Owner liability

Before any of that, a form usually arrives. An Anhörungsbogen is addressed to you as the accused — the Betroffener — and offers the opportunity to comment on the accusation. A Zeugenfragebogen is addressed to you as a witness, in practice usually as the registered keeper, and asks who was driving. Which of the two you are holding is printed on it, and they are not the same document even though they arrive in the same kind of envelope.

The distinction matters because German procedure attaches different obligations to the two capacities, and both differ again from the plainly factual part of the form — your own name and address as keeper. The rules that govern what a witness must answer, including the position of close relatives and the rule against having to incriminate yourself, reach fine proceedings through the criminal-procedure rules applied by § 46 OWiG. Our research pass did not capture those provisions verbatim, so this page names where the answer lives and does not quote a section number at you.

Two things can be said without quoting anything. The form itself states the capacity you are being asked in and what it says about your rights — that statement, not this page, is what applies to your file. And the clock on the underlying offence runs regardless of what happens to the form: prosecution is time-barred under § 26(3) StVG, and the payment page carries the current period out of the reviewed data set, with the open question we attach to it.

Where a camera recorded the driver, authorities compare that image against photographs already held — an identity-card or passport photograph, for instance — and the German courts have dealt repeatedly with what such a comparison can and cannot establish. It is a practice built on case law and administrative routine rather than a procedure written out in the fine catalogue, and its limits are set by decisions rather than by a table.

For a keeper this is the mechanism that decides whether the driver was "not identifiable" at all — which is the precondition for everything else on this page. It is also the reason a company or a family vehicle behaves differently from a single-driver one: the pool of candidates is larger, and the comparison has more work to do.

The order is made by the authority competent under the law of the relevant Land — a state measure, not a federal one — and it is addressed to the keeper. It can cover one vehicle or several, including vehicles registered to that keeper in the future, and the authority may designate substitute vehicles as well.

What has to be recorded is a short and exact list, kept per vehicle and per individual trip.

Beyond the entries themselves, the logbook has to be handed over for inspection at any time on request — at the place the ordering authority fixes, to that authority or a body it designates, or to other competent persons. And once the ordered period has ended, the completed book has to be kept for the further retention period stated in § 31a(3) StVZO. That retention period is the only duration the section states, and it is emphatically not the duration of the order.

The catalogue carries a single row for all three failures — keeping the book improperly, not producing it on request, not retaining it for the prescribed period — at a standard rate of 100 €, with no standard driving ban attached.

One precision if you are comparing this against your own paperwork: the published catalogue identifies its rows by a running number, and the multi-digit code printed on German notices is an enforcement numbering scheme that does not appear in the catalogue text at all. We searched the full annex for it and found no occurrence, so we cite the running number and not the code.

There is a further route, met most often in parking cases, where the driver could not be established and the costs of the proceedings are imposed on the keeper of the vehicle. It carries a flat fee of its own instead of the percentage fee a normal fine notice adds. This site names that provision and states no amount for it, because the reviewed data set does not carry one.

It is worth reading the paper carefully for which of the two you have. A costs decision against a keeper is not a finding that the keeper committed the offence, and it is not the logbook order either — three different documents, three different consequences, and only one of them puts anything on a driver register.

The demand that brings most people to this subject is the one this site does not serve: how to make the question of who was driving go away. We are explicit about the reason rather than quiet about it. Giving the authority a name that is not the driver's is not a procedural trick — it moves the matter into the criminal code, and the exposure runs to the person doing the naming as well as to the person named.

So this page describes what the system does when a driver is not identified — the questionnaire, the photo comparison, the logbook order, the costs route — and describes no ways around it. What you must and must not answer in your own case is a legal question, and legal questions belong with a lawyer rather than with a reference site that takes no fees from anyone.

Four things decide it, and none of them is a matter of tone. Whether the driver can be identified from the evidence held. Whether the offence is still within the prosecution period. Whether the authority regards a logbook order as proportionate — a discretionary decision, reviewable by the administrative courts. And what the order itself says, since its duration is in no statute.

What this page cannot tell you is which of those is in play in your file. It sets out the mechanism and names the provisions; the document in your hand is the only thing that says what has actually been ordered, and by whom.