Carrier (Frachtführer)

Under a contract of carriage, a carrier (German: Frachtführer) undertakes to transport goods to their destination and deliver them to the consignee there (section 407 of the German Commercial Code, HGB). The operative word is transport: the carrier owes the movement itself, not its brokerage.

Carrier and forwarder are two roles, not two companies

This is the most common confusion in German transport law. Under section 453 HGB a freight forwarder undertakes to arrange the dispatch — choosing the mode and route, concluding the necessary contracts, commissioning a carrier. The carrier drives.

Both roles sitting inside one company is the norm rather than the exception: a forwarder with its own fleet acts as forwarder and carrier for the same consignment. Legally they remain two distinct sets of obligations, and that matters the moment something goes wrong.

What the carrier answers for

The custody liability in section 425 HGB runs from taking over the goods to delivering them, and covers loss, damage and exceeding the agreed delivery period. It is strict: what matters is not whether anyone was careless, but whether the damage arose inside that window.

Section 431 HGB caps it at 8.33 units of account per kilogram of the gross weight of the affected consignment, the unit of account being the IMF Special Drawing Right. The CMR convention applies the same rate to cross-border carriage by road.

The practical consequence is easy to underestimate: the cap tracks weight, not value. A 20-kilogram consignment is therefore limited to roughly 167 units of account, whether it contains cardboard or electronics. Anyone shipping high-value goods needs a declared value or separate cargo insurance.

When a forwarder becomes a carrier

Three situations pull a forwarder into carrier liability:

• Performing the carriage itself (section 458 HGB)
• Fixed-rate forwarding (section 459 HGB) — agreeing a flat rate instead of costs plus commission
• Groupage (section 460 HGB) — consolidating several consignments into one load

In each, the forwarder holds a carrier's rights and obligations. For shippers this is usually the better position, because custody liability is stricter than liability for careful selection.

What this means for your transport order

While consignments arrive intact, none of this surfaces. When they do not, the role determines who you claim against and under which rules. So it is worth reading the order confirmation: a fixed price agreed for the carriage itself generally puts you in carriage law, whatever the letterhead says.

Documentation helps either way. The consignment note evidences the handover and condition at the start; proof of delivery does the same at the end. Where you would rather commission the operating business directly than go through a brokering layer, a direct run is the short path: one vehicle, one contract, no transshipment.