Overview

• More than 8,100 patients are on Germany’s transplant waiting list while postmortem donations reached just 953 in 2024.
• The first five months of 2025 saw 426 postmortem donors compared with 382 in the same period last year, a rise experts say is still insufficient.
• Health ministers and medical bodies including Bavaria’s Judith Gerlach and the Berlin Ärztekammer are advocating presumed consent to make donation the default.
• Significant regional disparities persist, with Saxony boasting 17.8 donors per million inhabitants while Hesse recorded a nearly one-third drop in postmortem donors this year.
• Hospital budget shortfalls limit organ procurement capacity and only about 30 percent of Germans have documented their donation decisions.