Introduction
Over the past decade, African swine fever (ASF) has developed into a panzootic threat to domestic and wild boar worldwide (Blome, Franzke, & Beer, 2020). Since 2014, ASF virus (ASFV) has been spreading in the European Union (Chenais et al., 2019). The virus was introduced into wild boar in Belgium in 2018 (Linden et al., 2019) and into the western part of Poland in 2019 (Mazur-Panasiuk, Walczak, Juszkiewicz, & Wozniakowski, 2020) close to the respective German borders. While the situation in Belgium appears to be under control, the epidemic in Poland worsened. The first reported case of ASF in wild boar in Western Poland was found about 79 km from the German border. Between 1st November 2019 and 9th September 2020, a total of 1,037 cases in wild boar and eight outbreaks in domestic pigs were reported from this region (ADNS, as of 10th September 2020) which restriction zones in Poland extending to the German border. The nearest case of ASF in wild boar in Poland was located 10.4 km from the German border (confirmed on 26th March 2020). Here, we report on the first cases of ASF in wild boar in Germany, detected close to the German-Polish border in the Federal State of Brandenburg, including the results of epidemiological investigations, diagnostics and genetic characterization of the German ASFV isolate using whole-genome sequencing.