GER: Rashly Renouncing Your Inheritance – Tough Luck?

Oct 4, 2024 Benn-Ibler Rechtsanwälte

If you make a mistake and decide to renounce your inheritance early on, can you still inherit? The Frankfurt Higher Regional Court (Oberlandesgericht, hereinafter OLG) had to deal with this question.

In the case at hand, the daughter had refused her inheritance after her mother’s death. She had not grown up with her mother because of her mother’s alcoholism. The police officer who informed her of her mother’s death had told her that her mother’s flat had been in a chaotic and untidy state. The daughter therefore assumed that her mother must have lived in a deprived area, without having seen the flat herself. It was only when the daughter received a letter from the administrator of the estate that she found out her mother had, in fact, a bank account balance in the upper five-figure range.

Nine months later, the daughter decided to contest the disclaimer and is now seeking to become the sole heir. She had been under the mistaken impression that the estate was over-indebted. The probate court rejected the daughter’s application for a certificate. The appeal against the rejection of the inheritance was ineffective.

The OLG has now made a decision on this matter:

Even if an heir has not made use of all reasonable and possible sources of information on the composition of an inheritance and has disclaimed the inheritance on the basis of a false assumption of excessive indebtedness, the heir may later contest this disclaimer.

In principle, heirs are not obliged to investigate the composition of the estate before disclaiming. However, if they take their decision solely on the basis of speculation, they will not be able to contest the disclaimer on the grounds of an error of fact if their speculation turns out to be incorrect.

To the extent that the daughter was wrong about the value of the estate itself and assumed that it was over-indebted, this cannot constitute a ground for challenge, since the value of something, as opposed to the factors that determine its value, is not a characteristic, and therefore one cannot be mistaken about this.

However, the daughter was wrong about the specific composition of the estate and thus about its essential characteristics, in particular about the existence of some money in the bank. It is true that the daughter had not exhausted all the obvious possibilities to inquire about the composition of her mother’s estate, which would preclude error of judgment. However, her refusal was based on a misunderstanding and not on a presumption.

Press release No. 48/2024, OLG Frankfurt 21 W 146/23 (24 July 2024)