bailiff

noun · Gerichtsvollzieher

The Gerichtsvollzieher is a public official of the justice system who carries out execution against movable property, serves documents and takes the debtor’s statement of assets under § 802c ZPO. English bailiff covers a range of very different figures, from court ushers to private enforcement agents, so the German office should be named and briefly explained rather than mapped onto one of them.

Which translation, when

Gerichtsvollzieherthe office: an official organ of execution attached to the court, acting on the creditor’s instruction within the powers the statute grants him, seizing movable property, effecting service and conducting the sale of seized goods; his position is public, not commercial, which already separates him from the private enforcement agents English readers may have in mind.

Vermögensauskunftthe information tool: on demand the debtor must give the Gerichtsvollzieher a statement of his assets, § 802c ZPO, the modern successor of the old eidesstattliche Versicherung that lay readers still call Offenbarungseid; refusal can lead to detention to compel it, and the statements are held centrally, which is why a fruitless seizure is often less important than the information the visit produces.

englische Vielfaltthe mapping problem: England knows county court bailiffs, High Court enforcement officers and, in older usage, the manorial bailiff, and none of them matches the German office exactly; Gerichtsdiener names court ushers rather than enforcement, and Vollstreckungsbeamter belongs to administrative enforcement, so a translation should keep Gerichtsvollzieher and gloss it, the sequence of execution itself being held by the enforcement entry.

Why

Bailiff is usually rendered as Gerichtsvollzieher, and the pair works only with a footnote, because the German office is narrower and more clearly public than the English word suggests. The Gerichtsvollzieher is an organ of execution attached to the court: he acts on the creditor’s instruction, seizes movable property, effects service and conducts the sale of what he has seized, all within powers the statute defines rather than by contract. Beside the seizure of goods sits the tool that matters more in practice, the Vermögensauskunft of § 802c ZPO, the debtor’s statement of his assets, taken by the Gerichtsvollzieher on demand and recorded in a register kept centrally; older texts and everyday speech still call it the eidesstattliche Versicherung or, colloquially, the Offenbarungseid, and refusal can be met with detention to compel compliance. Creditors frequently instruct him precisely for this information rather than in the hope of finding goods worth selling. On the English side there is no single counterpart. County court bailiffs are court officers, High Court enforcement officers are authorised private professionals, certificated enforcement agents work commercially, and the historical bailiff of an estate has nothing to do with any of them, so translating into English requires the same care in reverse. Two German words invite themselves and both are wrong: Gerichtsdiener describes the usher who keeps order in the courtroom, and Vollstreckungsbeamter belongs to administrative enforcement by authorities. The sequence of execution in which the Gerichtsvollzieher acts is held by the enforcement entry, and the seizure of receivables, which is not his department but the court’s, by the attachment entry.

Typical mistakes

The Gerichtsvollzieher is a public organ of execution, so equating him with a commercial enforcement agent misdescribes the office.
Receivables and bank accounts are seized by court order and not by the Gerichtsvollzieher, so attributing an account freeze to him misplaces the measure.
Gerichtsdiener names a court usher and Vollstreckungsbeamter belongs to administrative enforcement, so neither renders the office.

What matters

Explaining a German enforcement step to an English-speaking client: the text should keep Gerichtsvollzieher with a short gloss, mention the statement of assets as the usual purpose of the visit, and route account seizures to the court order instead.

Authority

§ 802c ZPO

What the machine misses

Left to a machine, bailiff becomes Gerichtsdiener or Vollstreckungsbeamter, one a court usher and the other an administrative officer, and the German office is the Gerichtsvollzieher, a public organ of execution who seizes movables, serves documents and takes the Vermögensauskunft of § 802c ZPO; the wrong word also hides that account seizures are not his to make.

See what the machine does with this clause →

Examples

the bailiff attended the premises	der Gerichtsvollzieher war vor Ort
to instruct the bailiff	den Gerichtsvollzieher beauftragen
the debtor’s statement of assets	die Vermögensauskunft
seizure of movable property	Pfändung beweglicher Sachen