Germany logs 15,800 heat deaths this summer, passing the 2018 record

Germany’s Robert Koch Institute put heat-related deaths this summer at 15,800, the highest total in the ten years it has kept a dedicated series. The previous peak in that series was 8,900 in 2018. A separate medical paper had put 1994 at about 10,000. Both older marks now sit well below 2026.

The age pattern is blunt. People over 75 account for most of the deaths. In an earlier mid-summer cut of the same series, more than 6,000 of the then 11,900 deaths were among those aged 85 and older, and about 2,900 more among those aged 75 to 84. Women appear in larger raw numbers because they make up a larger share of the very old, not because the heat treated the sexes differently.

One week did most of the damage. Around 9,600 heat-linked deaths fell in late June, when temperatures in parts of Germany passed 40 degrees Celsius. The institute later added about 4,000 more between late July and mid-August. An 20 August update covering 6 April to 9 August had already reached about 14,000, or almost 17 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. Thursday’s 15,800 figure is the summer running total after that later pulse.

RKI does not wait for a doctor to write “heatstroke” on a certificate. It compares weekly deaths in hot weeks with deaths in otherwise similar weeks without heat, then attributes the extra deaths to heat. The method is conservative by the institute’s own description. Direct heatstroke is the smaller part. Most of the extra deaths come when heat meets heart disease, lung disease or kidney disease in a body that can no longer shed warmth.

The Federal Statistical Office, using a different excess-death method, counted around 6,800 extra deaths in the single week of 22 to 28 June. The two offices are not measuring the same object, but both point to the same week as the lethal core of the year.

Cooling in care homes remains thin. Reporting earlier in the summer put air conditioning in only about 14.5 percent of social-care facilities. That share matters because the people who die in these models live disproportionately in those buildings. A night that stays above 25 degrees Celsius in an uncooled ward does not look like a disaster on a map. It is how the 9,600-death week is assembled, one room at a time.

The rest of Europe had the same summer. Heat and drought fed wildfires, cut crop yields and dropped water on the Rhine and the Danube. In Germany the political calendar caught up late. Climate adaptation sat on the agenda of a two-day cabinet retreat under Chancellor Friedrich Merz this week. No new national cooling or care-home standard came out of the meeting.

Heat mortality series are easy to argue with because they are models. A family that loses an 87-year-old in a 40-degree week will often hear a cardiac cause, which is true as far as it goes. The RKI series exists to count the extra deaths that appear only when the temperature does. After a decade of that counting, 15,800 is not a rounding error on 8,900.

What the figure does not yet do is force a building rule. Germany can publish weekly heat deaths with some precision. It has not yet required the rooms where those deaths concentrate to hold a livable night-time temperature. Until that gap closes, the next 40-degree week will write a similar paragraph.