False. Retained auction volume (the Marktpflegequote) goes into the Bund's own holdings — the “Eigenbestand des Bundes,” managed by the Finanzagentur, the federal government's own debt agency — and is sold from there into the secondary market. The Bundesbank's role in auctions is that of an operating agent: it runs the tender platform on the Finanzagentur's behalf. It does not buy the retained bonds, and nothing about retention adds taxpayer risk that the taxpayer did not already carry as the debtor of its own federal debt. The video (02:58: “diese Marktpflege wird entsprechend hier durch die Deutsche Bundesbank durchgeführt”) attributes the mechanism to the wrong institution — the official documents below are unambiguous.
§ 8.1 The video's chain
Concept · Who holds retained bondsWhy the retention quota sits with the Bund itself, not the central bank, is worked through in the primer — long‑and‑short · Who holds retained bonds (German).
Government cannot sell → Bundesbank absorbs → liability lands on the taxpayer. For the first link, see claim 02 and claim 03 — retention is a standing feature of every auction, not a symptom of failure. This page checks the second link: who legally holds what is retained. That is a documentary question with a documentary answer.
§ 8.2 Who holds it, in the issuer's words
Im Rahmen einer Auktion hält die Finanzagentur regelmäßig einen Teil des
jeweiligen Emissionsvolumens als sogenannte Marktpflegequote zurück. Meist sind dies rund
20 %. Dieser einbehaltene Bestand wird in der Zeit nach der Auktion zu einem Großteil
in den Sekundärmarkt abgegeben.
Sie greift dabei auf den Eigenbestand an Bundeswertpapieren zurück, den
sie am Sekundärmarkt erwirbt oder regelmäßig in Auktionen als Marktpflegequote einbehält.
[…] Bis zu einer Höhe von jährlich maximal 20 % des Betrages der umlaufenden
Bundeswertpapiere dürfen Eigenbestände aufgebaut werden.
The Bundesbank's own result notices label the position the same way — “Einbehaltene Marktpflegequote (Eigenbestand des Bundes)” — quoted in full with its source on the Marktpflegequote page. The holder is named in the label: the Bund. The Bundesbank conducts the auctions as the Finanzagentur's operational agent and publishes the results; it takes nothing onto its balance sheet in doing so.
§ 8.3 The kernel of the confusion
Two real things are being blended. First, the Bundesbank does hold German government bonds — bought years ago in the Eurosystem's monetary-policy programmes (PSPP, PEPP), in the secondary market, from investors, for monetary policy reasons; a stock that predates this video's auctions and has nothing to do with the Marktpflegequote mechanics. Second, the word “Marktpflege” historically appeared in Bundesbank communications because the Bundesbank once conducted market operations for the Bund's debt management — an agency role the Finanzagentur took over. Neither fact makes the Bundesbank the buyer of retained 2026 auction volume: the current documents above assign the Eigenbestand to the Bund, its sales to the Finanzagentur.
§ 8.4 Reading the evidence
Per the issuer's and the Bundesbank's published documents, retained auction volume is booked as the Bund's own holdings (Eigenbestand des Bundes), capped by law, managed and later sold into the secondary market by the Finanzagentur. No document assigns retained volume to the Bundesbank's balance sheet.
The taxpayer-risk framing collapses once the holder is named correctly: the taxpayer stands behind federal debt as issuer, identically whether a bond sits in an investor's portfolio or, temporarily, in the Bund's own depot. Retention changes the timing of sales, not the liability. A genuine central-bank absorption of failed auctions — monetary financing — is prohibited by Art. 123 TFEU and would look nothing like the documented mechanism.
“The liability risks stay with the German taxpayer” is, as rhetoric, trivially true of all sovereign debt everywhere — and as an insinuation that retention added a hidden central-bank bailout, it is contradicted by the documents above.