Did Germany legalize incest? No, that's not true. Germany has not legalized incest. According to section 173 of the German Criminal Code, sexual relation between siblings and between parents and their children is forbidden.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) published on TikTok by @maysaranews on August 22, 2023, under the title "Germany just passed the law." The text on the video read:
[...] Germany allows marriage between siblings, between son and mother and marriage with animals.
(Translated from Arabic by Lead Stories staff).
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Aug 23 10:31:47 2023 UTC)
The claim went viral on TikTok and it was published by numerous other accounts, such as here, here and here.
According to Cornell Law School
Incest is marriage or sexual intercourse with a relative within the prohibited degree of consanguinity. In other words, incest is sexual contact between close blood relatives, including brothers and sisters, parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren, or aunts and uncles with nephews or nieces.
While the videos published on TikTok claim that Germany has legalized marriage between siblings and between mother and son, section 173 of German Criminal Code forbids incest:
Section 173 (Incest)
(1) Whosoever performs an act of sexual intercourse with a consanguine descendant shall be liable to imprisonment not exceeding three years or a fine. (2) Whosoever performs an act of sexual intercourse with a consanguine relative in an ascending line shall be liable to imprisonment not exceeding two years or a fine; this shall also apply if the relationship as a relative has ceased to exist. Consanguine siblings who perform an act of sexual intercourse with each other shall incur the same penalty. (3) Descendants and siblings shall not be liable pursuant to this provision if they were not yet eighteen years of age at the time of the act.
DW and other media reported that in 2014 the German Ethics Council called for the repeal of the prohibition of incest between siblings, after examining a controversial case in Germany, where a brother and a sister had four children together. In 2022, according to the Daily Mail, the man continued to call for an end to laws banning incest.
A search of Google News index' of thousands of credible news sites performed by Lead Stories on August 24, 2023, for the past 12 months, with the following keywords: "Germany legalize incest," did not show any reference to a law being passed recently in Germany to allegedly make incest legal. As of now, incest is still illegal in Germany according to the German Criminal Code.
