Üble Nachrede in Germany: § 186 StGB and the Not Demonstrably True Rule

Üble Nachrede is the German defamation offence that catches most real cases, and it contains one feature that surprises almost every reader arriving from a common law background. Under § 186 StGB a damaging factual claim about another person is punishable unless that claim is demonstrably true. The German wording is nicht erweislich wahr, and it places the risk of non provability on the speaker rather than on the person being talked about.

That is a structural difference, not a detail of procedure. In a common law defamation claim the usual starting point is that the claimant complains of a statement and the defendant may prove truth as a defence, with the burden allocated by the law of that jurisdiction. Under § 186 StGB the provision is drafted so that a statement whose truth simply cannot be established falls inside the offence, even where nobody can show it is false.

This page works through what § 186 StGB requires, how the erweislich wahr structure operates in practice, how the offence is bounded on either side by § 185 StGB and § 187 StGB, what the § 193 StGB defence does with it, and how the criminal and civil routes fit together.

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

What § 186 StGB actually says

§ 186 StGB is headed Üble Nachrede. It applies to a person who, in relation to another, asserts or spreads a fact which is capable of making that other person contemptible or of lowering them in public opinion, and it makes that conduct punishable if this fact is not demonstrably true.

Four elements have to be present. There must be a Tatsache, a claim capable of being proved true or false. It must relate to an identifiable other person. It must be capable of damaging that person's standing. And it must not be demonstrably true.

Two verbs cover the conduct. Behaupten means putting the claim forward as one's own assertion, and verbreiten means passing on a claim that originated elsewhere. Repeating a rumour, forwarding a message, or quoting a third party can all fall within the second verb, and adding a phrase such as apparently or according to others does not by itself take a statement outside the provision.

The claim also has to reach somebody other than the person concerned. German doctrine treats §§ 186 and 187 StGB as directed at claims put before third parties, and a statement made only to the person it describes is assessed as Beleidigung under § 185 StGB rather than as üble Nachrede.

Nicht erweislich wahr, and why it matters

Most English language explanations of German defamation law describe § 186 StGB as covering false statements. That is not what the provision says, and the difference is the single most consequential feature of the offence.

The text does not require the statement to be false. It requires it to be not demonstrably true. Three states of the world are therefore possible, and only one of them lies outside the provision.

The middle row is where the practical weight of the provision sits. A private allegation with no documents behind it, an account of a conversation with no witnesses, a suspicion repeated in a review: these often cannot be proved either way, and under § 186 StGB the consequence of that failure of proof runs against the person who made the claim.

There is a procedural point that follows from this and is often mangled in summaries. Because non provability is part of the offence definition rather than a defence, this is not a reversal of the criminal burden of proof: the court still has to be satisfied of the elements, and the presumption of innocence still applies. What has changed is the elements themselves, since the prosecution does not have to show falsity, only that truth was not established.

A worked example

Take a concrete scenario. A former patient writes in a public review that a named physiotherapist reused single use equipment between patients. The practice denies it.

If the patient can produce evidence establishing that this happened, for example a photograph with an identifiable context or a corroborating witness, the fact is demonstrably true and § 186 StGB is not engaged, though § 192 StGB means the way the claim was phrased can still matter.

If the patient saw something ambiguous, cannot describe it precisely, and no other evidence exists, the position is different. The practice does not have to prove that the reuse never happened. The claim is simply not demonstrably true, and it is capable of lowering the practice in public opinion, so it falls within § 186 StGB even though nobody can show the patient invented anything.

If the patient made the allegation up in order to damage a competitor's supplier, and knew it was untrue, the case moves to § 187 StGB and the penalty range moves with it. That progression, from provable to unprovable to knowingly false, is the architecture of the whole group of offences.

How § 186 StGB differs from § 187 StGB and § 185 StGB

The three provisions are best read as one graded scheme. The search term that brings most readers here is usually an attempt to work out which of the three describes what happened to them.

Two boundaries do all the work. Fact against value judgment separates § 185 StGB from the other two, and knowledge of falsity separates § 187 StGB from § 186 StGB. Provability separates § 186 StGB from a lawful statement. The knowledge based offence is set out at Verleumdung and knowingly false statements, and the insult offence at criminal insult.

Sorting a statement into fact or value judgment is rarely mechanical. A sentence such as the manager cheats his staff can read as an evaluative summary of a working relationship or as a claim about specific conduct, and German courts assess the statement in its context, with mixed statements assessed according to the element that gives them their character.

Penalty tiers

§ 186 StGB provides for imprisonment of up to one year or a fine. Where the act was committed publicly, in an assembly, or by disseminating content within the meaning of § 11 Absatz 3 StGB, the range rises to imprisonment of up to two years or a fine.

§ 11 Absatz 3 StGB defines Inhalte as material contained in writings, on audio or image carriers, in data storage, in images or other embodiments, or transmitted by information or communication technology independently of storage. Anything posted or forwarded online therefore engages the aggravated tier, which is why the online cases are structurally more serious than the same words said in a corridor.

The wording change to Inhalt in § 186 StGB came from the 60. Strafrechtsänderungsgesetz of 30 November 2020, in force on 1 January 2021. The separate Gesetz zur Bekämpfung des Rechtsextremismus und der Hasskriminalität, in force since 3 April 2021, added the public, assembly and dissemination aggravation to § 185 StGB for the first time. It did not raise the ceiling in § 187 StGB.

A heavier variant exists where the target is a person involved in political life. Under § 188 StGB an act falling under § 186 StGB, committed publicly, in an assembly or by disseminating content, connected with the person's public position and capable of making their public work considerably more difficult, carries imprisonment from three months to five years.

Two provisions that refine the truth question

§ 190 StGB deals with claims that a person committed a criminal offence. Where the asserted fact is an offence, proof of truth is treated as furnished if that person has been convicted of it with binding effect, and proof of truth is excluded if that person was acquitted with binding effect before the assertion was made.

The second half of that rule has real bite. Once there has been a binding acquittal, a speaker who repeats the allegation afterwards cannot run the truth argument at all, whatever they believe about the outcome of the case.

§ 192 StGB points the other way. Proof of the truth of the asserted fact does not exclude punishment under § 185 StGB where the existence of an insult follows from the form of the assertion or the circumstances in which it was made. A true statement delivered as an act of contempt can still be an insult, which is why establishing truth ends the § 186 StGB analysis but not necessarily the matter.

§ 193 StGB and the constitutional balance

The provision that keeps § 186 StGB compatible with a functioning public debate is § 193 StGB, headed Wahrnehmung berechtigter Interessen. It covers critical judgments on scientific, artistic or commercial work, statements or acts made in order to exercise or defend rights or to pursue legitimate interests, reprimands by superiors towards subordinates, official reports or assessments by an official, and similar cases, which are punishable only insofar as the existence of an insult follows from the form of the statement or the circumstances in which it was made.

This is where freedom of expression under Art. 5 Abs. 1 GG is weighed against the general personality right. Journalism, consumer reviews, warnings to colleagues, submissions in litigation and complaints to an authority all live here, and the assessment considers among other things whether the speaker complied with the care to be expected before making the assertion.

That last point is the counterweight to the erweislich wahr structure. A speaker who checked what could reasonably be checked, and reported carefully on a matter of genuine interest, stands in a very different position from one who repeated an unverified rumour, even though neither can prove the claim in court.

Schmähkritik is a narrow category

Schmähkritik describes statements so detached from any substantive dispute that no balancing against freedom of expression is required. The Bundesverfassungsgericht has cut it back sharply, and it matters mostly for statements assessed under § 185 StGB rather than factual claims under § 186 StGB.

In its decisions of 19 May 2020, reported in press release 049/2020, the court held that Schmähkritik exists only where a statement no longer has any discernible connection with a substantive engagement and amounts to the groundless denigration of a person. The decision of 19 August 2020 in 1 BvR 2249/19, reported in press release 095/2020, added that this is a narrow exception subject to strict prerequisites, and that in borderline cases a court should carry out the balancing exercise rather than assert the label.

The lesson for readers is simply that the label is not a shortcut. A finding that a statement is not Schmähkritik says nothing about whether it is lawful, because the ordinary Art. 5 Abs. 1 GG balancing then has to be performed.

The Strafantrag and the three month deadline

The offences in this group are Antragsdelikte. § 194 StGB provides that an insult is prosecuted only on application, and § 77b StGB sets that application period at three months.

The period runs from the end of the day on which the entitled person obtains knowledge of both the act and the identity of the offender. Both parts are needed, so the clock does not start against someone who has seen the post but does not know who wrote it. Where the period would end on a Saturday, Sunday or public holiday it extends to the next working day.

Once the period has run out the criminal route is closed regardless of how serious the statement was. § 194 StGB also contains exceptions, including situations connected with persecution under National Socialist or another arbitrary rule, an application right for the superior where an official was insulted, and a rule for offences under § 188 StGB and § 192a StGB, where the Staatsanwaltschaft may act on its own initiative if it considers that a special public interest requires it.

What a Strafanzeige actually does

A Strafanzeige is a report of a suspected offence made to the police or the Staatsanwaltschaft. It sets an examination in motion. It does not commence a prosecution, and it does not put the person reporting in control of what follows.

The decision to charge belongs to the Staatsanwaltschaft. Under § 376 StPO public charges for the offences listed in § 374 StPO are brought only where prosecution is in the public interest, and the defamation offences are on that list, so a purely private dispute is frequently closed with a reference to the private prosecution route.

That route is the Privatklage. § 374 Absatz 1 Nummer 2 StPO allows an insult within §§ 185 to 189 StGB to be pursued by the injured person by way of private prosecution without first calling on the Staatsanwaltschaft, unless the statement was directed at one of the political bodies listed in § 194 Absatz 4 StGB. In a Privatklage the private party runs the case and carries the associated cost risk.

Where a conviction follows and the offence was committed publicly or by disseminating content, § 200 StGB requires the court, on the application of the injured person, to order that the conviction be made public, with the manner of publication set in the judgment and, for dissemination cases, ideally through the same medium.

The civil route runs in parallel

The criminal and civil tracks are independent and can be pursued at the same time over the same statement. A decision by the Staatsanwaltschaft not to charge does not decide the civil claim, and a civil court reaches its own view on the facts.

Damages claims rest on § 823 Abs. 1 BGB, through the general personality right that German courts derive from Art. 2 Abs. 1 in conjunction with Art. 1 Abs. 1 GG and treat as a sonstiges Recht within that provision. A second basis runs through § 823 Abs. 2 BGB, which imposes liability on anyone who breaches a statute intended to protect another, with §§ 185 to 187 StGB functioning as such protective statutes.

Removal and injunctive relief come from elsewhere. § 1004 BGB gives an owner a claim against a disturber for removal of an interference and, where further interference is to be feared, for an injunction. German courts apply that provision by analogy to the personality right, and it is the basis on which a court orders a statement deleted or prohibits its repetition.

The distinction is worth holding onto, because the two tracks deliver different things. A criminal outcome sanctions the speaker; it does not remove the statement. The civil track is the one that produces deletion, an injunction, a correction where appropriate, and compensation in serious cases.

Identifying the speaker is usually the real obstacle

In online matters the legal classification is rarely what stalls a case. The obstacle is establishing who actually wrote the statement, since a display name is not evidence of authorship and many platforms hold little verified information about their users.

§ 21 TDDDG, in the Telekommunikation-Digitale-Dienste-Datenschutz-Gesetz, provides a route for civil claims. It allows a digital service provider to disclose subscriber data where this is necessary in order to enforce civil claims for damage caused by unlawful content, including content falling under §§ 185 to 187 StGB and § 189 StGB, and it requires a prior court order which the affected person applies for at the Landgericht, with the provider joined to that proceeding.

Even then the data held may be no more than an IP address and a timestamp, which requires a further step against the access provider before any individual is identified, and that step can fail for ordinary technical reasons. This is where a substantial number of otherwise well founded matters come to a stop, and it is worth understanding early, because the three month period in § 77b StGB only begins once the offender is known.

For the wider set of German defamation rules see the defamation law overview, and for the general guide to German law see Germany.