Raining banknotes shut down German motorway

Several hundred euros worth of banknotes brought an autobahn to a halt in southern Germany on Wednesday when they rained down on the motorway after a driver apparently forgot his wallet on the car roof.

A driver on the Autobahn 98 in Baden-Württemberg spotted the banknotes swirling around in the air and promptly called the police.

Officers who arrived at the scene shut down two lanes of traffic as a precautionary measure to give them time to gather up the cash. During the search they also found an empty wallet.

Jorg Kiefer, police spokesman in Freiburg, said that they were still waiting for the owner to reclaim his possessions. He added that he wasn’t able to make the exact amount of money public.

“We will only hand it over if the owner can tell us the exact sum of money that was in the wallet,” he stated. He confirmed though that several hundred euros of bank notes had been gathered from the road.

Superintendent Kiefer said that “the classic explanation” for this type of incident is that a driver forgets the wallet on top of their car. “But it could also have been a lorry driver who put it down between the cab and the trailer.”