Qualität ist, wenn der Kunde zurückkommt – nicht das Produkt. Quality is when the customer comes back, not the product. A 2025 article about Porsche Consulting quoted it as a saying attributed to the founder of a traditional German department store chain. The article does not name him.
The same article then turned to process. Nicht nur das fehlerfreie Produkt zählt, sondern vor allem der Umgang mit Fehlern. Not only the faultless product counts, but above all the way errors are handled.
Ohne Fleiß kein Preis. Without diligence, no prize.
Der Zweck heiligt die Mittel. The end justifies the means. In German it is usually said as a reproach.
Ende gut, alles gut. All is well that ends well. The counter-saying, which puts the result first.
Dafür stehe ich mit meinem Namen. I stand for it with my name. The baby food maker HiPP calls the sentence one of the best-known brand statements in Germany.
The company describes the work behind it. It has grown raw materials on organically farmed land since 1956. Vom Acker bis ins Gläschen, from the field to the jar, one in four of its employees in Germany is responsible for guaranteeing and assuring quality.
In 2003 the frozen-food company FRoSTA adopted its own Reinheitsgebot, purity law, a name that recalls the beer law. It allowed no additives at all. Sales collapsed, and the company stayed with the rule.
Its chief executive Felix Ahlers explains the rule by the way the food is made. Wir wollen keine Zutaten ins Essen mischen, die man zu Hause nie verwenden würde. We do not want to mix any ingredients into the food that one would never use at home.
The German label Ohne Gentechnik, without genetic engineering, rests on rules added in 2008 to a national law. On milk, meat and eggs it certifies how the animals were fed. Animals kept for milk must have been fed without genetically modified feed for at least three months, pigs for at least four months, laying hens for at least six weeks.
Milk, meat, eggs and other animal foods need no marking, even when the animals were given genetically modified feed.
In 2001 German football decided that every Bundesliga club must run a youth academy, a Leistungszentrum. Since the 2007/08 season the academies have been certified by the agency Double PASS. The audit divides everything that works in an academy into eight dimensions, among them organization and procedures. Effectiveness and permeability is one of the eight.
The auditors look at how the work is actually done. Wir suchen nach Arbeitsdokumenten, nicht nach eigens für uns gefertigten Unterlagen. We look for working documents, not for papers made especially for us. Uns geht es um Implementierung. What matters to us is implementation.
In July 2014 ZDF broadcast rankings of Germany’s best men and women, presented as the result of a Forsa poll. It then emerged that the editors had moved people up or down. Franz Beckenbauer, for example, had been moved from place 31 to place 9.
Program director Norbert Himmler called it ein grober Verstoß gegen die Programmrichtlinien des Senders, a gross breach of the broadcaster’s program guidelines, and said it damaged ZDF’s credibility. ZDF dissolved the team responsible, and Himmler proposed a set of rules for the use of polls in programs.
On 11 April 2024 pupils in Lower Saxony sat the written Abitur exam in politics and economics. Someone had broken into a Gymnasium in Goslar and, according to the ministry, broken open a safe. The exam was interrupted across the state. At about 9 a.m. new tasks were uploaded to the schools, for about 8,000 candidates at about 450 schools.
The ministry gave the reason. Theoretisch hätten Schülerinnen und Schüler die Aufgaben vorab einsehen können. In theory, pupils could have seen the tasks in advance.
German health insurance law requires the Federal Joint Committee, the body that sets rules for medical care, to lay down minimum requirements for quality. Section 136 of the Fifth Book of the Social Code names three kinds: Struktur-, Prozess- und Ergebnisqualität, the quality of structure, of process and of outcome.
The committee explains process quality with a question. Welche Arbeitsschritte sind erforderlich, damit beispielsweise eine Operation … wie vorgesehen abläuft? Which work steps are needed so that an operation, for example, runs as intended? Its data-based quality procedures deal with process quality and outcome quality for certain treatments.
On the morning of 1 October 2002, a police officer in Frankfurt threatened the suspect Magnus Gäfgen with massive Schmerzen, severe pain, if he did not reveal where a kidnapped child was. The officer acted on the order of the deputy police chief, Wolfgang Daschner.
On 9 April 2003 the Frankfurt Regional Court ruled that Gäfgen’s earlier statements could not be used, under Section 136a of the Code of Criminal Procedure. The court still allowed the physical evidence. At the trial Gäfgen confessed again, after he had been told that his first confession could not be used. On 28 July 2003 he was sentenced to life. The verdict rested mainly on the new confession.
In December 2004 Daschner and the officer were convicted and given a warning, with their fines held in reserve. In 2010 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the threat was inhuman treatment, and that the trial had still been fair.