# Janosch Dahmen

# Janosch Dahmen

Janosch Dahmen (born 6 September 1981 in Berlin) is a German physician and a politician of Alliance 90/[The Greens](/organizations/the-greens). He has been a member of the Bundestag since 12 November 2020, when he took the seat of Katja Dörner on the party's state list for North Rhine-Westphalia. In the current parliament he is a full member of the Committee on Health, a deputy member of the Defence Committee, and a constituency candidate in Ennepe-Ruhr-Kreis II.

The biography he supplied to the Bundestag records schooling from 1988 to 2001, civilian service in 2001–2002, political-science studies in Innsbruck and Berlin from 2002 to 2004, and medical studies from 2004 to 2010 in Witten/Herdecke, Beirut and San Diego, with the state examination and a doctorate in 2011. From 2011 to 2018 he trained as a trauma surgeon and emergency physician at the BG Klinikum Duisburg and then served as medical director of the Christoph 9 air-rescue centre. From 2018 he was a senior physician and medical director in the medical direction of Berlin's emergency service for the Berlin Fire Brigade. He joined the Greens in 1998, sat on Witten's city council from 2009 to 2014, and belonged to the party's North Rhine-Westphalia executive from 2010 to 2018.

On the day [Alexei Navalny](/people/alexei-navalny) was flown to Berlin in late August 2020, Dahmen, then the senior physician on duty for the medical direction of the city's rescue service, acted as incident commander at the military part of Tegel Airport, arranging care for Navalny and his relatives and the transfer to the Charité. On 10 December 2021 the Green Bundestag group elected him health-policy spokesperson and head of its health working group, succeeding Maria Klein-Schmeink.

On 7 April 2022 the Bundestag rejected several initiatives for a COVID-19 vaccination mandate, including a merged bill that would have required vaccination from the age of 60 from 15 October 2022; 296 members voted in favour, 378 against, and nine abstained. In that debate Dahmen defended the move from an original proposal for adults aged 18 and over, through a threshold of 50, to a duty from 60, and called the text reasonable, effective and legally secure. In July 2026 *[Der Spiegel](/organizations/der-spiegel)* published an interview presenting him as someone who had grown up in a pacifist milieu and had registered as a reservist in the armed forces. *[Die Welt](/organizations/die-welt)* reported that he had withdrawn his earlier refusal of military service, completed a multi-day exercise that June at the medical training regiment in Feldkirchen, Bavaria, taken the public oath in Straubing, and tied the decision to Russia's February 2022 attack on Ukraine.

## Early life and education

### Family and upbringing

Janosch Dahmen was born on 6 September 1981 in Berlin, then part of West Berlin. By his own account he grew up in a cooperative housing project in Kreuzberg, in what he has called an “old-left” household shaped by pacifism. In a 2026 interview he put that upbringing in his own words: “I grew up in an old-left household, shaped by pacifism. My conviction was and is: I do not want to kill anyone.” The biography he supplied to the Bundestag records the date and place of birth but not his parents’ names or occupations.

### Schooling and civilian service

That biography lists schooling from 1988 to 2001 and does not name a school. From 2001 to 2002 he performed Zivildienst. Under the Basic Law, men who refused armed service on grounds of conscience could be obliged to perform a civilian substitute; more than 2.5 million did so before compulsory service, and with it the Zivildienst, ended when conscription was suspended in 2011. Dahmen has said that he refused military service as a young man because of the pacifism of his parental home.

### University studies and doctorate

He then studied political science from 2002 to 2004 in Innsbruck and Berlin, before turning to medicine. A professional profile dates the Innsbruck portion to 2003–2004 at the University of Innsbruck. The published biographies describe this as a period of study, not as a completed degree in political science.

From 2004 to 2010 he studied human medicine at the private University of Witten/Herdecke in Witten, North Rhine-Westphalia. A 2013 account from the university also places parts of that medical study at universities in the United States, Lebanon and Ukraine. The Bundestag biography names Beirut and San Diego for the same years, and his professional profile lists the American University of Beirut and the University of California, San Diego.

During the Witten years he took part in humanitarian work in Eastern Europe. The university’s 2013 profile said he founded Students Health Dialogue, a project on HIV/AIDS prevention with young people in Germany and Ukraine. A release from the university in November 2004 described him and fellow student Julian Kricheldorff as having spent a week in Ukraine that September and having contacted, in Kyiv, the student group “Students fight AIDS,” ahead of a World AIDS Day programme run by the Witten initiative. In 2013 he said that the university’s guiding ideas—encouraging freedom, seeking truth and promoting social responsibility—had become politically formative for him.

In 2010, affiliated with the university’s Institute for Teaching and Educational Research in Health Sciences, he was a co-author of a paper in *BMC Medical Education* comparing how graduates of Witten/Herdecke’s problem-based learning curriculum and of conventional German medical schools rated the fit between their training and the demands of medical work. In 2011 he passed the state examination in medicine (*Staatsexamen*) and completed a doctorate (*Promotion*), the qualification under which he is styled Dr. med.

## Medical career

### Trauma surgery and air rescue

From 2011 to 2018 Dahmen completed specialist training in trauma surgery (*Unfallchirurgie*) and emergency medicine at the BG Klinikum Duisburg, a hospital of the statutory accident-insurance system in Duisburg, North Rhine-Westphalia. The *Deutsches Ärzteblatt* later described him as a specialist in trauma surgery with an additional qualification as an emergency physician, and reported that the Duisburg training ran from 2011 to 2018. The biography he supplied to the Bundestag, which the parliament notes is the member's own account, states that this training was followed by service as medical director (*Ärztlicher Leiter*) of Luftrettungszentrum Christoph 9, and that from 2018 he held a senior post with the Berlin fire brigade. The text gives no separate start and end dates for the air-rescue directorship.

Christoph 9 is the rescue helicopter based at the BG Klinikum Duisburg. The clinic states that it is dispatched to emergencies in the Ruhr, the Bergisches Land and the Lower Rhine, and that about half of the patients it treats are severely injured. The crew, on standby from sunrise to sunset but not before 07:00, consists of pilots from the Bundespolizei aviation unit at Sankt Augustin, specially trained paramedics of the Duisburg professional fire service, and emergency physicians from the clinic; the hospital reports about 1,100 missions a year. The aircraft is a Eurocopter EC135 T2i. The clinic's own page names another physician as [the centre](/organizations/the-centre)'s lead doctor, so the directorship recorded in Dahmen's biography belongs to his Duisburg years rather than to the present station.

### Berlin emergency medical services

From 2018 until he entered parliament, Dahmen was *Medizinaldirektor* and senior physician (*Oberarzt*) in the *Ärztliche Leitung Rettungsdienst Berlin*, the medical directorate of the emergency medical service of the Berliner Feuerwehr. The *Ärzteblatt* reported that the work was centred on the response to the [COVID-19 pandemic](/drivers/covid-19-pandemic) and on digitalisation of the rescue service. He was still in that role on the evening he was asked to take a seat: he told the journal that the call came while he was in the fire brigade's crisis staff, preparing the evacuation of a nursing home. He joined the Bundestag on 12 November 2020, after Katja Dörner of Alliance 90/The Greens was elected mayor of Bonn and a mandate fell vacant. In the register of members' interests, his occupation before the mandate is given as physician and *Medizinaldirektor* with the Berliner Feuerwehr, with a right to return (*Rückkehrrecht*) to that post. The parliamentary biography's phrase "since 2018" therefore describes the appointment he left for the mandate, not a post he continued to fill full-time in parliament.

### Alexei Navalny

On the morning of Saturday 22 August 2020, Dahmen was the senior physician on duty for special incidents in Berlin's rescue service when the [Russian opposition](/organizations/russian-opposition) politician Alexei Navalny was flown to the city. In an interview with *t-online* that the outlet says he authorised, given after Navalny's death in February 2024, Dahmen said a civil-society effort to organise an air ambulance out of Russia had been visible for several days, although it was unclear until departure whether the flight would leave. He said that when Navalny landed on the military part of Berlin Tegel Airport, he acted as incident commander (*Einsatzleiter*) and took charge of Navalny, the relatives travelling with him, and the transfer to the Charité. The *Tagesspiegel*, reporting the same conversation, described him as *Ärztlicher Einsatzleiter* of the rescue service, at Tegel that morning to receive the patient.

Dahmen said Navalny arrived in a very critical condition and that the cause was then entirely unknown. The same day, the Charité confirmed only that it had admitted Alexei Anatolyevich Navalny and that extensive diagnostics were under way, with further comment to follow after the examinations and consultation with the family. On 2 September 2020 the federal government announced that, at the Charité's request, a specialist Bundeswehr laboratory had produced unequivocal evidence of a chemical nerve agent of the Novichok group in samples from Navalny, who it said had been flown to Berlin on 22 August with signs of poisoning. Dahmen did not present himself as the doctor who then treated Navalny in hospital. Asked how narrowly Navalny had survived, he referred to what was publicly known about a complex intensive-care treatment, not to care he had given himself, and *t-online*'s headline nevertheless called him Navalny's emergency doctor.

### Continued practice and professional bodies

He has continued to work as an emergency physician alongside the mandate. The Bundestag register of paid outside activities lists him as a *Notarzt* for DRF Stiftung Luftrettung gemeinnützige AG, the non-profit air-rescue operator DRF Luftrettung, at 1,560 euros gross a month; the transparency site Abgeordnetenwatch reproduces the same monthly figure for the 2025–2029 Bundestag. In 2020, shortly after taking his seat, he told the *Ärzteblatt* that a political mandate was always an assignment for a limited time and that his commitment remained patient care.

The parliamentary biography also lists membership of the German Society for Interdisciplinary Emergency and Acute Medicine (DGINA), the German Society for Orthopaedics and Trauma Surgery (DGOU) and the Marburger Bund. Those entries, like the rest of the biography, are the member's own declaration. The supervisory-board role at the University of Witten/Herdecke is recorded separately among his disclosed functions rather than among these clinical affiliations.

## Early political activity

The biography Dahmen supplied to the Bundestag states that he joined Bündnis 90/Die Grünen in 1998. The *Westdeutsche Zeitung* reported in September 2009 that, after moving to Witten in 2004 to study medicine, he had shared the chair of the Greens in the Ennepe-Ruhr-Kreis with the outgoing member of parliament Irmingard Schewe-Gerigk since 2005.

### Witten city council

In the 2009 Witten council election, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen received 5,268 votes (12.9 percent) and nine of 66 seats; turnout was 51.5 percent. Dahmen’s Bundestag biography states that he was a member of the Rat der Stadt Witten from 2009 to 2014. In November 2012 the Greens in Hattingen still described him as a councillor and district spokesperson, while he worked as a physician on the intensive-care unit at the BG Unfallklinik in Duisburg.

### State executive in North Rhine-Westphalia

The Bundestag biography states that he belonged to the Landesvorstand of the Greens in North Rhine-Westphalia from 2010 to 2018. An August 2012 assignment list for the 2012–2014 executive made him the contact for Bochum, Dortmund and Ennepe-Ruhr, and for working groups on older people, health, social and labour-market policy, and sport. His listed priorities were health and social policy, the fire service, rescue services and disaster protection, and sport.

About 260 delegates at the state conference in Siegburg in June 2014 elected him again as one of the further members, under co-chairs Mona Neubaur and Sven Lehmann. On 23 April 2016 the conference in Neuss elected a 20-member executive that again included him for the Ennepe-Ruhr association; Neubaur received 90.5 percent and Lehmann 92.2 percent. On 16 June 2018 in Troisdorf, delegates confirmed Neubaur and [Felix Banaszak](/people/felix-banaszak) and reduced the executive to eight members, a list that did not include Dahmen.

### Bundestag candidacies before 2020

In 2009 he was the Greens’ direct candidate in constituency 140, Ennepe-Ruhr-Kreis II — Sprockhövel, Wetter, Witten, Herdecke and Hattingen — after Schewe-Gerigk stood down. The *Westdeutsche Zeitung* noted that, unlike her, he had no state-list place. The Green first-vote total was 11,621 (8.7 percent). Christel Humme of the Social Democratic Party won the seat with 40.9 percent. He told the paper he wanted citizens’ health insurance paid into by everyone, and cited the Herdecke shared-budget model.

On 16 November 2012 a constituency meeting nominated him again for Ennepe-Ruhr-Kreis II, renumbered 139 and covering Witten, Sprockhövel, Hattingen, Wetter (Ruhr) and Herdecke. He argued for citizens’ insurance, fairer private supplementary cover, clearer rules for the pharmaceutical industry, and stronger patients’ rights. The state list for 2013 placed him 14th. He received 10,964 first votes (8.3 percent). Ralf Kapschack (SPD) won with 56,197 votes (42.3 percent), ahead of Ralf Brauksiepe (CDU) on 47,530 (35.8 percent). The Greens won 13 seats in North Rhine-Westphalia, all from the list. The elected names ran from Bärbel Höhn in first place to Ursula Schauws in 13th, so 14th place brought no mandate.

At the state conference in Oberhausen in December 2016 he was placed 14th again, with 51.7 percent on a second ballot; [Britta Haßelmann](/people/britta-hasselmann) led the list. The federal returning officer’s 2017 candidate register lists Dr Janosch Dahmen, a physician born in 1981, for constituency 139 and for 14th place on the state list. Green first votes in the constituency were 11,538 (8.6 percent). Kapschack won again, with 49,333 votes (36.7 percent). The party’s 12 list seats in the state, and no constituency seat, did not reach 14th place.

## Bundestag membership

### Entry in 2020 and re-elections

Janosch Dahmen took his seat in the Bundestag on 12 November 2020, during the 19th legislative period, as the next successful candidate on the North Rhine-Westphalia state list of Alliance 90/The Greens. He succeeded Katja Dörner, who resigned with effect from the end of 31 October 2020 and, from 1 November 2020, was Oberbürgermeisterin of Bonn.

At the federal election of 26 September 2021 he was the Greens’ direct candidate in constituency 138, Hagen – Ennepe-Ruhr-Kreis I, and was placed 24th on the party’s North Rhine-Westphalia list. The direct seat went to the [Social Democratic Party of Germany](/organizations/social-democratic-party-of-germany), with 47,581 first votes (33.3 percent). The Green first-vote total in the constituency was 17,954 (12.5 percent). Dahmen returned through the state list: in the Federal Returning Officer’s final notice he is recorded as elected for the Greens in North Rhine-Westphalia from list place 24.

He was elected again on 23 February 2025, once more from the North Rhine-Westphalia list, this time from place 18. He also stood in constituency 138, which after the redistribution of constituencies was Ennepe-Ruhr-Kreis II. The direct mandate there went to [Katja Strauss-Köster](/people/katja-strauss-koster) of the [Christian Democratic Union of Germany](/organizations/christian-democratic-union-of-germany), with 43,775 first votes (30.9 percent). The Greens, whose constituency candidate was Dahmen, received 14,587 first votes (10.3 percent).

### Committees and spokesperson role

For the rest of the 19th period he was a full member of the Committee on Health and of the parliamentary accompanying body on the COVID-19 pandemic, and he was the Greens’ Obmann on that body.

In the 20th period, from 2021 to 2025, he was again a full member of the Committee on Health and a deputy member of the Defence Committee and of the Joint Committee (Gemeinsamer Ausschuss). On 10 December 2021 the Green parliamentary group elected him its health-policy spokesperson and chair of its health working group. He succeeded Maria Klein-Schmeink, who had been elected a deputy chair of the group.

The group retained him in that role for the 21st period. On 30 April 2025 the *Ärzte Zeitung* reported that the Greens, then preparing for four years in opposition, had kept Dahmen as their health spokesperson. In the 21st Bundestag he is a full member of the Committee on Health and a deputy member of the Defence Committee. His mandate is again a North Rhine-Westphalia list seat, with the constituency candidacy in Ennepe-Ruhr-Kreis II.

### Outside activities and disclosures

The outside posts published on the Bundestag’s member pages are the member’s own filings under the code of conduct. The administration states that biographical text rests on members’ self-reporting, and that published earnings are gross figures, including benefits in kind, not taxable income.

Both the archived 20th-period page and the current biography give his occupation before the mandate as physician and Medizinaldirektor with the Berlin fire service, with a right to return to that post.

The 20th-period filing records emergency-physician work for the Ennepe-Ruhr-Kreis, based in Schwelm, until 31 December 2024, at 5,000 euro gross a year, and for Northern Helicopter GmbH in Emden from 1 April 2022 to 31 December 2024, also at 5,000 euro gross a year. From 1 January 2025 that filing, and the current biography, list emergency-physician work for DRF Stiftung Luftrettung gemeinnützige AG in Dortmund at 1,560 euro gross a month.

The same 20th-period filing lists a consultancy for the [Bertelsmann Stiftung](/organizations/bertelsmann-stiftung) in Gütersloh from 1 December 2024, with 4,750 euro gross shown for 2024. The current biography records that consultancy as ending on 31 December 2025 and does not publish a remuneration figure for it.

He is recorded as a member of the supervisory board of Universität Witten/Herdecke gGmbH in Witten, at 6,500 euro gross a year in the 20th-period filing and 6,400 euro gross a year in the current filing. The current entry also names him chair of that board from 18 November 2025. The filings further list membership of the board of trustees of the Sepsis-Stiftung in Berlin—from 1 January 2025 in the archive, and until 31 December 2025 on the current page—and a holding in Naturkind Forum Kreuzberg gUG (haftungsbeschränkt) in Berlin.

## COVID-19 policy

### Measures during the pandemic

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dahmen, a physician and health expert for Alliance 90/The Greens in the traffic-light coalition talks, argued for rules that would fall mainly on unvaccinated people as hospitals came under strain. On 5 November 2021 he told n-tv that Germany needed 2G access rules—entry limited to vaccinated or recovered people—“nationwide, not only in Baden-Württemberg,” where that state had just restricted contacts for the unvaccinated. He called 2G the “decisive lever,” said checks were too lax, and argued that “in this pandemic of the unvaccinated” consistent measures, including contact restrictions, were required because the health system was threatening to collapse.

He backed a vaccination requirement for staff working with vulnerable groups, such as in nursing homes, saying vaccination was no longer an “individual decision.” He added that the Bundestag then had no majority for an occupation-specific mandate, so a testing duty was the minimum. By February 2022 the Protestant Press Service described him as health-policy spokesman of the Green Bundestag group.

### The general vaccination mandate

Constituents later contrasted that with his 2013 answers on Wen-Wählen, where he rejected a vaccination requirement for kindergartens and schools: benefits, risks and side effects differed, people should be informed individually, and “medical coerced treatment is out of the question here as elsewhere.” On Abgeordnetenwatch he said a mandate was “not a political breach of one’s word,” that getting past the pandemic required staying “capable of learning and open to course corrections,” and that one person’s freedom not to be vaccinated was by then restricting the freedoms of many others.

On 3 March 2022 he was a lead signatory, with the Social Democrat Heike Baehrens, the Free Democrat Katrin Helling-Plahr and others—including Chancellor [Olaf Scholz](/people/mig-olaf-scholz) and Health Minister Karl Lauterbach—of cross-party Drucksache 20/899, a bill “on information, counselling and vaccination of all adults against SARS-CoV-2.” From 1 October 2022, adults ordinarily resident in Germany would have had to hold a vaccination or recovery certificate. Insurers were to tell them about counselling and vaccination by 15 May. Medical contraindication and the first trimester of pregnancy were exemptions, and the duty did not apply under 18. Enforcement was limited to fines, up to 2,500 euros for the relevant administrative offence, and was not to use immediate physical coercion; coercive detention was excluded.

A second cross-party bill, Drucksache 20/954 of 10 March 2022, from Dieter Janecek, Gyde Jensen and others in the Greens, the Free Democratic Party (Germany) and the Social Democratic Party of Germany, proposed compulsory counselling for adults and a duty from age 50 that would apply only if the Bundestag later activated it. The health committee merged the drafts. On 7 April 2022 Dahmen defended the result: a duty from 60, which he called effective and medically grounded because severe disease rose sharply between 50 and 60. Precaution, he said, meant “acting today in order to secure the freedom of tomorrow.” He argued against a party whip and accused the CDU/CSU of instructing members in writing not to vote yes; *Der Spiegel* reported such a letter.

In a free vote the Bundestag rejected the merged text, Drucksachen 20/899, 20/954 and 20/1353, on second reading. The plenary record’s final count was 683 votes: 296 in favour, 378 against and 9 abstentions. The same sitting rejected the alternatives. The CDU/CSU “vaccination-precaution bill” ended at 172 yes, 496 no and 9 abstentions, out of 677. A motion led by [Wolfgang Kubicki](/people/wolfgang-kubicki) to raise uptake without a general mandate drew 85 yes, 590 no and 12 abstentions, out of 687. An [Alternative for Germany](/organizations/alternative-for-germany) motion against any statutory COVID-19 vaccination mandate, led by Martin Sichert, drew 79 yes and 606 no, out of 685. No general adult mandate was passed.

### Facility-based rules and later reassessment

In December 2021 the Bundestag and Bundesrat had already adopted a narrower rule. Staff in hospitals, nursing homes, outpatient care, practices, rescue services and similar settings had to show, by 15 March 2022, proof of vaccination or recovery, or a certificate that they could not be vaccinated. Dahmen described that duty as protection for people at high risk from COVID-19, and a general mandate as a separate way through the pandemic.

In February 2022 Minister-President Markus Söder said Bavaria would at first not apply the facility rule, citing practical gaps and staff shortages. Dahmen called that an “outrageous proceeding,” like being allowed to drive through a red light, and said it asked whether the state must enforce its own laws: “the axe is being laid to the foundations of our constitutional state.” Repairs could be discussed, he said, but not suspension while a general mandate was pending. Against the claim that the rule no longer helped against Omicron, he said vaccination still reduced infection risk and softened illness. After the Federal [Constitutional Court](/organizations/constitutional-court) refused to halt the rule in an emergency balance of consequences, he said it had to be applied nationwide from mid-March and that the Union’s “party-political squabbling” had damaged acceptance. The First Senate upheld the facility duty on 27 April 2022 (1 BvR 2649/21). On 20 September 2022 the federal government said the provision ran, as the law then stood, until the end of 31 December 2022, with any extension still under review.

In late December 2022 Dahmen told the *Rheinische Post* that adapted vaccines and boosters left Germany better prepared, and that “without vaccination we in Germany would by now probably have more than a million deaths to mourn.” When minutes of the Robert Koch Institute crisis staff, released after a freedom-of-information case by *Multipolar*, appeared in March 2024, he told dpa that strict first-wave measures, before vaccines and with scarce protective equipment, had “saved a great many lives.” He opposed an enquiry commission or investigative committee, calling electoral use of the review wrong “against the background of the countless victims.” The same report noted Sichert’s call for a committee of inquiry, the institute’s description of the minutes as summaries of open scientific discussion, and criticism that placed *Multipolar* near conspiracy-narrative publishing.

## Health-system policy

As health-policy spokesperson of Alliance 90/The Greens in the Bundestag, Janosch Dahmen has worked on hospital finance, emergency care, digital records, cannabis, post-infection illness and long-term care, apart from the party's positions on vaccination against COVID-19.

### Hospital reform

The Hospital Care Improvement Act (Krankenhausversorgungsverbesserungsgesetz, KHVVG) was passed by the Bundestag on 17 October 2024 and the Bundesrat on 22 November 2024, and entered into force on 12 December 2024. It was the reform of Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (Social Democratic Party). The Federal Ministry of Health describes service groups (Leistungsgruppen), so that not every hospital offers every treatment, and a standby payment (Vorhaltevergütung) meant to cover 60 percent of a hospital budget independently of volume, with about 40 percent still earned through diagnosis-related groups. The *taz* reported that Lauterbach carried the law against state protests, that it applied from the start of 2025 with phased implementation through 2029, and that the network of about 1,700 hospitals was expected to shrink as complex care was concentrated.

After the CDU/CSU–SPD government of Chancellor [Friedrich Merz](/people/friedrich-merz) took office in May 2025, Health Minister [Nina Warken](/people/nina-warken) (CDU) prepared changes. On 8 September 2025 Dahmen told ARD's *Morgenmagazin* that wide exceptions would create a patchwork, weaken small rural hospitals and raise spending while quality fell. He called the bill "letztlich der Abrissbagger der Krankenhausreform" — a wrecking machine for the reform. On 8 October 2025 the cabinet adopted a draft Hospital Reform Adjustment Act (Krankenhausreformanpassungsgesetz, KHAG). Warken said bundling and quality remained the aim, but that parts of the original law had failed in practice, especially in rural care: service groups would fall from 65 to 61, and states, with the sickness funds, would no longer be bound by the original travel-time rules. The Bundestag passed the KHAG on 6 March 2026. In February 2026 *Deutsches Ärzteblatt* reported RWI Leibniz Institute estimates that concentrating care on about 1,000 of some 1,600 somatic sites could save about €9 billion a year from 2035, but only about €4.3 billion under the KHAG's exceptions, and nothing if cooperation rules froze the existing map.

### Emergency and rescue services

In Germany, emergency care is split among the physicians' out-of-hours service on 116117, hospital emergency departments and the rescue service on 112. The Green bill of 14 October 2025, Bundestag printed paper 21/2214 (Notfallgesetz), introduced by Dahmen and the Green group, says patients are left to choose, while rescue work is paid largely as transport rather than treatment on scene. It would have made emergency rescue a statutory benefit, linked control centres and created integrated emergency centres.

On 11 February 2026 Dahmen told dpa the system was at its load limit and "strukturell völlig zersplittert" — almost 300 rescue areas, about 240 control centres and more than a dozen organisational forms — so that rapid treatment still depended too often on the postcode. The cabinet adopted its bill on 22 April 2026. Warken called it the third attempt: integrated emergency centres, a nationwide link between 116117 and 112, on-scene care as an insurance benefit rather than transport alone, and €225 million over five years to digitalise control centres. Dahmen called the draft overdue — patients in Brandenburg and North Rhine-Westphalia were being billed for rescue call-outs — but unfinished: no standby funding for emergency departments, no cost-covering pay when the rescue service referred a patient, and no uniform rules on response times. [The Left](/organizations/the-left-slovenia) called it underfunded, and the federal association of statutory physicians said emergency promises were growing while ambulatory budgets were cut.

### Digital health

On 14 December 2023 the Bundestag passed the Act to Accelerate Digitalisation of the Health System (Digital-Gesetz, printed paper 20/9048) and the Health Data Use Act (20/9046), with the governing parties in favour, the AfD against and the CDU/CSU abstaining. An electronic patient record was to be opened from the start of 2025 for every statutorily insured person unless they opted out, and the electronic prescription was to be standard from 1 January. Lauterbach tied the laws to a restructuring of gematik, the telematics agency. In July 2025 Dahmen told the *Augsburger Allgemeine* that, on figures from AOK, Techniker Krankenkasse and Barmer, fewer than 3 percent of some 70 million records were in use because laboratory results, doctors' letters and a vaccination record were missing. Without that content the file was, he said, an empty promise, and implementation now lay with Warken.

### Cannabis, long COVID and long-term care

The Cannabis Act largely took effect on 1 April 2024: adults could possess limited amounts and grow up to three plants, with non-commercial cultivation clubs from 1 July. The next day Dahmen told Deutschlandfunk the change was "zeitgemäß" and overdue: prohibition had left a growing black market and rising use, especially among children and young people. The law required an evaluation after 18 months; as a physician, he said many users wanted cannabis free of toxic additives. The CDU/CSU had opposed the law. On 1 April 2026 *Der Spiegel* reported the second EKOCAN evaluation: no short-term jump in use tied to the act, adolescent prevalence stable or slightly down, and fewer young people in early-intervention programmes because courts could less easily compel attendance. Warken called recreational partial legalisation a mistake, citing that drop and an online trade in high-THC medicinal cannabis aimed at young people; Interior Minister [Alexander Dobrindt](/people/alexander-dobrindt) called the act a "Rohrkrepierer" and said the black market was booming. Dahmen told RND the illicit market was receding without use exploding, including among young people, but that medicinal-cannabis sales had opened a grey zone which further legal routes should close.

For Long COVID, including myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, the ministry in February 2025 launched 30 care-research projects funded with €73 million for 2024–2028. Ministerial round tables with patients, clinicians and insurers reached a fifth meeting on 31 March 2025. The Federal Joint Committee adopted a directive on coordinated care for suspected long COVID and similar illnesses.

In June 2026 Warken published a draft to steady social long-term-care insurance without a general contribution rise. Tagesschau reported a ministry forecast of a deficit of about €7.5 billion the next year and €15 billion in 2028, slightly higher thresholds for a care grade, and a six-month delay before subsidies reduce nursing-home co-payments. On 8 June Dahmen told rbb Inforadio that co-payments were already extremely high and that the draft was a "Kürzungs-Keule" — a cuts reform, not a structural one — shifting shortfalls onto people needing care, relatives and municipalities. He proposed instead that civil servants, the self-employed and wealth be drawn in more evenly.

## Security policy and reservist service

### From conscientious objection to the reserve

Janosch Dahmen, health-policy spokesperson of Alliance 90/The Greens in the Bundestag and a deputy member of the Defence Committee, said in a *Der Spiegel* interview of 11 July 2026, by Christian Teevs and Severin Weiland, that he had withdrawn his earlier refusal of military service and become a Bundeswehr reservist. The magazine’s account presented a deputy from a pacifist background who now described firing an assault rifle.

He had grown up in a pacifist, self-described “old-left” household in Kreuzberg. The biography he filed with the Bundestag records Zivildienst—civilian service by recognized conscientious objectors—in 2001–2002. “My conviction was and is: I do not want to kill a human being,” he told *Spiegel*. “But I have to recognize that the times, and the conditions under which I must answer for this decision of conscience, have changed.” He tied the change to [Vladimir Putin](/people/vladimir-putin)’s full-scale [attack on Ukraine](/facts/2022-russian-invasion-of-ukraine) in February 2022: defending “our country, which is worth protecting, and our free, liberal society” could not be left only to others. *t-online* reported that the formal withdrawal was recent, the decision older, and that he had discussed it with his wife, children and parents, who he said had understood.

### Training and oath

In June 2026, by his account, he completed a multi-day exercise at the medical training regiment (Sanitätslehrregiment) in Feldkirchen, Bavaria, and made a public solemn pledge (*Gelöbnis*) in Straubing.

He was posted as a physician in the medical service, but the course included weapons. *t-online* reported practice with the G36 assault rifle. He called the shooting a sharp moment: he concentrated on doing everything correctly and safely, and thought hard about it before and after. “It made clear to me once again that this is serious, and that a concrete danger is involved, for me and for others.”

He said the step did not break with Green values. Standing with people who are attacked and who have stood up for freedom and self-determination had “always been core left-wing politics,” and “we cannot throw ourselves in the dust when dictators try to shift borders and subjugate other states.” The *Augsburger Allgemeine* set his decision beside other Greens: Robert Habeck, an objector, had said in a podcast some years earlier that a fundamentally pacifist stance was no longer workable and that he would probably decide differently today; Anton Hofreiter, mustered out as a young man, said he would defend the country if it came to it.

### Civic service and the defence debate

Dahmen argued for a general civic service (*Gesellschaftsdienst*): men and women should serve six to twelve months after school, in the Bundeswehr, an aid organisation, civil protection or a social institution, and return—for example for six weeks every six years—so that “defensibility and resilience” would not fall only on the young. *Die Welt* reported that a project group of the Green parliamentary group was then weighing voluntary against compulsory service.

The proposal went beyond the line fixed in Hanover in November 2025. By a narrow majority the congress backed compulsory muster for young men, of the kind the new military-service law later applied from the 2008 cohort, and it did not vote on other models circulating in the party. Delegates welcomed closing the registration gap left when conscription was suspended, and otherwise chose voluntariness: muster was to show who would be fit, not to restore an obligation to serve. They also called for more attractive military and civil-protection service and a coordination office for whole-of-state crisis management. The Green Youth lost an attempt to reject every compulsory element. Co-chair Luis Bobga called compulsory muster “a first step toward conscription through the back door”; Bundestag member Nyke Slawik said the interference with personal freedom was limited.

On 5 December 2025 the Bundestag passed the coalition’s reform. Muster became compulsory again for men born from 2008, with assessments starting on 1 July 2027, while service stayed voluntary unless personnel targets were missed—in which case a further vote could introduce a partial obligation, possibly by lot. Defence minister [Boris Pistorius](/people/boris-pistorius) said the service “is voluntary, and it remains so,” if the government’s hopes held, and that “this state does not protect itself on its own.” The Greens, [Die Linke](/organizations/die-linke) and the AfD voted no, for different reasons. The government cited NATO goals of about 460,000 soldiers including the reserve, and about 260,000 active personnel by 2035, against a little over 184,000 at the end of October 2025.

Dahmen called Die Linke’s stance as an “anti-military-service party” a “serious false assumption”: that a state which does little for the individual cannot ask citizens to defend it. The idea that a person is obliged only to conscience was, he said, “a fundamental left-wing misunderstanding.” His reservist status, and a recurring service for women as well as men, remained his own argument beside a party line that in November 2025 had kept Bundeswehr service voluntary.

## Personal life and public reception

### Family

The Bundestag biography, based on Dahmen's own disclosures, states that he was born on 6 September 1981 in Berlin, is married and has three children. In a July 2026 interview he described his parental home as "old left" and pacifist; reporting of the interview also says he was born in West Berlin and grew up in a cooperative housing project in Kreuzberg. He said his wife, children and parents had understood his decision to withdraw his conscientious objection.

Where the family lives is not a single published address. In September 2017 he told the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung that he lived in Witten, was married with two children, and that meeting his wife, Levka, and the births of his children mattered most in his life to that point. Before the 2025 election he told Radio Ennepe Ruhr that he lived with his wife and three children in the Ennepe-Ruhr-Kreis in North Rhine-Westphalia, where he had met his wife and where two of the three children had been born. He has also had a house in northern Brandenburg, the site of a 2023 construction accident.

### The 2023 accident

The accident was on Wednesday, 16 August 2023, during building work at that house. Business Insider reported on 18 August that a roof beam had struck his head, that he had lost consciousness, and that a rescue helicopter had flown him to a Berlin hospital. It said his Bundestag office had confirmed the accident and that he was responsive again and doing as well as circumstances allowed, with the severity still unclear. A spokeswoman for the Green Bundestag group denied that account of the injury: "He was not struck by a roof beam and did not suffer a head injury." She would not describe the incident further, but confirmed the Wednesday, the work on the house, treatment in hospital, and that he was doing reasonably well. Der Tagesspiegel, which published the denial, attributed the helicopter transfer to Business Insider.

On Sunday, 20 August, Dahmen wrote on X that he was recovering and would soon be back at work at his former strength, and he thanked well-wishers and colleagues in the rescue service and the clinic. Tagesspiegel reported that a hospital photograph he posted showed his right hand bandaged and his left wrist wrapped.

### Reception and criticism

Coverage has regularly cast Dahmen as health-policy spokesman of Alliance 90/The Greens and as a doctor who still practises emergency medicine, including DRF Luftrettung shifts disclosed to parliament and work in the Ennepe-Ruhr district. In April 2021 Der Tagesspiegel profiled him under the headline "The Greens' Lauterbach," comparing him with the physician-politician Karl Lauterbach as he explained pandemic policy in the media.

Criticism has focused on his support for a COVID-19 vaccination mandate. In 2013, on wen-wählen.de, he rejected a requirement for kindergartens and schools: every vaccination had different benefits, risks and side effects; "compulsory medical treatment is impermissible here as elsewhere"; and manufacturers' commercial interests demanded a critical, evidence-based approach. During the COVID-19 pandemic he argued for a general mandate from age 18. On Abgeordnetenwatch in March 2022 he called that "not a political breach of one's word": society had to be able to correct course, and the freedom not to be vaccinated was restricting the freedoms of many others. The day before the April 2022 Bundestag votes, the lawyer Jessica Hamed wrote in [Cicero](/people/cicero) that Dahmen's group was trying "by hook or by crook" to pass some extended mandate, quoting the 2013 line against compulsory treatment. The bills and the votes are covered in the section on COVID-19 policy.

His 2026 withdrawal of conscientious objection, covered under security policy, was reported as a change from the pacifist background he described. Die Welt quoted his Spiegel interview: he still did not want to kill anyone, but the conditions of that decision had changed, and defence could not be left only to others. He proposed a civic service of six to twelve months; at their autumn 2025 congress the Greens had narrowly backed compulsory muster for young men while leaving service itself voluntary. He called Die Linke's view, that a state which does little for the individual cannot ask to be defended, a "grave false assumption."

## Dated facts

_No published facts on this page yet._

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/people/janosch-dahmen