Is that a pig flying? Do I see my cats cuddling up with the yappy dog next door? Why isn’t this mandatory across the board as banks need governments to keep them afloat?

The top executives of Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest bank, will forego bonus payments for 2008, the first complete management board of a bank to do so in reaction to the global financial crisis.

Deutsche Bank Chief Executive Josef Ackermann decided to waive the extra payments for 2008, and the rest of the executive board will follow suit, a spokesman for Deutsche Bank said on Thursday.

The spokesman confirmed comments that Ackermann made in an interview with German paper Bild am Sonntag.

The money will be used to prop up wages of other bank employees whose salaries are hit harder by the effects of the finance crisis, Ackermann said in an interview in the Sunday edition of the paper that was released early.

Even though the 2008 payments for the four-member board have not yet been set, they would have been worth “millions of euros,” for Ackermann alone, despite the financial crisis, the chief told the paper.

In 2007, the management board received 28.9 million euros ($38.94 million) in bonus payments, compared with fixed payments of 4.3 million euros in the period.