Overview
- The national weather service warns of an overregional black-ice situation, with Hamburg under a level‑3 alert citing danger to life from suddenly freezing rain.
- Schools switched to distance learning in North Rhine‑Westphalia, Lower Saxony and Bremen, with exceptions on some North Sea islands and officials stressing it is not an extra day off.
- Frankfurt Airport canceled 98 of about 1,052 scheduled flights and operated with extensive deicing, while Munich and Nuremberg reported additional scrubbed departures.
- Deutsche Bahn reduced speeds on key high‑speed corridors such as Hannover–Frankfurt, Wolfsburg–Berlin and Cologne–Frankfurt, with ICEs between Berlin and Frankfurt skipping Braunschweig and Hildesheim and some regional outages in the north.
- Police reported numerous crashes, including a fatal collision on Bavaria’s A6, as winter services worked nonstop; impacts varied by region, with areas like the Kassel district largely keeping routes passable, and forecasters expect conditions to ease as temperatures rise by midweek.