Destatis GENESIS Statistics

This connector uses the GENESIS-Online RESTful/JSON web service (Anwenderdokumentation Version 5.1, 01.06.2026).

IMPORTANT — POST only. Destatis permanently shut down GET requests with credentials in the URL on 30 June 2025 ("Zur Verbesserung des Schutzes Ihrer Nutzerdaten wird die bisher angebotene Möglichkeit der API Nutzung mittels GET Requests am 30. Juni 2025 endgültig abgeschaltet"). Since then the API is reachable only via POST, with credentials sent as HTTP header fields and all other parameters in a application/x-www-form-urlencoded request body. Every tool here is mapped that way. Every tool also pins Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8: without the charset GENESIS decodes the body as latin-1, so a search term with an umlaut (Bevölkerung) silently returns Code 0 with no results. Do not convert any tool back to GET — a GET now returns the GENESIS HTML web interface instead of JSON.

Setup:

1. Register free at https://genesis.destatis.de (Registrierung).
2. Recommended: log in and open the modal "Webservice-Schnittstelle (API)" to copy your personal API token (32 characters). Destatis explicitly recommends the token: it can be reset independently of your password and contains no characters that need escaping.
3. Set DESTATIS_USERNAME_OR_TOKEN to either your Nutzerkennung/e-mail or the API token. When using a token, leave DESTATIS_PASSWORD empty — the API accepts the password header blank, and a password is not required. When using a Nutzerkennung, set DESTATIS_PASSWORD as well.

Token limitation: a token identifies but cannot authenticate write access. Requests with job=true (used automatically for very large tables), profile/password and profile/removeresult require Nutzerkennung + password. All tools in this connector are read-only, so a token covers them — except when a table is large enough to be pushed into the queue.

Which errors mean what (verified against the live API): find/find is a public service. It answers Status.Code = 0 with the same results whether or not credentials are sent, so an empty destatis_search_tables result means the search genuinely found nothing — it is never a sign of an authentication problem, and this service cannot be used to test credentials. The data, metadata and catalogue services are gated: Code = 15 ("Sie sind nicht berechtigt diesen Service aufzurufen…") means the credentials never arrived, and Code = 2 ("Bitte prüfen und korrigieren Sie Ihren Nutzernamen oder Ihren Token bzw. das Passwort") means they arrived but are wrong. To check which account is answering, call destatis_login_check: it reports isGuest: true when the request is running as the anonymous GAST account.

"Test connection" only proves reachability. GENESIS is POST-only, so the probe can just confirm the service answers (GET /helloworld/whoami); it cannot check credentials. Use destatis_login_check for that.

Resource limits (chapter 1.7 of the docs): a maximum of 3 parallel requests per account; requests running longer than 15 minutes are terminated. Tables with more than ~40,000 values cannot be downloaded in the dialog and return Status.Code = 98 — split the query by time range or narrow the classifying variables.

Reading responses: every response carries a Status block. Code: 0 means success; a non-zero Code carries the reason in Content. Table codes look like 12411-0001 (population) or 61111-0001 (consumer price index) — use destatis_search_tables to find them before calling destatis_get_table.