German insolvencies: a map, and tools for agents

26-09-06

The German graveyard: a night-time cemetery scene under a full moon, with each insolvent company drawn as a headstone sized to its workforce, grouped into fenced plots by sector. Retail & fashion leads with 12,125 jobs across 13 stones, Hellweg at 2,900 the largest; the cracked, leaning stones are businesses that have actually stopped trading.

I updated Germany bites the dust, the running ledger of named German company insolvencies.

If you have not seen the page before: it is a hand-checked list of German companies that have gone under since February 2025, newest first, each one with the number of jobs behind it. A case only makes the list if a named source published a specific headcount, a real town, and a defensible date for an actual insolvency event. No estimates, and no plant closures or restructurings dressed up as failures, however many jobs they cost. That rule keeps it honest and also keeps it small: this is a sample of the reported cases, not a register. Germany logged around 12,900 corporate insolvencies in the first half of 2026 alone.

It now stands at 65 companies and 36,645 jobs. The newest entry is the Wahl-Gruppe in Siegen, on 3 September. Thirteen of the sixty-five have actually stopped trading; the rest filed and are still running, which is the distinction most coverage of this blurs. The stones above are the page’s graveyard view: one per company, cut to the size of the workforce behind it, sorted into plots by sector, the cracked and leaning ones being the businesses that have stopped.

A map of where they fall

There is now a map of Germany on the page: one dot per case, placed at the company’s registered town, on land that darkens with the number of cases in each state. The clusters read before the individual dots do, which is the point. Bayern leads with 14 of the 65, then Nordrhein-Westfalen with 11. It responds to the sector filter like everything else on the page, so you can see manufacturing clustering in Bayern while seven of the thirteen retail failures sit in Nordrhein-Westfalen alone.

Four tools, so agents can stop scraping

The ledger is also published over WebMCP now. Four tools are registered on the project page: insolvency_summary for totals and the split by sector, state and month, list_insolvencies for the filtered and paged rows, get_insolvency for one full record with its source link, and insolvency_trend for the national monthly series from the IWH-Insolvenztrend.

They are scoped to that one page. An agent reading a blog post here should not be handed four tools about German insolvencies. If you want the raw thing without a browser, the whole dataset and its aggregates are one file: /webmcp/insolvencies.json.

Project page: https://nader.io/projects/german-insolvencies