Every year, the German states pay money to the churches. These Staatsleistungen, state payments, go back mainly to 1803. In that year, church property was given to secular rulers, and the new rulers took over the church’s obligations. In 1919, the Weimar Constitution ordered that the payments be durch die Landesgesetzgebung abgelöst, bought out by state law. It added: Die Grundsätze hierfür stellt das Reich auf. The Reich sets the principles for this. The Basic Law of 1949 took this article over. The principles have never been set, and so the payments continue. For 2022, the states planned about 602 million euros for the Catholic and Protestant churches alone.
Ablösen in this legal sense means to end against compensation. The payments can stop only against compensation, and in more than a century no federal law has set the terms.