger to life, limb or liberty of the actor, a relative or another person close to them, and it does not make the act lawful. § 35 Abs. 1 Satz 2 StGB withdraws the excuse where the actor could be expected to accept the danger, in particular because they caused it themselves or because they stood in a special legal relationship.

A worked scenario

Consider how a court would work through a reported incident. Two people are in a bar in Leipzig. One, A, shoves the other, B, hard against the counter, and then draws back a fist. B pushes A away with enough force that A falls and breaks a wrist. B is investigated for Körperverletzung under § 223 StGB.

The first question is whether there was a present unlawful attack. The shove has already happened and a further blow is drawn back, so an attack is under way and has not ended. Nothing suggests A was acting lawfully, so the attack is unlawful.

The second question is necessity. A push that creates distance is capable of ending the attack, and the assessment asks whether a milder means that would have been equally effective was available in that moment. A verbal warning would not obviously have been equally effective against a fist already drawn back, so the push is likely to satisfy the necessity element even though the injury that resulted was serious.

The third question is Gebotenheit. There is no gross imbalance between a threatened blow to the face and a push, nothing to suggest A was a child or plainly not responsible, and no indication that B engineered the situation. On those facts the restriction does not obviously bite.

Now change one detail. If B had pushed A after A had turned away and left, the first element fails, because the attack was no longer present, and the whole structure collapses at the first stage regardless of how justified B felt. If instead B had reacted to a light shove by striking A repeatedly after A was already on the floor, the later blows would raise the same problem, since the attack had ended by then.

That is the point of the worked example. The outcome turns on the sequence and on what was happening at each moment, which is why summaries of self defence cases so often disagree with the court's own assessment of them.

Why the analysis is always fact specific

Three features of the German test make it unusually sensitive to detail. Presence is assessed second by second, so the same physical act can fall inside or outside § 32 StGB depending on when it occurred. Necessity is judged on the situation as it appeared at the time, which brings in what the person could perceive. Gebotenheit brings in the relationship between the parties and the history of the encounter.

There is also the question of mistake. A person may be mistaken about whether an attack is happening at all, or about the limits of what is permitted, and German law treats those two kinds of error under different rules from § 32 StGB itself, and they sit at a different stage of the analysis. A mistaken belief in the facts of an attack, the Erlaubnistatbestandsirrtum, and a mistaken belief about the legal limits of the defence, an Erlaubnisirrtum, are worked out through the general rules on mistake in §§ 16 and 17 StGB together with the doctrine German courts have built around them, and the two are treated differently from one another. § 35 Abs. 2 StGB is a separate provision that deals only with a mistaken assumption of the circumstances excusing under § 35 Abs. 1 StGB, so it does not answer a mistake about a Notwehr situation.

For that reason nothing on this page can indicate how a particular incident would be assessed. It sets out the elements a German court works through. The application of those elements to real facts is a matter for the investigating authorities and the court, and, for anyone involved in such a matter, for a qualified Rechtsanwalt.

For related material on the German criminal system, see filing a criminal report and the Führungszeugnis, and for the wider guide see German criminal law and Germany.

Frequently asked questions